How American Samoa is governed: ballots, a Senate of chiefs and no organic act

Where authority over the territory comes from

Every other power in American Samoa is delegated from one statute. The Ratification Act of 1929, which accepted the deeds of cession, vested all civil, judicial and military power over the islands in the President. In 1951 Executive Order 10264 passed that authority to the Secretary of the Interior, whose Office of Insular Affairs still handles the federal relationship.

Congress has never followed with an organic act, the kind of law that sets out a territory's government. Britannica describes American Samoa as unincorporated and unorganised for that reason: not all of the United States Constitution applies, and no charter act defines the government. The Congressional Research Service notes that Congress holds plenary authority over every territory under the Territorial Clause, and that any change of status, statehood included, would need an act of Congress.

What exists instead is a constitution the territory wrote and Washington approved. A convention drafted the first one in 1960 and a second revised it in 1966; voters approved the revision at the 1966 election, and Interior Secretary Stewart Udall promulgated it to take effect on 1 July 1967. Its preamble says so plainly: it has been "ratified and approved by the Secretary of the Interior."

What the Secretary of the Interior still decides

The constitution leaves the Secretary with three kinds of power that no state governor answers to.

The first is over the constitution itself. An amendment needs three-fifths of each house of the Fono and a majority of voters, and then goes to the Secretary, who has four months to approve or disapprove it. In 1983 Congress went further and required amendments to be made by Congress alone, a rule written to stop the Secretary appointing an attorney general independent of the elected governor. That law was repealed in 2025.

The second is over legislation. The governor can veto a bill; the Fono can pass it again by two-thirds of each house; and if the governor still withholds approval, the bill goes to the Secretary, who can make it law within 90 days.

The third is over the courts. The Secretary appoints the Chief Justice and the Associate Justice of the High Court. Other judges are appointed by the governor on the Chief Justice's recommendation and confirmed by the Senate.

Even the elected governorship is a delegation. The 1967 text said the governor would be "appointed as provided in the laws of the United States." Voters asked for an elected governor in a 1976 referendum, and the change was made by Secretary's Order No. 3009 of 13 September 1977, which provides for a governor and lieutenant governor "popularly elected" from November 1977.

How the Fono combines ballots and chiefs

The legislature, the Fono, has two houses and meets in Fagatogo. Its House of Representatives, whose members are also called faipule, is elected like a mainland chamber: candidates must be United States nationals aged at least 25 with five years' residence, and elections fall on the first Tuesday after 1 November in even years. Ballots carry no party labels. Members need not be matai, though most are.

The Senate works another way. A senator must be at least 30, and under Article II "the registered matai of a Samoan family who fulfills his obligations as required by Samoan custom" in the county he represents. The county councils choose senators "in accordance with Samoan custom," and the High Court has held that this means the traditional manner of reaching a decision as it existed when the provision was adopted. It has also declined to prescribe one method, since custom varies by county.

The courts read the Senate's position as special. In a 1987 case the High Court said the legislature, "and particularly the Senate which is composed of traditional chiefs chosen according to Samoan custom, has a peculiar relationship to the preservation of land and culture."

The apportionment has been frozen since 1967. The constitution requires reapportionment "at intervals of not less than 5 years," and none has been made, so the seats still follow the 1960 census. Manuʻa, whose population has fallen, is over-represented; Tuālāuta, which has grown, is under-represented. Voters narrowly rejected two more representatives for Ituʻau and Tuālāuta in 2022, and in the same year rejected restoring two Senate seats to Manuʻa.

Swains Island has an anomaly of its own. The constitution gives its delegate every privilege of a member except the vote. The Fono's own history records that in 2025 the delegate became a voting member, although the island was uninhabited and only nine former residents could take part in choosing him.

How chiefs govern the villages

Below the territorial government sits an older one that the constitution names and protects. The territory is divided into the Western, Eastern and Manuʻa districts, plus Swains Island and uninhabited Rose Atoll; the districts into counties; the counties into villages. The governor appoints a district governor for each district and a Secretary of Samoan Affairs "from among the leading registered matais," who heads the Department of Local Government.

