Issue 043 - Public administration - Case-processing throughput
How much administrative work is involved in revoking 200,000 visas?
AP reported that the U.S. government is preparing a large-scale revocation of up to 200,000 business and tourist visas held by people who have applied for asylum. If carried out at that scale, AP says it would be the largest single mass visa revocation in U.S. history.
The problem
Estimate the human administrative workload required to process 200,000 visa revocations.
Consider the work that might have to occur for each case, then estimate total staff-hours and full-time worker-years. Is processing 200,000 cases something a modest government office could plausibly complete in months, or does individual case handling turn it into a much larger staffing problem?
Because Fermi problems target an order of magnitude, I normally use no more than two significant digits and write most calculations in scientific notation; the Fermi reference explains both conventions.
Before checking sources
Matt's first pass
I do not have a good sense of how much administrative time is spent on a visa revocation, so I used a range of anywhere from 1.5 to 8 hours per revocation.
low workload ~= 2.0 x 10^5 cases x 1.5 hours/case
~= 3.0 x 10^5 worker-hours
high workload ~= 2.0 x 10^5 cases x 8 hours/case
~= 1.6 x 10^6 worker-hoursI assumed that the average government worker spends about 35 hours weekly, out of a 40-hour work week, actually engaged in casework. That is probably optimistic.
I did not have a good sense of how many people might be engaged with this task. Some government departments have facilities with tens of thousands of workers, while other departments might only be able to task hundreds of workers with this kind of project while managing their regular responsibilities. So I looked at scenarios where a department could commit 100 workers, 1,000 workers, or 10,000 workers to the visa-revocation task exclusively.
productive time per worker ~= 35 hours/weekOn the lower end:
100 workers:
3.0 x 10^5 hours / (100 x 35 hours/week)
~= 86 weeks
~= 1.8 years
1,000 workers:
3.0 x 10^5 hours / (1,000 x 35 hours/week)
~= 8.6 weeks
~= a little over 2 months
10,000 workers:
3.0 x 10^5 hours / (10,000 x 35 hours/week)
~= about 1 weekOn the upper end:
100 workers:
1.6 x 10^6 hours / (100 x 35 hours/week)
~= 460 weeks
~= 9 years
1,000 workers:
1.6 x 10^6 hours / (1,000 x 35 hours/week)
~= 46 weeks
~= 11 months
10,000 workers:
1.6 x 10^6 hours / (10,000 x 35 hours/week)
~= 4.6 weeksSo the time period could vary widely based on time per revocation and the number of people working on it. My intuition is that the time per revocation will probably skew toward the higher end, and I do not think the departments involved can spare tens of thousands of personnel exclusively for this task. Unless there is a large departmental hiring or surge effort, this might take on the order of a year to complete.
Calibration Score
Matt's Calibration Score: 65 / 100
Higher is better: earn points for accurate pegs, sound models, correct math, and a result close to the sourced answer. The image shows percent full of it: 100 minus the Calibration Score.
Pegs: 10/30. Time-per-case was likely high for a batch-heavy process, but plausible for individualized casework.
Model: 30/30. Cases times time per case divided by worker capacity was the right model.
Math: 5/10. The scenario arithmetic was mostly clean, with some optimistic productivity assumptions.
Result: 20/30. The final one-year-scale intuition remains plausible under slower casework assumptions.
Grounding facts
State Department visa operations are large. The FY2024 Report of the Visa Office shows more than 10 million nonimmigrant visas issued in that fiscal year. That does not mean revocations are easy, but it shows the agency already operates at high document-processing scale.
The hard distinction is batch action versus case adjudication. A database update can process thousands of records quickly. Individual review, exception handling, legal support, and public inquiries scale much more like ordinary casework.
After checking sources
Check and recalibrate
Matt's range is reasonable if every case gets meaningful individual handling. The big correction is that a mass revocation targeted by a database condition may not require 1.5 to 8 hours for every case at the initial action stage.
A low-friction case might be mostly automated: match asylum records to B1/B2 visa records, run duplicate and identity checks, generate revocation records, send notices, and route exceptions. If the average human time is only 15 to 30 minutes per case:
batch-heavy workload
~= 2.0 x 10^5 cases x 0.25 to 0.5 hours/case
~= 5.0 x 10^4 to 1.0 x 10^5 staff-hoursIf each case gets a short human review, plus some supervisor checks and exception handling, a useful middle estimate is 1 to 2 hours per case:
light individual handling
~= 2.0 x 10^5 cases x 1 to 2 hours/case
~= 2.0 x 10^5 to 4.0 x 10^5 staff-hoursIf legal risk, record ambiguity, individualized reasoning, inquiries, or downstream follow-up push the average closer to Matt's upper range, the total becomes:
heavy casework
~= 2.0 x 10^5 cases x 4 to 8 hours/case
~= 8.0 x 10^5 to 1.6 x 10^6 staff-hoursConvert to full-time worker-years using the familiar 2,000-hour work-year:
50,000 staff-hours ~= 25 worker-years
300,000 staff-hours ~= 150 worker-years
1,600,000 staff-hours ~= 800 worker-yearsNow compare with the recent reported revocation rate. AP reported about 175,000 State Department revocations over the prior 18 months:
recent revocation rate ~= 1.75 x 10^5 / 18 months
~= 1.0 x 10^4 revocations/month
time for 2.0 x 10^5 more at that rate
~= 2.0 x 10^5 / 1.0 x 10^4 per month
~= 20 monthsThat external rate check lands close to Matt's intuition: not necessarily because every case needs eight hours, but because agencies have other duties, quality controls, system constraints, legal risk, and limited staff that can be reassigned.
A good calibrated answer is therefore about 1 x 10^5 to 1 x 10^6 staff-hours, with a middle estimate near 3 x 10^5 staff-hours or about 150 worker-years. A 1,000-person surge could process the initial workload in weeks or months; a 100-person office could take many months to years depending on review depth.
Post-check reflection
Matt's reflection
Looks like I may have been considerably overestimating the time per visa revocation, depending on how it gets calculated.
In theory, if we are only looking at visas flagged as overlapping with asylum requesters, that database matching should be quick and should allow for much more focused actions. However, if we look at the rate of revocation over the last 18 months, then a further 200,000 revocations might take about 20 months, which is much closer to my intuitive estimate.
So if the time per case is closer to the theoretical minimum, 100 workers could work through that caseload in a matter of months and 1,000 workers in just a couple of weeks. But if the time per case is closer to my estimate, this is a one-year-plus project.
Recommended memory peg
Remember staff-hours = cases x hours per case, and worker-years = staff-hours / 2,000. For administrative throughput, always separate the theoretical batch-processing minimum from the human review and exception-handling workload.
Reader results
Bars show how submitted estimates sort into the answer choices from the gut-check prompt.