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Comment by klipt | Hacker News Reader

> Process long-pending petitions, which we have currently been unable to process due to the high volume of incoming petitions and the significant surge in premium processing requests over the past few years

You'd think the $1,225 paid for every premium processing request would allow them to hire more people to tackle the backlog, but I guess not, maybe they just reroute that money elsewhere :P

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USCIS is under department of homeland security now. Possibly where it is rerouted too. The cost of all applications have gone up by a fairly large amount imho since the DOJ days. I looked into this when I was trying to figure out the costs for my own application some time ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Citizenship_and_...

I'd think the $1,225 paid would be allowing them to hire more people to expedite the premium processing. You can't offer premium processing without additional processing capacity. For a while you might get away with just moving premium requests to the front of the queue, but that breaks down after a certain point and in order to meet whatever timeline they are promising, they will need to have the capacity to handle all the premium applications within that time.

As I understand it, USCIS (though not ICE or CBP) is subject to the current federal hiring freeze.

>hire more people

There's a federal hiring freeze.

The premium processing service has been around for years, most of the time there isn't a hiring freeze.

I guess if they were planning to use the premium processing fees to hire a bunch of extra people for the April application deadline the hiring freeze will stymie that, which just shows how stupid a general hiring freeze is.

Growth in volume/demand. They probably did hire more people over time, but needed to hire more since January to meet current deadlines. Since the freeze has been in effect for a few months now, that probably had a detrimental effect on their ability to adapt to any increased volume.

if this is what the people want, tell congress to fund them more and Defense/Military less. they control how much money is appropriated to DHS

USCIS is self-funded. They exist via the fees paid. To quote them[0]:

> USCIS is funded primarily by immigration and naturalization benefit fees charged to applicants and petitioners. Fees collected from individuals or organizations filing immigration benefit requests are deposited into the Immigration Examinations Fee Account (IEFA). Congress created the IEFA in 1988, establishing the authority to recover the full cost of immigration benefit processing. This account represents approximately 95 percent of USCIS’ fiscal year (FY) 2016 total budget authority. The remaining budget authority comes from two other mandatory fee accounts and appropriated funding for the E-Verify program.

[0] https://www.uscis.gov/aboutus

good point.

still, the uscis budget is not even a drop in the bucket:

https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=795314

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