The Trump administration has shut down the U.S. State Department's Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, also known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC).
Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted that under the Biden administration, the office, previously within the Bureau of Global Public Affairs, cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year.
In a statement on Wednesday, Rubio said in the last decade, individuals in the United States were slandered, fired, charged, and jailed for voicing their opinions, against the wishes of “our Founding Fathers.”
Rubio accused the previous U.S. government of spending “millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.”
“This is antithetical to the very principles we should be upholding and inconceivable it was taking place in America. That ends today,” he declared.
Rubio said under the leadership of President Donald Trump, the administration will continually work to safeguard as portrayed in the “important step” of GEC elimination.
It is every government official's responsibility to work to preserve and protect the freedom for Americans to exercise their free speech, the Secretary of State asserted.
The GEC, tasked with countering foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts, faced opposition from Republicans, including lawmakers, who accused the agency of censoring conservative voices.
The work of the Global Engagement Center, however, had the support of the U.S. Congress as well as the State Department during President Joe Biden's tenure.
In a post on X, ex-State Department spokesman Ned Price said the Trump administration's action “is a deeply misleading and unserious portrayal of an organization focused on identifying foreign — primarily Russian — disinformation ops.”
