Biden didn't remove bald eagle from passports; photo placed on different page | Fact check

Joedy McCreary, USA TODAY
·3 min read
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The claim: Biden administration removed 'patriotic imagery’ of bald eagle from US passports

A Jan. 12 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) shows side-by-side photos of what appear to be American passports, one of which has noticeably less patriotic imagery.

“Why is the Biden regime removing patriotic imagery from the US passport?” reads part of the on-screen text included in the image. "The eagle, American flag, and 'We The People' have been removed."

The post, which originated on X, formerly Twitter, received more than 100 likes in less than a week.

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Our rating: False

The bald eagle isn't gone, and the redesign isn't a Biden administration initiative. The process of redesigning passport books began during Barack Obama’s presidency and continued through Donald Trump’s term. The bald eagle appears on a different page in the new passports.

Photo of bald eagle placed on different page, not removed

The State Department updated the design of U.S. passport books to incorporate security features, including a data page made from polycarbonate plastic and a laser-engraved photo of the holder. The first Next Generation Passport was issued in 2021, the same year Biden was sworn in as president.

But the claim in the post is false, according to experts and government documents. The eagle has not been removed from passports. It has simply been placed on a different page. The process of changing the passport’s appearance began nearly a decade before Biden assumed the presidency.

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“The design was certainly completed under the Trump Administration,” Patrick Bixby, a professor at Arizona State University and the author of a book about the history of passports, told USA TODAY.

The International Civil Aviation Organization, the United Nations agency that sets global passport standards, recommends a redesign every 10 years to add security features and combat fraud and forgery, said Tom Topol, an expert on passport history and the publisher of the Passport Collector website, in an email to USA TODAY. The previous version of the U.S. passport had been in use since 2006, he added.

The Government Publishing Office, which has manufactured U.S. passports for nearly a century, received approval in October 2012 – near the end of Obama’s first term – to begin the process of redesigning them with Homeland Security and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, according to a 2020 report from the Office of the Inspector General.

A test run of thousands of the new passports was produced in 2018 – while Trump was president – in Washington, D.C., and in Mississippi as part of a quality-control check. The redesigned version was completed in 2020, according to document security company Keesing Technologies.

The photo of passport books in the Instagram post originated in a 2022 Reddit post that shows the second and third pages – the signature and data pages – of both versions. While the new version does not show an image of a bald eagle on the second page, one is pictured on Page 4, as seen in sample passport pages provided to USA TODAY by a State Department spokesperson.

“The design of the stamping pages – filled with patriotic imagery from America’s past – remains virtually identical to the previous generation passport,” Bixby said. “The only pages that have really changed are the signature and data pages.”

The social media users who shared the post could not be reached.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: False claim Biden removed bald eagle from passports | Fact check