Originally Posted by
LupineChemist
The next gen US one looks like a lot of the features in my Spanish passport. But in Spain I just go to the police station, pay 30€ or something like that and they give it to me right there. I have no idea why the US makes it so complicated. When I last renewed at the US consulate in Madrid, the US one took only 4 or 5 days, so I assume there's the capacity to print on demand in the embassy as well.
They don’t print standard US passports for applicants at that embassy either — neither the legacy version nor this “Next Gen” version. ACS at each of the relevant missions in Spain get the completed US passports delivered after production elsewhere. The primary exception to that can be the “emergency passport”, which still uses a visa-like sticker on and for the biodata of the applicant and is printed locally on the imported regular passport blanks of the legacy version.
The turnaroud time you’re seeing is largely a function of the flight connectivity between a fulfillment center for US passports and the city hosting the US mission with ACS handling submitted/received passport applications.