After a year-long “review”, the White House on August 12, 2013, approved the State Department’s proposed new “long form” questionnaires for some (unspecified) subset of applicants for US passports:

Form DS-5513, “Supplemental Questionnaire to Determine Entitlement for a U.S. Passport”:

• Form DS-5513 as approved (OMB Control Number 1405-0216)
• Supporting Documents for Form DS-5513 (click on “all” at top of page for more details)

Form DS-5520, “Supplemental Questionnaire to Determine Identity for a U.S. Passport”:

• Form DS-5520 as approved (OMB Control No: 1405-0215)
• Supporting Documents for Form DS-5520 (click on “all” at top of page for more details)

In approving these forms, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) ignored overwhelmingly public outrage at these questionnaires, which ask such questions as:

• List all your parent(s) residences one year before your birth.
• Parent(s) place of employment at the time of your birth (Dates of employment, Name of employer, Address of employer).
• Did your mother receive medical care while pregnant with you and/or up to one year after your birth? (Name of hospital or other facility, Address, Name of Doctor, Approximate dates of appointments).
• Please provide the names (as well as address and phone number, if available) of persons present at your birth such as medical personnel, family members, etc.
• Please list any schools, day care centers, or developmental programs you attended from birth to age 18 in or outside of the United States.
• Please list all of your permanent residences inside and outside of the United States starting with your birth until age 18.

The proposed forms were slightly (but not significantly) revised by the State Department during the review by OMB. But there are still no publicly-disclosed guidelines for which passport applicants would be sent one or both of these “long forms”.  We requested this information from the State Department more than two years ago under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), but the State Department has not yet responded to our request. (This is, we’ve been told, typical of the State Department’s failure to comply with FOIA deadlines.)  The most reasonable inference is that the new forms are designed to be impossible to complete, so as to provide a pretext to deny you a passport if the State Department doesn’t like your looks (or your opinions, or whatever).

The State Department has also ignored our formal complaint that these conditions for passport issuance violate U.S. obligations as a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and our FOIA request for any records of what (if anything) was done with that complaint.

OMB declined our written request to meet with them to discuss our objections to the proposed forms. OMB policy is to meet with groups interested in its reviews of proposed regulations, but it doesn’t apply that policy to its reviews of proposed “information collections”.

In the course of the review by OMB, the State Department admitted that, as we had already reported, it has already been using these forms illegally. According to the latest State Department submission to OMB:

The DS-5520 has been created to correct a procedure that may have been inconsistent with the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA)….   Field offices have, in the past, sent the applicant a letter containing a questionnaire asking for the supplemental information.  The Department has become aware of this procedure and is now seeking OMB approval to rectify the oversight….

The DS-5520 is a new collection based on the previously internal Information Request Letter (IRL) titled, “Supplemental Identification List”.  To estimate the number of respondents per year, therefore, the Department ran a report using our Management Information System (MIS) to determine the number of these IRLs filed in 2011 by every passport agency and acceptance facility.  The results revealed that in 2011, 54,723 letters were filed along with the DS-11.

Until the forms were approved (as they now have been) by OMB, the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) prohibited the State Department from denying anyone a passport or imposing any other penalties for failure or refusal to fill out these forms.

Now that these forms have been approved, objections to the denial of a passport on the basis of failure to complete these forms (or to do so to the satisfaction of the State Department) will have to be based on other grounds than the PRA.  These objections may be more fundamental, but may also be more difficult to establish in administrative or judicial proceedings.

If you are a US citizen but are denied a US passport because you are unable or unwilling to answer these questions, or you are prevented from entering or leaving the USA because you don’t have a passport, we’d like to hear from you.