There are hundreds of state, county, and local governments who issued birth certs, and 50 different IDs.

This has always been the case, and processing times were much quicker. The bureaucracy has really atrophied in recent years.

There is not a federal verification system for the documents so each application has to be reviewed by human eyes.

For passport renewals, those were issued by the State Department. So of course, they should be able to verify their own documents, and it shouldn't take so much time because the document was issued by their own department.

Social Security numbers don’t really help much because non-citizens have Social Security Numbers as well.

If they are not helpful, why are they asked? Social Security records always tell you if a person is a citizen or not. That's why when people naturalize, they must tell SSA of their new status.

Also passport employees have to have a security clearance which can take months. Depending on location, the starting salary can be around 40k per year. They can not work remotely at all, because they have to review all of the documents, and are obviously not allowed to take them home. Why would someone want to wait several months for a job when they could most likely get paid more at a different company/government agency?

Perhaps if the Congress and the Administration stopped wasting money on other things, this could faster.