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>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.

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