The US State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), which Republicans have accused of censoring US citizens, has been shuttered due to a lack of funding.
A State Department spokesperson told Fox News in a statement, "The Global Engagement Center will terminate by operation of law [by the end of the day] on December 23, 2024. The Department of State has consulted with Congress regarding next steps."
$61 million in funding for the 120-person agency was reportedly included in the original continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government beyond Friday’s deadline, but conservatives shot down that iteration of the spending bill after Elon Musk and Donald Trump spoke out against it, and the rewritten version did not include money for the GEC.
During debate on the spending bill last week, Senator Eric Schmitt said, "This is an entity that is funded to censor conservatives. We should not be doing any of this stuff." Lawmakers have argued that GEC went beyond its mission of "proactively addressing foreign adversaries’ attempts to undermine US interests using disinformation and propaganda" by attempting to censor American citizens, per the New York Post.
The GEC, "funded a secret list of subcontractors and helped pioneer an insidious — and idiotic — new form of blacklisting" during the pandemic, journalist Matt Taibbi wrote in the Twitter Files. Last year, he exposed that the GEC "flagged accounts as ‘Russian personas and proxies’ based on criteria such as ‘Describing the Coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon,’ blaming ‘research conducted at the Wuhan institute,’ and ‘attributing the appearance of the virus to the CIA.’" He noted that the State Department also “flagged accounts that retweeted news that Twitter banned the popular US website ZeroHedge, claiming that it 'led to another flurry of disinformation narratives.'"
The GEC also partnered with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Special Operations Command, and the Department of Homeland Security.
A 2024 report from the Republican-led House Small Business Committee slammed the agency for awarding grants to organizations whose work includes tracking domestic misinformation and rating the credibility of US-based publishers.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, The Daily Wire, and The Federalist, sued the State Department, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and other Biden officials earlier this month for "engaging in a conspiracy to censor, deplatform and demonetize American media outlets disfavored by the federal government," claiming that the GEC was used as a tool for the Biden administration to carry out its censorship and describing the agency as "one of the most egregious government operations to censor the American press in the history of the nation."
The Texas Attorney General’s Office said in a press release, "Congress authorized the creation of the Global Engagement Center expressly to counter foreign propaganda and misinformation. Instead, the agency weaponized this authority to violate the First Amendment and suppress Americans’ constitutionally-protected speech.”
According to the lawsuit, The Daily Wire, The Federalist, and other conservative news organizations were branded "unreliable" or "risky" by the agency, "starving them of advertising revenue and reducing the circulation of their reporting and speech — all as a direct result of [the State Department’s] unlawful censorship scheme."
