Mike Johnson’s Omnibus Resuscitates State Department Group That Censored The Federalist
A State Department group engaged in censoring conservatives online was set to be shut down in only a few days, but House Republicans wrested defeat from the jaws of victory by extending the office’s authorization for another year in an omnibus spending package disguised as a “continuing resolution.”
Hidden in a one-paragraph item on the 139th page of the gargantuan 1,547-page pork-barrel bill is a one-year extension of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), originally a counterterrorism tool that has been used to help Big Tech companies engage in industrial-scale censorship.
The move comes almost immediately after the censorship office was snubbed in the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and the State Department informed Congress its intention to shutter the office by Dec. 24 after intense scrutiny. That means House Republicans, many of whom have claimed to be up-in-arms about the federal censorship, actively found a work-around to keep the office alive for one more year by amending the 2017 NDAA’s language.
In a statement to the Washington Examiner earlier this month, the State Department said of the GEC that is “remains hopeful that Congress extends this important mandate through other means before the Dec. 24th termination date.” It appears House Republicans bent over backwards to ensure that happened.
The subagency is named as a defendant in a lawsuit brought by The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas which describes the GEC as “one of the most audacious, manipulative, secretive, and gravest abuses of power and infringements of First Amendment rights by the federal government in American history.”
The lawsuit argues that the State Department is using a counterterrorism tool, ostensibly intended to fight foreign “disinformation,” to instead censor Americans from speech that is not politically expedient to the regime and the know-it-all bureaucrats in permanent D.C.
GEC-funded grants gave organizations like the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and NewsGuard (both of which have specifically targeted The Federalist and The Daily Wire) the ability to alter the news and information landscape in the United States, working against almost exclusively conservative outlets to ensure the American people could not hear perspectives different from the state-approved stenography conducted by corporate media outlets.
As the lawsuit states, the State Department “is actively intervening in the news-media market to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press.”
As The Federalist’s Joy Pullmann wrote, despite the fact that federal censorship of Americans is both illegal and unconstitutional, the GEC funded the development of hundreds of “disinformation” tools designed to scrub the internet for information deemed politically inexpedient by the regime. It awards money based on the effectiveness of the censorship.
The State Department then turns around and provides the tools to Big Tech companies with the intention of having them downgrade or blacklist certain information and outlets, or actively fight against it using subjective “fact-checking technologies, media literacy tools, media intelligence platforms, social network mapping, and machine learning/artificial intelligence technology,” as the lawsuit states.
The tools then rate outlets based on how much they comply with regime messaging, and use that ratings system to pressure major companies from advertising on their websites, effectively starving them of the revenue needed to function and compete with regime-approved outlets.
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
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