In what way does the above matter, and what is the point of “tooting their own horn” or not on this? To drive up unnecessary queries about why applicants didn’t get a new version? Rather than getting busy marketing to a domestic audience, perhaps the country should have all hands on deck for issuing just the common passport version in widest US circulation.

As unfortunately the State Department won’t scrap the idea of this expensive approach for those eligible for US passports now and in the future, the slower the rollout the better it is for America’s passport users in the aggregate. I apply for too many personal passports to welcome the inevitable price hike that will eventually come with the arguably less environmentally-friendly US passport version with the polycarbonate biodata page.