Margot Cleveland, senior legal correspondent for The Federalist, shared a case development notice from the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Texas. Cleveland is a named plaintiff in The Daily Wire v. United States Department of State. According to the notice, the named State Department agency, the so-called “Global Engagement Center” (GEC), is set to terminate on December 23, 2024. Such a lovely Christmas gift to the American people.
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According to the notice, the department will be shuttered and defunded and will “realign the Center’s staff and funding to other Department offices and bureaus for foreign information manipulation and interference activities in the event that the termination is not extended.”
🚨🚨🚨BREAKING: State Department provides notice to Congress of shuttering of Global Engagement Center or “GEC” and reassignment of employees. 1/ pic.twitter.com/ptLHNiwIDq
— Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) December 10, 2024
From the above notification, in part:
This lawsuit challenges programs administered by the State Department’s Global Center (GEC). Sec ECF No. 1 ¶1; ECF No. 53 at 2. GEC’s statutory authority contains a sunset provision by which, absent further action from Congress, it will terminate two weeks from today—on December 23, 2024. See Section 1287(i) of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017 (22 USC § 2656 note) (“Termination.—The Center shall terminate on the date that is 8 years after the date of the enactment of this Act [Dec. 23, 2016].”) Congress has not extended the termination of the GEC thus far, and it is Defendants’ understanding that reauthorization is unlikely to occur.
This is one department that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) won’t have to do the heavy lifting for. Let it go gently into that good night. Of course, its acting deputy coordinator has been making the rounds before Thanksgiving, touting how critical this department is to national security and the information technology space.
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As the Global Engagement Center faces potential elimination, a leader within the State Department’s foreign disinformation-fighting unit is emphasizing the success that it’s had using technology to combat disinformation created by foreign actors and spread outside the United States.
The agency will lose its funding at the end of the year without congressional intervention.
In an interview with Scoop News Group, Carrie Goux, an acting deputy coordinator who helps lead the Global Engagement Center, said that her team plays a critical role in the foreign information space — and that the government needs to understand the emerging technology’s place it. The Global Engagement Center has repeatedly emphasized that its work does not focus on Americans or the United States.
“We need to continue to invest in our ability to understand the information space, to use emerging technologies, [and] to understand how emerging technologies are being used,” Goux said. “That means we need to have the technical expertise to do that and to have the technical solutions to do that. This is only moving faster, and it’s not going away.”
As The Daily Wire lawsuit pointed out, “the U.S. Department of State acting through its Global Engagement Center is violating the First Amendment by ‘actively intervening in the news media market to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable.’”
The complaint detailed instances where the GEC “funded, promoted, and marketed censorship technologies that suppressed the Media Plaintiffs’ speech and limited the distribution of their reporting.”
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This lawsuit, as well as other complaints lodged since former President Barack Obama signed an executive order to implement this arm of the U.S. Department of State, belies Goux’s claims that “its work does not focus on Americans or the United States.”
Investigative journalist Matt Taibi debunked this as well in his Twitter files coverage.
10. GEC’s mandate: “To recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign… disinformation.”
On the surface, it’s the same mission the United States Information Agency (USIA) fulfilled for decades, with a catch. USIA focused on foreign “disinfo.”
GEC’s focus is wider. pic.twitter.com/upfxHqGjQ5
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 2, 2023
9. The Global Engagement Center is usually listed as a State Department entity. It’s not. Created in Obama’s last year, GEC is an interagency group “within” State, whose initial partners included FBI, DHS, NSA, CIA, DARPA, Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and others.
10. GEC’s mandate: “To recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign… disinformation.”
On the surface, it’s the same mission the United States Information Agency (USIA) fulfilled for decades, with a catch. USIA focused on foreign “disinfo.”
GEC’s focus is wider.
Taibi further laid out:
“It’s an incubator for the domestic disinformation complex,” says a former intelligence source. “All the shit we pulled in other countries since the Cold War, some morons decided to bring home.”
Its most recent incarnation is all these government disinformation pushes, like “Scary Poppins” Nina Jankowicz and her failed Government Disinformation Board. The death of this department would destroy the seeds for anything like this in the future, not to mention cut off the funding used for it. Then there are those employees, but hopefully, Secretary of State nominee (please, God) Florida Sen. Marco Rubio will ship them someplace appropriate — like Alaska or Greenland.
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Let’s hope Congress doesn’t pull a Hail Mary and try to save this poisonous injection against free speech, especially since it is not even a legislatively established arm of the State Department. If Congress allowed more of these grand ideas to die a rightful death (think the Patriot Act), we probably would not be in the financial pickle we are in or have a need for an Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to show us how to get out of it.
