Under the current administration it wouldn't surprise me if they decided in their last budget cutting meeting to indiscriminately erase everything with the wildcard "fact" in the project's name.

“Soft power” refers usually to credibility. The point of the Factbook is to be a credible public resource for an entity that would otherwise not have much.

You can make propaganda without lying, by choosing what metrics you value over others for example, by adding them or omitting them or implying whether a stat increasing is positive or negative.