Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Wednesday that he’s going above and beyond to continue protecting the free speech of every citizen in the United States — something that State Department wasn’t doing previously. As a matter of fact, the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) had “actively silenced and censored the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving” — particularly conservatives — and we were paying at least $50 million per year for it to do so.
But Rubio has now shut it down, placing 30 full-time staff members on leave, eliminating all 50 full-time staff positions, and letting Congress know that it no longer exists, so there’s no need to keep pumping taxpayer dollars into it. According to the MIT Technology Review, “…employees at R/FIMI received an email, inviting them to an 11:15AM meeting with [Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Darren] Beattie, where employees were told that the office and their jobs have been eliminated.”
Rubio issued the following statement on “Protecting and Championing Free Speech at the State Department”:
Freedom of speech and expression have been a cornerstone of what it means to be an American citizen. For centuries, the United States served as a beacon of hope for millions of people around the world. Over the last decade though, individuals in America have been slandered, fired, charged, and even jailed for simply voicing their opinions.
That is not an America our Founding Fathers would recognize.
It is the responsibility of every government official to continuously work to preserve and protect the freedom for Americans to exercise their free speech. That is why today I am announcing the closure of the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI), formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC). 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. This is antithetical to the very principals we should be upholding and inconceivable it was taking place in America.
That ends today. Under the administration of President Trump, we will always work to protect the rights of the American people, and this is an important step in continuing to fulfill that commitment.
He also posted the following on X:
Over the last decade, Americans have been slandered, fired, charged, and even jailed for simply voicing their opinions.
That ends today.
I am announcing the closure of the @StateDept‘s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, formerly the Global Engagement… https://t.co/ucdBPmPJC1
— Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) April 16, 2025
Back in 2023, Elon Musk called the office “the worst offender in U.S. government censorship media manipulation,” as well as a “threat to our democracy.”
Its backstory is what Rubio calls the “pernicious way Washington turns laudable public goals into a means of entrenching its own power and rolling back the freedom of regular Americans.” It began in 2011 as “the Center for Strategic Counter Terrorism Communications (CSCC). CSCC’s purpose was to monitor the narratives of Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations and advise the American government on what counterterrorist narratives to use in response.”
According to The Hill, the CSCC became the Global Engagement Center (GEC) under Barack Obama to “counter foreign propaganda at the height of recruiting efforts by the terrorist group the Islamic State. Congress later expanded its authority to address Russian disinformation campaigns.” However, Rubio says that Obama also began “stripping away the explicit focus on international terrorism.” He added that in 2016, its mission under the leadership of Rick Stengel became to cover “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.”
Here’s more (this part will make your blood boil):
In 2019, Stengel directly equated President Trump’s campaign with foreign and terrorist propaganda, writing, ‘Trump employed the same techniques of disinformation as the Russians and much the same scare tactics as ISIS.’ That same year, Stengel wrote an entire article about ‘why America needs a hate speech law.’
‘I’m not against propaganda,’ Stengel once said. ‘Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population, and I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.’
All too many abuses of trust that occurred at the GEC seemed to reflect Stengel’s dark founding vision.
In 2020, a coronavirus from a Chinese lab swept the globe, and GEC popped up with a report warning that a ‘Russian disinformation apparatus’ was behind public speculation that the virus was an ‘engineered bioweapon’ or that it existed due to ‘research conducted at the Wuhan institute.’ GEC tarred not only specific claims as foreign propaganda but also specific users. It created lists of thousands of accounts that were accused of being foreign propaganda vectors simply for sharing articles or even following certain accounts. These lists were sent to social media companies for ‘review,’ but nobody was fooled — the purpose of this was to pressure private companies in the direction of more censorship and less free speech.
GEC was an enthusiastic participant in the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), an infamous group established under constitutionally questionable conditions to monitor ‘disinformation’ about the 2020 election. The EIP pretty much exclusively singled out accounts and narratives associated with President Trump and his supporters and, in fact, directly flagged President Trump’s tweets, along with his family members and friends of the administration.
In 2024, Republicans in Congress actually shut the GEC down, stripping it of its funding, but the Joe Biden administration restructured it to form the R/FIMI. In an op-ed in the Federalist on Wednesday (that I highly recommend everyone read in its entirety), Rubio wrote:
GEC was supposed to be dead already. But, as many have learned the hard way, in Washington, D.C., few things ever truly die. When Republicans in Congress sunset GEC’s funding at the end of last year, the Biden State Department simply slapped on a new name. The GEC became the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R-FIMI) office, with the same roster of employees. With this new name, they hoped to survive the transition to the new administration.
Today, we are putting that to an end. Whatever name it goes by, GEC is dead. It will not return.
He ends the piece by doubling down on Donald Trump’s commitment to the core values that make the United States great, and I know we use the phrase a lot, but this is exactly what I voted for and would vote for again a million times over:
The Trump administration rejects this anti-American attitude. The American people don’t need an obscure agency to ‘protect’ them from lies by pressuring X to ban users or trying to put The Federalist out of business. This administration will fight false narratives with true narratives, not with heavy-handed threats decreeing that only one ‘truth’ be visible online.
Finally, as we recommit this country to its core constitutional free speech principles at home, we will remain vigilant abroad — not just against threats from adversaries such as Communist China but also from less expected countries where authoritarian censorship is gradually strangling true freedom of speech. We are not afraid. At her birth, America was a lone beacon of freedom to the world. If necessary, we will happily be that lone beacon once again.
We’re on a new journey here at PJ Media, and we hope you’ll join us as a VIP member as we team up with Donald Trump Jr., Lara Trump, and MxM News.
Not only do you support us and help keep running, but gain some perks for you too when you sign up. I know you’re thinking it’s going to be expensive, but right now, it’s only $1.63 a month or less than $20 for an entire year of access.
Click this link to sign up today, and use the code word FIGHT to make sure you get the best price. We can’t wait for you to join us!
