State Department publications riddled with omissions and inaccurate info on Pacific island entries

Photo courtesy of the State Department

By Jayvee Vallejera

The Facebook page of the U.S. Embassy in Palau is named U.S. Embassy Koror, which refers to the capital of Palau. However, the embassy’s official website says the embassy is actually in Airia.

In one instance, a U.S. government report referred to the Marshall Islands and Palau as U.S. territories instead of freely associated states.

In the U.S. State Department's Foreign Affairs Manual, the sections on the Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu have no country entries, despite being recognized as independent nations.

Honiara in the Solomon Islands has had a U.S. embassy since January 2023. Nuku'alofa in Tonga has had one since May 2023. Vanuatu’s capital, Port Vila, has hosted a U.S. Embassy since July 2024.

These are just a few examples of some of the inaccuracies in the Foreign Affairs Manual, according to Michael Walsh, an academic researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand, who also cited other State Department publications and websites of U.S. diplomatic missions for imprecision. He calls them 

“information quality issues.”

Walsh, who has been advocating for the State Department to tidy up its official publications, has already reached out to the department and has also urged committees in the U.S. Congress with oversight over U.S. foreign affairs to pressure the State Department to rid its official publications of these “information quality” issues. 

Just last month, Walsh enumerated these issues for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs Press Office at the State Department. However, there has been no commitment made to investigate them, he said.

He said these information quality issues do not just impact the quality of the reference material that guides the conduct of U.S. diplomats and the oversight activities of U.S. policymakers.

“They also negatively impact the ability of researchers to be able to construct reliable frameworks that can be used in the analysis of U.S. foreign policy,” he added.

These kinds of inaccuracies have managed to creep into State Department publications despite having Information Quality Guidelines that are supposed to guard against them, Walsh said.

Of particular concern for him are inconsistencies in the department’s Foreign Affairs Manual, which is like the employee handbook for U.S. diplomats.

It serves as the single, comprehensive, and authoritative source of information that guides the conduct of American diplomats.

“It goes without saying that it should not contain inaccurate, incomplete, inconsistent, non-credible, out-of-date, imprecise, non-compliant and difficult-to-understand information,” he said.

Walsh discovered these issues in the course of his own academic research while working on a policy document that guides and instructs how to prepare what’s called Integrated Country Strategies, which outlines U.S. priorities in a given country.

The problem, he said, was that the content areas in that policy document did not match the content areas that were in the actual strategic plans.

He reached out to the Media Relations Team at the State Department to ask for clarification, but, instead of getting feedback, the document was removed from the public domain and no revised version was published in its place. 

“As a consequence, I was unable to determine whether the content areas that were present in the Integrated Country Strategies were compliant with the guidance and instructions with a high level of confidence,” he added.

That, he said, hindered his ability to tell the American people about the strategic planning performance of its diplomats.

The State Department’s Information Quality Guidelines has its own issues, Walsh said. For example, the hyperlink on its website where the public could ask for corrections is often broken.

He has a hunch, though, that the real crux of the problem lies elsewhere.

One culprit could be the cultures within the U.S. Foreign Service, U.S. Department of State and U.S. Congress, he said.

In an opinion piece he wrote for eurasiareview.com, Walsh quoted former U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken as saying it is difficult to “make transformative change in an institution of [its] size and complexity.”

“It is therefore not surprising that the U.S. Department of State has failed to fulfill its obligation to correct any and all information that is non-compliant with the U.S. Department of State Information Quality Guidelines,” Walsh said in his opinion piece.

In a separate email interview, Walsh said both the U.S. Foreign Service and State Department seem to undervalue the importance of error-free publications, while the U.S. Congress appears to undervalue the importance of making sure the State Department and U.S. Foreign Service comply with the Information Quality Guidelines.

To improve the quality of information produced by the department, Walsh suggests investing in personnel and resources.

That means hiring more editors and reviewers, more training for spotting these inaccuracies and investing in technologies that could help, like using artificial intelligence.

Both Congress and the Executive Branch also need to have more oversight over the quality of these types of information, he added.

The problem, Walsh said, is that these are expensive solutions.

The cultures of the U.S. Foreign Service, U.S. Department of State, and U.S. Congress also need to shift, he said. For one, U.S. diplomats need to stop trying to hide these inaccuracies from the U.S. Congress and the American people.

Citing his own experience, he said a U.S. diplomat tried to pressure a newspaper in Curaçao to take down an opinion piece he had written about these inaccuracies. When the editor refused, the diplomat barred that editor from a diplomatic event.

He said this low quality of official information appears to be a general problem across the State Department. He has identified them in the Integrated Country Strategies, Functional Bureau Strategies, Joint Regional Strategies, Independent States in the World Fact Sheet, Dependencies and Areas of Special Sovereignty Fact Sheet, and U.S. Department of State websites. 

These problematic entries did not just arise during the Trump administration and under the watch of State Secretary Marco Rubio. Walsh said he has documented similar issues in official documents produced under the Biden administration. 

In fact, this situation appears to be a major problem across the U.S. government, he said.

Walsh said he reported this error to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and it was eventually corrected. “However, it took a tremendous amount of time and effort to achieve that outcome.”

As part of his advocacy, Walsh has already reported these “information quality issues” to U.S. Congress staff. That includes not just the chiefs of staff of the delegations from American Samoa, the CNMI, Guam, and Hawaii, but also the professional staff of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

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