REPORT: State Department’s ‘Global Engagement Center’ accused of censoring Americans closes… but is it really gone?

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From Fox News: The State Department’s foreign disinformation center, accused by conservatives of censoring U.S. citizens, shut its doors due to lack of funding this week.

Elon Musk had deemed the Global Engagement Center (GEC), established in 2016, the “worst offender in U.S. government censorship & media manipulation,” and its funding was stripped as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the Pentagon’s yearly policy bill.

“The Global Engagement Center will terminate by operation of law [by the end of the day] on December 23, 2024,” a State Department spokesperson said in a statement. “The Department of State has consulted with Congress regarding next steps.”

Lawmakers had originally included funding for the GEC in its continuing resolution (CR), or bill to fund the government beyond a Friday deadline. But conservatives balked at that iteration of the funding bill, and it was rewritten without money for the GEC and other funding riders.

The agency had a budget of around $61 million and 120 people on staff.

A message posted on the X account for the now-closed agency reads, “This account is no longer in use as of 12/23/2024. For updates on the U.S. Department of State, please follow @StateDept.”

On December 23, journalist Gabe Kaminsky, who has led the charge in exposing the State Department’s censorship program, announced that although the agency is closing, its staff is simply being scattered out into other government agencies.

Kaminsky wrote:

Today, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center is officially set to terminate eight years after it was authorized during the Obama administration.

The GEC, which almost earned a lifeline under the first CR version, is already scattering its employees to other agencies after congressional subpoenas and lawsuits targeting its funding of entities aiming to thwart alleged disinformation in the U.S., despite the GEC’s mandate to act internationally.

GEC funded the Global Disinformation Index, as I reported, and was involved with the 2020 Election Integrity Partnership pressuring social media platforms to remove content before the 2020 presidential election

As @mtaibbi reported, GEC stayed in close contact w/ Twitter and asked it to remove accounts it believed were linked to foreign adversaries, though were, in many cases, managed by people in the U.S.

The House Judiciary Committee under @Jim_Jordan unearthed documents showing GEC’s involvement with the Department of Homeland Security’s CISA to create the Election Integrity Partnership with Stanford University.

Last year, ‘Twitter Files’ journalist Matt Taibbi explained the vast web of connections. He wrote:

The Global Engagement Center is usually listed as a State Department entity.
It’s not.

Created in Obama’s last year, GEC is an interagency group “within” State, whose initial partners included FBI, DHS, NSA, CIA, DARPA, Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and others.

Earlier this month, Mike Benz, a former State Department official who has been sounding the alarm over the GEC, also warned that even if Republicans defund and eliminate the government’s Global Engagement Center, it’s operatives will not just go away, but will try to embed the program into many other departments and programs, including ‘think tank’ organizations.

He warned that it’s going to be a long fight to get rid of the censorship program that is attacking conservative news organizations.

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