The digital tyranny of needing an account for everything

Oh, and when will the US have online passport renewal processes?

It’s the nightmare travel scenario. The bookings are made, the suitcases packed, and you realize on the day of your travel that someone in the family has an expired passport. In this case, it was my youngest daughter, on the day of our Easter trip to Ireland. After going through the seven stages of grief in about an hour, we ended up splitting up our traveling party. I went to Ireland with my oldest child, while the youngest stayed home with her Mom.

Let me warn you that this post will take a series of turns. We start with me screwing up my daughters passport renewal, and somehow end with a critique of the American administrative state. Stick with it. If you are more of a visual learner, I mapped out what to expect.

Adapted from Avinash Kaur

As soon as I returned to the US, I set about renewing her passport. To renew a kids passport, both parents must be physically present at a passport office, or more realistically, a post office. If not, its a lot more paperwork to reassure the government that one parent is not surreptitiously trying to kidnap the kids. So, three people together then. It took a couple of weeks to get an appointment at a nearby post office or a good deal longer if we did not do it during school hours. I prefilled the form and printed it out, went to CVS to get a passport photo, grabbed the birth certificate, our IDs, and her old passport. The post office was fairly busy, but they kept our appointment time, and courteously went through the paperwork with us. We got the passport back in 12 days with the expedited process - which is really impressive!

One snag: their copier was broken, and they needed to keep copies of the documentation. So, could we go somewhere and get copies for them? Sure. We drove to a nearby library, got the paper copies, drove back to the post office and dropped them off.

One lesson here is that the US federal government has relatively few bricks-and-mortar options where it can engage with the public. The post office is really the only game in town, with more than 30,000 locations (down from about 40,000 at its peak in the late 1990s). Social Security, which is probably the next most physically represented non-military federal agency across the US, has about 1,200 offices.

This is not new. The US Postal Service has been the tangible physical representation of the emergence and westward expansion of the American state in the 19th century. When the Social Security program was being created in the 1930s, the government relied on local post offices to quickly enroll tens of millions of applicants.

The USPS accepted 7.5 million passport applications in 2022, and it’s efforts are concentrated on the trickier ones — kids and first time passports that require more documentation than renewals. It is great that we can rely on post offices. Not only are they plentiful and easy to find, they are relatively neutral administrative spaces that people do not have a strong aversion to, as some people might with welfare offices or police stations. That physical space helps to ensure the government can reach people in a way that private digital actors cannot. For example people who are having problems with facial ID verification to sign up for login.gov can go to a post office to be verified, while those who rely on private ID verification systems have no such back-up.

Anyway, lets do the time count for the passport renewal process:

• Photos: 45 minutes x 2 people

• Trip to post office, library: 2 hours x 3 people

• Prefilling and printing online form, pulling together documentation: 30 minutes X 1 person

Total: 8 hours

This experience reminded me that my Irish passport was expiring, and needed to be renewed. Which took me about 20-25 minutes all in, done entirely online. And half of that time was getting my kid to take a photo on my phone, and figuring out how to save that photo as a jpeg. There was no form to fill in, and no documentation to provide. I clicked through a series of intuitive questions, uploaded the photo (which was rightsized to the appropriate dimensions automatically), entered my old passport information, my address, and paid. It was extraordinarily easy. The passport arrived, from Dublin to the USA, 10 days later.

The tyranny of the mandated accounts

One nice touch with renewing my Irish passport is that I did not need to set up an account just for this process, which would have meant creating a login and a password.

One of the tyrannies of modern life is the rise of the mandatory accounts, apps or portals. If you need to buy a ticket to an event, communicate with your doctor, or apply for a job, you need to set up an online account. If you are really lucky, there will be a recaptcha at the end of the process, where you unsuccessfully try to identify a motorcycle, or make sense of a scrawl of letters.

The day after I renewed my passport, I created an appointment for one of my kids to get a haircut, which required a login with a password. I tried calling the location, but no-one picked up. And why should they, when the answering machine encourages people to make an online appointment? When I tried to set up an account, my sense of deja vu was confirmed when I was told there was already an account under my email. So I had to reset my password.

I spent only slightly less time setting up my kids haircut appointment than I did renewing my passport. Something is wrong here.

The espoused logic for all of these online accounts is convenience. But whose convenience? How much time are we wasting with an endless array of these interactions, many poorly designed? The mandatory account primarily serves the needs of the company, or more precisely, its desire to collect your information, and monetize it somehow. To send a survey, to pitch new products or reminders, to sell your data to others.

