The Global Engagement Center, a State Department unit that called out Russian and Chinese propaganda campaigns and became a MAGA boogeyman, has been shut down. Team Trump is promising that it’s just the start of an examination of alleged censorship during the Biden administration—and the first Trump administration too.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the move “a crucial step toward keeping the president’s promise to liberate American speech” in an op-ed for the right-wing site The Federalist. Critics say it’s part of a larger effort by the Trump administration to withdraw from a decades-long contest of ideas and information with America’s adversaries.
In early February, Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded the Justice Department task force on covert foreign influence and radically narrowed enforcement of the law that outlawed secretive propaganda for overseas regimes. The Trump administration gutted the parent organization of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia, which aimed to provide news and demonstrate the value of a free press in regions of the world where both were often in short supply. Together, according to The Washington Post, they reached a weekly audience of 420 million people in 63 languages. “Most shameful moment at the department since the purges of the 1950s,” one State Department official, who was granted anonymity because they are not authorized to talk to the press, tells WIRED.
To Trumpists, the push to publish American-style news around the world was an outdated waste of taxpayer money, and attempts to combat disinformation abroad, even if their origins were benign, were really attempts to silence right-wing Americans. The Global Engagement Center, or GEC, became a particular fixation. “The worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation is an obscure agency called GEC,” Elon Musk posted in 2023. (MIT Technology Review first reported the news of its closure.)
(“The allegations of ‘censorship’ against the GEC are as fictitious as the conspiracy theories spun by various bad-faith actors around international broadcasting and other long-standing institutions of American soft power now under attack,” said the State Department official.)
First established during the war on terror to counter and keep tabs on militant messaging overseas, the GEC expanded over the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations into a $60-million, 120-person shop which also tracked and exposed rival nation-state campaigns to spread propaganda and pollute the information environment. It mapped a multibillion-dollar Chinese influence program that stretched from Pakistan to Latin America. It looked into the social media accounts boosting Germany’s far-right AfD party and spreading neo-Nazi propaganda. It revealed a covert Russian effort to undermine public health in Africa. And the GEC called out the Kremlin’s claims that the “United States worked with Ukraine to train an army of migratory birds, mosquitos, and even bats to carry biological weapons into Russia.”
Sometimes, with grants of just a few thousand dollars, it funded the work of journalists in countries targeted by the Putin regime. “We were really focused on building the capacity of folks that were already doing that good work and making sure that they had the platform to continue to tell their stories—to tell the truth in an environment that was trying to take that from them,” a second State Department source tells WIRED.
Over the years, the GEC’s effectiveness and execution were questioned by the State Department’s Inspector General, among others. But the GEC and efforts like it generally received bipartisan support. That started to change after the pandemic—and Musk’s purchase of Twitter. The so-called “Twitter Files”—reports based on Musk’s release of internal company emails—seemed to show the GEC being far too aggressive in its attempts to tamp down on alleged Covid disinformation during Trump’s first term. Republican critics like US Representative Brian Mast of Florida complained that the GEC wasn’t being aggressive enough in support of Israel after October 7. Other GOP congresspersons zeroed in on its $100,000 grant to the UK-based Global Disinformation Index to monitor media in Asia. The Index later compiled a list of the 10 American news outlets at highest risk of publishing false claims; nearly all of them were MAGA-friendly. This was an entirely separate project from the one the GEC funded, but Trumpists saw the existence of the list as evidence that it was suppressing speech at home when it was supposed to be looking abroad.
“GEC’s history shows the pernicious way Washington turns laudable public goals into a means of entrenching its own power and rolling back the freedom of regular Americans,” Rubio wrote in his op-ed. “Over the past half-decade, bodies like GEC, crafted by our own governing ruling class, nearly destroyed America’s long free speech history. The enemies of speech had new lingo to justify their authoritarian impulse. It was ‘disinformation,’ allegedly pushed by nefarious foreign governments, that was the No. 1 threat to ‘our democracy.’ To protect ‘our democracy,’ this ‘disinformation’ had to be identified and stamped out.”
A famously conservative US court of appeals rejected this idea, writing that “there is no indication that State Department officials flagged specific content for censorship.” But by then, the GEC was poison in MAGA minds. Its participation in a State Department campaign accusing Kremlin-funded media outlet RT of being an intelligence operation did not change their opinions. The GEC was cleared of “having anything to do with domestic suppression of points of view. But what was going on was that they decided that this was a winnable, small victory they could have over this ‘liberal institution,’” according to a diplomatic source with direct knowledge of the matter.
A December deal to reauthorize funding for the GEC, due to run out in 2024, fell apart after “Elon Musk got involved,” that source said; the center was officially disbanded, but about 50 staffers and $30 million in funding were moved to a “Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub” in the hopes of proving the value of such an operation to their new MAGA superiors. They were also given a new boss, Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Darren Beattie.
The name may sound familiar. Beattie had left a trail of trolly posts on Musk’s social media platform—promoting the Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, for instance, and musing that “competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.” He also called his future boss Marco Rubio “low IQ.”
Rubio, until recently, was hawkish about fighting foreign influence campaigns. In 2023, a second diplomatic source with direct knowledge said, he supported reauthorizing funding the GEC into the 2030s. “It’s not just Russia—Iran, China, North Korea, and even Cuba are pushing disinformation into America,” he posted last September. But after being confirmed as secretary of state, Rubio appeared to do something of a 180. While the department would continue to counter “enemy propaganda,” he wrote in a cable, any State Department programs that “lead or in any way open the door to censorship of the American people will be terminated.”
“The secretary believes shutting down GEC was long overdue,” a State spokesperson tells WIRED. “It cost taxpayers $50 million a year, and the Biden administration used that money to silence and censor Americans. What started out years ago as an effort to counter terrorist organizations was exploited by partisan bureaucrats who used the office to go after Americans’ free speech. Even career employees acknowledged GEC’s ambiguous mission was always problematic. Thanks to Secretary Rubio, the American people won’t have to worry about it anymore, as it has been permanently disbanded.”
For the first 60 days, the renamed, pared-down Global Engagement Center escaped the clear-cutting that took down the US Agency for International Development and other programs boosting America’s standing abroad. But employees there knew that this was, at best, a temporary stay of execution. In his Federalist op-ed, Rubio wrote, “Today, we are putting that to an end. Whatever name it goes by, GEC is dead. It will not return.”
Stories about GEC will continue, Rubio promised in a livestreamed conversation with Mike Benz, a former State Department official who has both a well-documented animus toward foreign-assistance and counter-disinformation programs—as well as a long history of promoting outlandish conspiracy theories.
Benz asked Rubio if there would be a kind of Twitter Files sequel, this time for GEC. “Yeah. So I think what we have to do now, and Darren [Beattie] will be involved in that as well, is sort of document what happened,” Rubio answered.
The secretary of state promised an even further-reaching, “cross-jurisdictional” effort to look at who got “deplatformed” for peddling disinformation or foreign propaganda and whether the US government could be blamed for it. “If we could somehow, with an 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,” Rubio said.