Rubio Nukes Obama-Era Agency That Funded Censorship Bureaucracy [WATCH]

The Trump administration has officially shuttered the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), an agency originally created to combat foreign propaganda but later accused of playing a role in suppressing domestic political speech.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the closure on Wednesday, citing ongoing concerns over taxpayer funding being used to target and silence American voices.

The move comes amid heightened scrutiny from Republican lawmakers and legal action involving allegations that the GEC facilitated censorship of conservative viewpoints online.

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“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,” Rubio said in a press release.

“This is antithetical to the very principles we should be upholding and inconceivable it was taking place in America.”

The GEC was established in 2016 under former President Barack Obama via executive order.

Its stated mission was to counter foreign terrorist propaganda, but it later expanded its operations to include working with entities that tracked and labeled domestic content deemed to be misinformation—particularly from right-leaning sources.

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Among the groups reportedly funded by the GEC was the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a UK-based organization that compiles “exclusion lists” to dissuade advertisers from placing ads on conservative media outlets.

Publications such as The Daily Wire and The Federalist were among those targeted.

These outlets later filed a lawsuit against the State Department in 2023, alleging that the agency’s actions violated the First Amendment and other federal laws.

“By 2020, it had grown into this movement of like actually going after individual American voices,” Rubio said during a broadcast interview Wednesday, reflecting on the agency’s evolution.

The GEC also reportedly collaborated with the Department of Homeland Security and private sector actors to monitor social media activity and flag content for removal—raising alarms among lawmakers and civil liberties advocates who viewed the program as a backdoor method of suppressing political speech.

Congress took a decisive step in December by excluding GEC funding from a key appropriations bill, effectively defunding the agency after mounting pressure from Republican members who objected to its activities.

“To the extent we’re spending money now, we are going to spend money on messaging,” Rubio said.

“It’s going to be pro-American messaging and it’s going to be incentivizing and protecting free speech, which is threatened all over the world.”

“The best way to counter disinformation is free speech,” he added.

WATCH:

Secretary Rubio’s live conversation with @MikeBenzCyber on dismantling the censorship bureaucracy at the State Department https://t.co/D45dpwBr4W

— Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) April 16, 2025

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