Digital interactions can really add convenience. Mandatory accounts, especially for infrequently used services, do not. Instead, they shift burdens onto users. In some cases there might be legitimate security needs. But lets face it, no-one is going to steal my haircut appointment. Because people tend to use the same username and password across sites, your patterns are likely to be revealed when one of those sites gets hacked, reducing your security. We’ve all read the articles telling us to not repeat user names and passwords, but again, this puts the burden on users when for many of these sites, a login is not truly necessary.

One solution is fewer logins for more interactions, e.g. using login.gov for federal services has saved people lots of time.¹ Or you could use your google or facebook logins when offered that option, though many are understandably reluctant to give tech giants more of their personal information. I use password managers, but that does not remove the time spent setting up the account, and they don’t work perfectly when sites have odd password requirements.

Another solution is to not require accounts with logins and passwords! For social safety net services, the best practice is to not mandate accounts unless necessary. Code for America’s field guide for safety net service design says: “Requiring account registration is a key accessibility barrier for many clients. Applications should have a prominent pathway to applying without completing registration first.”

Passports, unlike haircut appointments, seem like a big deal, since they deal with identity. Isn’t this a case where an account would be a good idea? Not really. Once I get the passport, I won’t need to interact with this service for another decade. The interaction requires me to reveal information (a current image of myself, personal payment information, and prior passport information) that validates my identity and the government can check against its own data. This is an example of shifting burdens away from citizens because a government is able to use administrative data to benefit the user, rather than to monetize that data.

What about online renewal for US passports?

Its not unreasonable to ask, if Ireland (and other countries) can do online passport renewal, why can’t the US?

The good news is that virtual passport renewals should be available sometime in 2024. In December 2021, in an executive order aimed at improving customer experience in government, President Biden ordered that “The Secretary of State shall design and deliver a new online passport renewal experience that does not require any physical documents to be mailed.”

The need for virtual passports reflects a massive increase in demand. The US has gone from issuing less than 5 million passports per year in 1994 to 24 million in 2023. Some of this increased demand emerged from Americans wanting to travel more, but also from post 9/11 policies, like requiring passports to travel to Mexico and Canada. There are currently about 160 million passports in circulation. Shifting more passport interactions to a digital space should be a win-win for both citizens and the government. And so, the goal of virtual passport renewal processes can be traced back as far as the Obama administration, but with seemingly little progress until recently.

How is that going? In 2022, the State Department piloted a virtual passport renewal system. About 500,000 people used the system, which was suspended in March of 2023, with the explanation that the system would be revised and improved based on customer feedback. This is completely normal. It is generally a bad idea to roll out a digital product all at once. The IRS DirectFile is a pilot for this precise reason. The pilot worked pretty well for the public, although digital photos proved to be a problem. Another problem is that the digital system dramatically increased work for the government employees processing the passports. This is an instance where moving to digital was not a win-win, and in fact created inefficiencies because the back-end workflow processes proved to be more complex than with the traditional paper applications.

Multiple contractors have worked on digital renewals using different platforms. One person I spoke with said the project has run into every IT bungle possible: the contractors are not nimble, unable to adapt to changing demands, and focus on maximizing profits. Government overseers lack the capacity to manage the contractors, and procurement processes make it easier to restart the process with a new contractor rather than fix the problems with an existing system.

A few months ago a US Digital Services team were tasked with fixing the problems and bringing a virtual renewal option back this year remains a presidential goal. But its hard not to think of this as a basic capacity problem. Providing appropriate identity to allow people to travel and work is a core government function. The fact that three administrations have not been able to bring this to fruition, even as other countries have, reflects a governance failure.

The head of state of a country like the US ought to be able to say “lets make passport renewal processes digital” and see it done after some reasonable amount of time, say in a year or so. This only seems unrealistic if you know something about how American public sector tech processes work, where it might take a year just to select a contractor. We could blame the US government addiction to contracting out, but this will not change anytime soon. If governments are going to contract for tech we need a) government technologists with the capacity and political support to hold contractors accountable, and b) procurement processes that are adaptable to meet the evolving need of projects. There is more of those technologists in government than before, but not in every department, and the procurement processes remain an obstacle. (Jen Pahlka’s Recoding America is excellent on this point).

All of this is to say, if the Biden administration finally gets digital passport renewal done, it deserves some credit. Because the track record here is not good.

As for my daughter, she took the disappointment of not being able to see her cousins in Ireland with impressive stoicism, though did note she would hold it over me for the rest of my life.

1. In a government report focused on burden reduction, Pam Herd, Amy Widman and I wrote that someone should estimate the value of citizen time that login.gov has saved - see p39.