Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Wednesday that the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) is officially shutting down. The decision ends nearly a decade of operations for an agency that has become infamous for aiding censorship of conservative viewpoints under the guise of combating disinformation.
“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 statement. “This is antithetical to the very principles we should be upholding and inconceivable it was taking place in America.”
The GEC was originally created by former President Barack Obama in 2016 through executive order. Its stated mission was to fight terrorist propaganda. But under Democrat leadership, the agency quietly shifted its focus toward funding third-party organizations that labeled right-leaning outlets as “disinformation” and encouraged tech platforms to marginalize or demonetize them.
One of those groups was the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a Europe-based nonprofit that assembled blacklists of conservative websites—including The Daily Wire and The Federalist—and lobbied for their content to be suppressed. The State Department funded GDI through GEC, prompting lawsuits from affected outlets in 2023 for violating the First Amendment and federal law.
Rubio made it clear that this kind of government-sponsored censorship is coming to an end. “The best way to counter disinformation is free speech,” he said. “To the extent we’re spending money now, we are going to spend money on messaging. 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 Daily Caller News Foundation reported that Congress had already moved to defund the GEC in December by excluding it from a year-end spending bill. Republican lawmakers had raised alarms over the agency’s role in suppressing political dissent under the label of foreign influence monitoring.
The center’s involvement with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) also drew fire. GEC reportedly worked with DHS and private groups to track social media posts and flag them for takedown if deemed misleading or harmful—often targeting American citizens and conservative platforms.
“By 2020, it had grown into this movement of like actually going after individual American voices,” Rubio said in a broadcast interview.
Despite operating in the shadows for years, GEC’s influence helped fuel what many Republicans now refer to as the “censorship-industrial complex”—a web of bureaucrats, nonprofits, and tech platforms working in tandem to silence dissenting opinions. Rubio’s announcement marks a major reversal of that trajectory and a renewed focus on constitutional freedoms.
This move comes as the Trump administration continues to dismantle legacy programs from the Obama-Biden era that abused federal resources to target political opposition. While Democrats pushed narratives about foreign propaganda and election interference, government-backed organizations were undermining free speech at home.
Rubio made it clear that this administration will not tolerate the suppression of American voices in the name of fighting misinformation. “This administration believes in empowering the American people with information—not policing what they’re allowed to hear.”
By shutting down the GEC, the Trump administration is restoring basic constitutional boundaries and making it clear that the federal government will no longer fund efforts to blacklist conservative thought.
This is what leadership looks like—defending the First Amendment, draining the bureaucracy, and holding the system accountable. And for Americans tired of being silenced, it’s a long overdue victory.
