The Biden administration is reportedly planning to rebrand the controversial Global Engagement Center (GEC), which has faced accusations of seeking to censor Americans, into a new State Department office tasked with countering “foreign information manipulation and interference,” despite the fact that the GEC ceased operations last month after Congress refused to reauthorize it in recent spending legislation.
According to a Dec. 6 notification letter reviewed by the Washington Examiner, the State Department plans to realign 51 GEC employees and $29.4 million in funding to a proposed “Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub” under the Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy. The remaining GEC staff and funds would be transferred to various bureaus including African Affairs, East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and European and Eurasian Affairs.
Senior Republican staffers who have reviewed the plan tell the Examiner that it appears the Biden administration is merely “rebranding” the GEC in an attempt to circumvent congressional oversight and continue conducting the same kind of censorship activities that drew criticism from House Republicans and media free speech advocates.
“[The] State Department is filled with Resistance Democrats who think they got through the first Trump administration and will get through the second the same way,” said one senior GOP aide. “Trump and [Secretary of State-designate] Marco Rubio are going to have to track every single office, down to every single staffer, if they want to end the weaponization of the federal government against conservatives.”
The GEC faced scrutiny after journalist Matt Taibbi uncovered evidence in his “Twitter Files” expose that the office pressured US social media platforms to censor Americans in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, purportedly to counter “disinformation” such as the theory that the virus leaked from a Chinese lab. “We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA,” Taibbi testified to Congress in March 2023.
The Washington Examiner also discovered a $100,000 grant the GEC made to the Global Disinformation Index, a London media monitoring nonprofit that branded 10 outlets including the New York Post as “disinformation” spreaders. Several Republicans argue the GEC overstepped its mandate of countering foreign propaganda by seeking to censor US citizens.
Twitter owner Elon Musk has described the GEC as the “worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation.” The plan to establish a new “information manipulation” hub is expected to trigger congressional investigations.
The Biden administration’s reported plan to rebrand the controversial Global Engagement Center into a new office to bypass congressional oversight has triggered alarm bells among House Republicans, who accuse the State Department of attempting to weaponize the federal government against conservatives. The move is seen as a brazen attempt to circumvent lawmakers’ refusal to reauthorize the GEC amid concerns it sought to censor Americans.
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