> There's obviously some tradeoff between hiring more people to process and verify an increased number of applications at faster throughput. But that’s the thi

> There's obviously some tradeoff between hiring more people to process and verify an increased number of applications at faster throughput. But that’s the thing. You need a certain throughput, and it shouldn’t affect the wait time. If you get X passport applications per day, and you can only produce less than X per day, your wait times will keep increasing over time. So at the minimum you need the same amount of production capacity as you have applications, preferably a little bit more. Assuming this is the case, then there must be something else causing the delays. Sure, there can be a small queue due to fluctuating orders but surely not 5 weeks ? So there are two possibilities: either it actually takes weeks to manufacture the document, which seems odd, or it only takes a couple of minutes but there is some reason it takes 5 weeks before production is started. > Shipping times from DE/DC to CA are probably longer than coast-to-coast in the Netherlands, etc. Shipping for pretty much everything in the Netherlands is next-day. But I see no reason why you have to ship from the other side of the country. You can run a big country as if it was a collection of small countries. Isn’t that kind of what US states are anyway ? You have 20 times the number of people as the Netherlands, why not have 20 production facilities spread around the country ?