Despite the death, if perhaps temporary or illusory death, of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which had helped promote censorship of Americans for heretical political opinions, “The State Department still needs to combat Chinese and Russian lies” argue Mark Montgomery and Ivana Stradner (Washington Examiner, January 7, 2025).
The GEC’s death was a partisan affair, with House Republicans repeatedly blocking its reauthorization. The Republicans never expressed opposition to the GEC’s core mission—countering adversary lies overseas—but rather, they opposed the GEC’s execution of the mission. Republican lawmakers had a point when they criticized the GEC for contracting with a British firm, Global Disinformation Index, that unfairly labeled some U.S. conservative media as extremist. The Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky led reporting on this concern….
This contract was a bad look for the GEC. However, rather than deal with this problem head-on by acknowledging that “we screwed up and chose a contractual partner poorly,” the Biden administration avoided taking direct accountability for years.
The note about the partisanship of the affair is not well-taken; partisan breakdown of votes says nothing by itself about the reasonableness of a legislative action. In any case, Montgomery and Stradner seem to think that the effects of the State Department’s contract with Global Disinformation Index were the result of a big misunderstanding. “The GEC operated exclusively abroad and was not intended to restrict Americans’ free speech in any shape or form.”
Not quite
This disavowal doesn’t quite make sense, though, because the authors have just acknowledged that the GEC sent money to Global Disinformation Index, whose blacklisting of Biden-administration-disfavored media companies in the United States led to significant loss of advertising for those companies.
The authors have also just acknowledged that the Biden administration, known for much other urging of censorship as well, certainly didn’t reel in repentant horror when the GEC’s funding of the Index was exposed.
The authors continue:
These domestic controversies aside, the GEC’s work was increasingly effective abroad. Its wins include its integral role in exposing Russian and Chinese disinformation campaigns in Latin America, Africa, and Moldova, as well as a Russian operation that spread conspiracy theories about biological weapons. The GEC also issued comprehensive reports concerning Chinese disinformation efforts, assessing that China has invested billions of dollars in global information control via disinformation and propaganda. In January 2024, the GEC spearheaded a multi-country agreement to counter foreign state disinformation.
Yes, all that sort of thing is all to the good. The disinformation efforts of America’s foreign enemies should be countered.
America’s adversaries remain brazen in their lies about the U.S. overseas. Sadly, much of Washington just sits back and wrings its hands in frustration at these big, fat lies being told by our authoritarian adversaries, but the GEC was one of the few exceptions to this malaise. The GEC is dead, but the adversary’s malicious ambitions are not, and without the GEC, U.S. officials will have a gap in their ability to respond to international disinformation campaigns.
The incoming Congress and the Trump-Rubio team at the State Department must now work together quickly to rebuild the GEC’s capability under a new organization and with new leadership, but with the same broad intent—to combat the lies told overseas by Russia, China, and Iran about the U.S.
Okay. But the charter and mandate of any such new or new-ish department of the State Department must include a proviso that any such GEC 2.0 be unequivocally, unambiguously, absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly having anything to do with funding or otherwise fostering the inhibiting, censoring, and punishing of American discourse.
Answering the pro-totalitarian assertions of any pro-totalitarian Americans is another matter entirely. The line that a GEC 2.0 may not cross pertains to direct or delegated censorship; but of course it is okay to respond to falsehoods and lies uttered by Americans or anybody that serve the goals of enemies of the United States. Nobody is inalienably entitled to misinform or disinform others without being answered.
Is it really dead?
But does the Global Engagement Center need to be resurrected?
In a January 2, 2024 article, the Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky reported that although the State Department claims to have shut down the GEC because of congressional refusal to fund it, the Department had also advised Congress in early December 2024 that if the GEC’s funding, ended a year earlier, were not renewed, the State Department would reconstitute its function anyway.
According to the Department’s letter to congressmen: “Should the authority for the GEC not be extended, the [State Department] plans to realign 51 employees and associated funding from the GEC to a proposed Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub reporting to the Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy (R).”
Whatever the precise facts are, let Trump and Rubio get to the bottom of the matter. And let them make sure that any State Department office with the mission of answering foreign disinformation stick exclusively to that mission.
