Nonimmigrant Visas: State Should Consistently Conduct Global Staffing Needs Assessments to Help Balance Workloads and Address Long Wait Times

Filed 1h ago · Via GAO · The Buffoon Desk

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At Rest

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Rijksmuseum · CC0 · via Wikimedia Commons

A GAO report finds State Department visitor visa adjudications hit 11.7 million in fiscal 2025, surpassing pre-pandemic levels, while average interview wait times ballooned from 26 days in 2019 to 201 days in 2025. Consular officers working on these visas dropped from 1,342 in fiscal 2024 to just 904 in 2025 because of hiring freezes and attrition, even as demand surged.

State has a Global Repositioning Exercise meant to align staffing with visa workload, but has run it only once since 2019 — skipping it in 2021 and 2022 for COVID reasons and in 2024 and 2025 because of, in officials' own words, changing policy priorities. GAO notes international tourism contributed $176 billion to the U.S. economy in 2025, still $28 billion below pre-pandemic levels, with wait times cited as a contributing factor.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A tool that works, sitting on a shelf because priorities kept changing, is about the most honest description of bureaucratic drift you're likely to read this year. Seven times longer to get a visa interview than before the pandemic is not a rounding error, it's a sign nobody's hand was on the wheel. State neither agreed nor disagreed with the fix, which is its own kind of answer.

Source: Read the original at GAO → Scored: At Rest · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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