Monday, 21 July 2025

Rubio Shuts Down State Dept. Disinfo Office


Secretary of State Marco Rubio just pulled the plug on the State Department’s foreign disinfo department.

Forty staffers were put on paid leave.

The office silenced Americans under the guise of ‘stopping propaganda’ but those days are over.

Rubio’s message is clear, censorship doesn’t belong here in America.

And he went on to post this on X:

Over the last decade, Americans have been slandered, fired, charged, and even jailed for simply voicing their opinions.

That ends today.

I am announcing the closure of the
@StateDept’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, formerly the Global Engagement Center (GEC), which cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year and actively silenced and censored the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.

New York Times reports:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his aides shut down a State Department office on Wednesday that tracks and counters global disinformation from foreign actors, including the governments of China, Russia and Iran, U.S. officials said.

The closing of the office, the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub, had been in the works for weeks. Mr. Rubio put all 40 or so of its employees on paid leave on Wednesday morning, the first step in firing them this spring. The State Department fired about 80 contractors working for the office in March and cut almost all contracts related to its work.

The office had been tracking disinformation campaigns by rival powers of the United States, as well as terrorist groups, and publishing reports on them. Some Republican lawmakers in recent years have accused federal employees and nongovernment experts working on tracking disinformation of trying to stifle the views of right-wing political groups around the world and trying to coordinate with social media companies to do so. Russian disinformation often circulates in far-right online channels.

Mr. Rubio released a statement before noon on Wednesday announcing the closure, saying that the office and its precursor in the Biden administration had “spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.” Mr. Rubio did not present any evidence to support the claim.

James P. Rubin, a former State Department official who ran the precursor to the office in the Biden administration, pushed back on the move to shutter the operation.

“This amounts to a form of unilateral disarmament in the information warfare Russia and China are conducting all over the world,” he said on Wednesday.

Truth is finally breaking out and won’t be silenced.

This is a huge win!

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport.

View the original article here.


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