State Depts Passport Plan Upsets Presidential Management Fellows

July 3, 2007— -- As the State Department continues to dig through a mountain of passport applications that were due long ago, it is now turning to some of the department's newest members for help.

The State Department will send roughly 300 young employees, split roughly evenly Foreign Service Officers and Civil Servants, to its main passport processing centers to go through applications.

"The State Department has a mission and the Secretary and the Deputy Secretary have an obligation to meet the demand while we build up capacity take care of the higher demand for passports," said Patrick Kennedy, the director of the department's Office of Management Policy, in and interview with ABC News.

In mandatory meetings with the two groups this morning, Kennedy and other top State Department officials notified the employees that they will begin week long training next Monday and will deploy to the passport centers the following week for an eight week tour.

The Foreign Service Officers being sent to work on passports are relatively new to the department, Kennedy said. They are on their way to their first assignment, in training, or between early assignments.

The Civil Servants that were notified today of their new temporary position come from two of the department's entry programs. Presidential Management Fellows, an exclusive two-year postgraduate program throughout the government, and members of the department's Career Entry Program will form part of the group that they will be shipped off to training next week.

According to several people who attended the meeting, many of those to be sent out soon are upset with the way the announcement was made, with less than a week's notice before the training and little apparent regard for their previous plans.

Kennedy addressed both concerns in his interview, saying that they would not have to leave the Washington DC area for two weeks and that the department would make every effort to accommodate special situations.

According to Kennedy, the decision to send these groups was made yesterday by Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte and other top officials. Sources who attended the meeting said they all received e-mails late yesterday afternoon telling them to attend a minatory meeting this morning at 9 a.m., with no further details of what it was about.

Once the meeting began, the few hundred people in attendance were told within the first few sentences that they would be moved from their current positions within a week. They were given only one choice in the matter, to indicate whether they preferred going to the facility in New Hampshire or the one in New Orleans.

Next Monday the group will be sent for consular training at the Foreign Service Institute in Virginia, and will be deployed to the passport offices the following Monday. There they will work six days a week for the next eight weeks authenticating citizenship documents to determine if an applicant is eligible for a passport. After that they have been promised they can return.

The effects of the passport application logjam are being felt throughout the department. Many of the employees tapped for the two-month consular tour are working in other critical areas in the department, leaving the department with holes in key areas. When asked, Kennedy told ABC News that there are no plans to fill those positions temporarily, saying that their colleagues will bear the burden as well and pick up the slack while the others are deployed.

The current two PMF classes will be affected, as well as the class that just ended. They'll be housed in hotels and provided with a per diem for meals. They were told that the department will try to be flexible for anyone who has "personal issues" with the short notice, but some sources have already indicated that they expect to have to cancel their previous plans.

This is the latest sign of the massive backlog of passport applications. Just a week and a half ago, the State Department issued a call for diplomats overseas to volunteer to go to the main passport processing facility in New Hampshire to work on passports. It even asked for their family members to pitch in and help with clerical duties to ease the slack on reviewing applications.

According to Kennedy, groups of U.S. diplomats have already returned from overseas to help. Some are senior diplomats who were scheduled for mid-career training in the United States, he said. That training will be postponed and they will be diverted to adjudicate passports, he added.

Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Maura Harty testified two weeks ago on Capitol Hill that the department aims to reduce the delayed time to get a passport by the end of September, and have it back to normal by the end of the calendar year. The giant wave of passport applications is due to the new Western Hemispheres Travel Initiative, which requires passports to visit Canada, Mexico, Bermuda and other countries in the region.

At the end of the eight weeks, the current group will be replaced by the new class of 60 foreign service officers who will have just graduated from training, known as A100s, who will work on passports until the demand has subsided.

Several of those who will be deployed to training next week told ABC News that they understand the critical need to get this done, that it's one of the few tangible things they do for the taxpayers, but many are upset at the way this was handled.

"People were pretty shocked," one said.

"Most of us don't have a problem serving and doing our duty when we're called, but it's the manner that we've been approached," another said, saying that the abrupt notification was "rude."