The previous government worked to silence dissenting voices, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said
The US has officially shut down the government agency that Secretary of State Marco Rubio said was used by the Biden administration to censor Americans.
Former President Joe Biden set up the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) in 2016 to “recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation,” according to its mission statement.
On Wednesday, Rubio announced the closure of the GEC, which had been operating as the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) office since December.
“Under the previous administration, this office, which cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year, spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving,” Rubio said. “This is antithetical to the very principles we should be upholding and inconceivable it was taking place in America.”
In an interview with conservative activist Mike Benz published on Wednesday, Rubio said that the GEC was originally conceived as a tool to fight extremism, such as propaganda from Al-Qaeda and ISIS, but later evolved to “going after individual American voices.”
“We ended government-sponsored censorship in the United States through the State Department,” he said.
The Biden administration had backed groups that were “literally tagging and labeling voices in American politics – Ben Shapiro, The Federalist, others – tagging them as foreign agents,” Rubio said.
The GEC had an annual budget of $61 million and employed around 120 workers. In December, congressional Republicans refused to renew its funding.
President Donald Trump and his allies have long accused the Democrats of weaponizing the government to suppress conservative opinions online. In 2023, tech billionaire Elon Musk slammed the GEC as the “worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation,” and “a threat to our democracy.” Journalist Matt Taibbi argued that the agency had tried suppressing discussions about Covid-19 under the guise of fighting “Russian personas and proxies.”
Last year, a group of House Republicans wrote a letter to then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken, claiming that the GEC was biased in favor of “American progressives” and working to silence opinions “deemed to be politically disfavored or inconvenient.”
