by WorldTribune Staff / 247 Real News April 16, 2025

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday announced the closure of the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) office, which critics contended had become a bastion of censorship.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio

Created at the end of 2024, the R/FIMI was spawned from the Global Engagement Center (GEC), which was allegedly established to fight so-called foreign “disinformation.”

In 2023, Elon Musk called the GEC the “worst offender in U.S. government censorship [and] media manipulation” and a “threat to our democracy.”

“Freedom of speech and expression have been a cornerstone of what it means to be an American citizen. For centuries, the United States served as a beacon of hope for millions of people around the world. Over the last decade though, individuals in America have been slandered, fired, charged, and even jailed for simply voicing their opinions,” Rubio said, adding it is “not an America our Founding Fathers would recognize.”

Rubio noted that, under the Biden-Harris regime, the R/FIMI, 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. This is antithetical to the very principals we should be upholding and inconceivable it was taking place in America.”

Rubio continued: “That ends today. Under the administration of President Trump, we will always work to protect the rights of the American people, and this is an important step in continuing to fulfill that commitment.”

GEC had its roots as the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC), created by an Obama-era executive order. In 2016, it became the Global Engagement Center. The GEC was shut down last December after a measure to reauthorize its $61 million budget was blocked by Republicans in Congress, who said it was assisting Big Tech in censoring American conservative voices.

After Congress zeroed out the GEC’s funding at the end of last year, the Biden-Harris regime restructured it, placing its approximately 50 employees under the authority of the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office.

Rubio, in an interview Tuesday, said that he wanted to “go back and prove” that the GEC’s work led to individual Americans being deplatformed from social media sites.

“If we could somehow with internal review, create a linkage between some information that came from something the State Department paid for, and an actual aggrieved party, that’s what’s important,” he said.

“We didn’t want to wait for that to take action. We know enough to already act, but we obviously want to know the depth and the scope of this. That’s going to happen.”

Support Free Press Foundation

  Rubio shuts down State Department’s ‘disinformation’ center, WorldTribune.com