Big Brother is no longer watching Americans from Foggy Bottom. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday announced “the closure of the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI), formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC),” an office which “spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.”

The State Department censorship office had “cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year,” according to the agency. It placed all 30 full-time staff on leave, eliminated all 50 full-time positions, and notified Congress of R/FIMI’s dissolution, with total savings of $65 million annually.

“GEC was supposed to be dead already,” Rubio declared in an op-ed for The Federalist. As TWS previously reported, the legislative authority for GEC expired on December 23, 2024, after the Republican-controlled House of Representatives “declined to enact several proposals to extend the GEC’s mandate,” according to the Congressional Research Service obituary.

Instead, the Biden administration merely staged a funeral and put the censorship apparatus into hiding. “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,” Rubio related. “Today, we are putting that to an end. Whatever name it goes by, GEC is dead. It will not return.”

President Barack Obama first “directed the Secretary of State to establish the GEC by executive Order” in March 2016 “to carry out U.S.-government-sponsored counterterrorism communications to foreign publics.” Congress later expanded that mission to include “counter[ing] foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts,” as well as leading and coordinating inter-agency counter-propaganda efforts.

Progressive operatives lurking in the bureaucracy twisted this mission into a license to suppress any domestic political speech they disliked, even before the Biden administration made it official policy. Rather than censor Americans’ speech directly, which would raise obvious First Amendment concerns, GEC and other federal agencies “effectively outsourced to the newly emerging censorship-industrial complex” to private proxies, according to a report published by the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government — as if that made the First Amendment problems go away.

Through a so-called Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), the GEC collaborated with private institutions to “monitor and censor Americans’ online speech in advance of the 2020 presidential election,” the report continued.

“Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation requests from every corner of government, from the FBI, the DHS, the HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA,” testified journalist Matt Taibbi, after reporting on the Twitter files. “For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same thing, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, NewsGuard, the Global Disinformation Index, and many others — many taxpayer-funded.”

In fact, the GEC was responsible for much of that taxpayer funding, a U.S. House Committee on Small Business (HCSB) report found, providing start-up capital through a murky sub-award to NewsGuard, an American tech company that rates the trustworthiness of news outlets with a manifestly leftward bias. The HCSB report concluded that the GEC had “circumvented its strict international mandate by funding, developing, then promoting tech start-ups and other small businesses in the disinformation detection space to private sector entities with domestic censorship capabilities.”

But the GEC had problems beyond its ravenous appetite to censor domestic speech. A 2022 inspection by the State Department Office of the Inspector General (OIG) faulted the GEC for a poor internal structure, conflict with other units within the State Department, and competition with “counter-disinformation efforts housed in other government agencies” that did a better job of executing what should have been its main mission: countering propaganda from hostile foreign actors.

The problems with the GEC weren’t going to disappear simply by changing the office’s name. “Over the last decade, Americans have been slandered, fired, charged, and even jailed for simply voicing their opinions,” wrote Rubio. “That ends today.” Thus, for the second time in four months, the State Department has declared an end to its office engaging in domestic censorship. This time, it seems that the GEC is dead for good.