Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday announced the closure of a small arm within the State Department aimed at countering foreign disinformation campaigns, but that Republicans increasingly criticized as silencing conservative voices online.
Rubio announced the shuttering of the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI), formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC), accusing it of using taxpayer dollars “to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.”
But some lawsuits targeting the GEC for alleged censorship failed to succeed, with a federal appeals court ruling that there was no evidence that its officials coerced or influenced social media platforms to moderate content on their sites.
The GEC’s mandate was to track and root out malign foreign influence campaigns, and over the last few years published reports on Chinese and Russian efforts to manipulate global opinion.
Still, the agency was also in the crosshairs of tech billionaire Elon Musk, head adviser of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that is taking a sledgehammer to parts of the federal government, including the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
In 2023, Musk called the center the “worst offender in U.S. government censorship and media manipulation.”
Rubio, in an interview Tuesday, said that he wanted to “go back and prove” that the GEC’s work led to individual Americans being deplatformed from social media sites.
“If we could somehow with internal review, create a linkage between some information that came from something the State Department paid for, and an actual aggrieved party, that's what's important,” he said.
“We didn't want to wait for that to take action. We know enough to already act, but we obviously want to know the depth and the scope of this. That's going to happen.”
The GEC, established in 2016 by executive order during the Obama administration, garnered bipartisan backing for its mission to counter foreign propaganda at the height of recruiting efforts by the terrorist group the Islamic State. Congress later expanded its authority to address Russian disinformation campaigns.
But the center struggled to find its footing in leading the U.S. government’s efforts to track and expose foreign malign influence campaigns. Its more than $50 million budget was largely dispersed through grants to organizations to identify and combat disinformation from foreign adversaries.
Congress zeroed out funding for the center at the end of 2024 and the outgoing Biden administration restructured the GEC and its approximately 50 employees were put under the authority of a new center called the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub.
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