In the villages authority rests with the chiefs. Each ʻaiga, the extended family, chooses its matai by consensus, and the matai of a village sit together as its fono. The National Park Service describes that council deciding on the village's resources, its disputes and the enforcement of its rules, with the highest-ranking chief, the aliʻi, presiding and the talking chiefs, tulafale, carrying its decisions to the village. A pulenuʻu manages day-to-day village business, a role the Park Service compares to a mayor's. Village courts handle matters of village rules and custom. Most offences against village rules are dealt with inside the village, and the Park Service describes the principle as restorative: the aim is reconciliation within the community, on the view that one person's actions affect all of it.

The two systems meet over land. The matai and the family councils decide who works communal land, and the constitution commits the territorial government "to protect persons of Samoan ancestry against alienation of their lands and the destruction of the Samoan way of life and language." No change to land law takes effect without two successive legislatures voting by two-thirds of each house, and the governor.

What the territory decides and what Washington sets

Money shows where the line runs. The Fono is autonomous in spending local revenue, and the constitution forbids it to appropriate more than territorial taxes and other local revenue bring in. Federal money is handled separately: before the governor sends the Secretary of the Interior a request for federal funds, he must put a preliminary budget plan to the Fono in joint session for its approval of the parts Congress would pay for.

Taxation is split the same way. The territory taxes the worldwide income of its residents under its own law, largely following the United States tax code as it stood in 2000, with a minimum rate of 4%. Washington collects payroll taxes on work in the territory but no federal income tax on income earned there. American Samoa is also its own customs territory: it charges no sales tax, applies a general import tax of 8% and sets its own import rules.

The clearest case of a decision made elsewhere is the minimum wage. Congress sets it, industry by industry, under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007 set the territory's rates rising toward the federal level, and later laws slowed the climb to increases every three years, with full convergence scheduled for 2036. When the Government Accountability Office reviewed the policy in 2020, the territorial government asked for a committee to set wages locally and a moratorium on increases until it existed. The Chamber of Commerce wanted increases for the cannery delayed.

Why the territory's leaders resist federal integration

The chiefs' objection to an organic act in 1949 set the pattern. Since then the territory has declined a federal district court, kept its own immigration law and argued against birthright citizenship.

Immigration is the clearest case. The territory controls who enters. According to the Department of the Interior, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services has no jurisdiction there, and even a United States citizen needs a passport or certified birth certificate and an onward ticket or proof of work to land. American Samoa is not treated as part of the United States for purposes of the Immigration and Nationality Act, so a foreign national living there has no route to citizenship without moving elsewhere.

Citizenship is the contested case. People born in the territory are United States nationals: they may live and work anywhere in the United States but cannot vote in federal elections, and citizenship comes only through naturalisation elsewhere. Those in favour of change argue the status restricts their voting rights and access to public employment. The territorial government has argued the opposite: that citizenship could let federal judges strike down the rule that land may pass only to people of at least half Samoan ancestry, along with the chiefly Senate. On 20 July 2021 the Fono unanimously backed the Tenth Circuit's ruling against automatic citizenship, and the Supreme Court declined the case in October 2022. The American Civil Liberties Union, which argued for the plaintiffs' side, calls the underlying Insular Cases a doctrine grounded in white supremacy.

The High Court had already upheld the land rule. In Craddick v. Territorial Registrar in 1980 its Appellate Division held that the restriction was a racial classification and still constitutional, because preserving Samoan land and culture was a proper purpose and the rule was necessary to it.

Voters have tested the edges of this themselves. In 2010 they rejected a package of constitutional amendments that would, among other things, have let United States citizens sit in the legislature only if they had Samoan ancestry. In 2012 the governor and the territory's delegate in Congress both called for residents to consider autonomy, if not independence, and the response was mixed.

Who speaks for the territory outside it

American Samoa's voice in Washington is one non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives, first elected in 1981. Residents take part in presidential primaries and send delegates to the national party conventions, but the territory has no electoral votes. The Republican and Democratic parties are organised there; few local politicians run under their labels.

Internationally the territory appears under its own name in several bodies. It is a member of the Pacific Community and the Pacific Islands Forum and of the Alliance of Small Island States, and it has had its own International Olympic Committee membership since 1987. It is also on the United Nations list of seventeen non-self-governing territories. The territorial government disputes that listing and considers itself self-governing, and the United States asked in 2001 and 2003 for American Samoa to be taken off the list, without success.