Shuttering of State office leaves US largely defenseless against foreign influence warfare, officials say

A small office in the State Department tasked with monitoring foreign disinformation threats was shuttered Wednesday by the Trump administration, the latest in a series of steps the White House has taken since January to dismantle entities that monitor foreign influence and information campaigns, or respond to them. As that effort continues, experts say, the United States and audiences around the world could be left virtually defenseless against increasing Chinese and Russian efforts to turn global populations against the United States. 

But that’s not how the administration sees it. “Over the last decade, Americans have been slandered, fired, charged, and even jailed for simply voicing their opinions. That ends today,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted to X Wednesday in an announcement about the closure of the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference hub, known as R/Fimi. 

R/Fimi was a remnant of the Global Engagement Center, which was created in 2016 by the Obama administration to counter Russian disinformation efforts. Rubio said the GEC “actively silenced and censored the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving,” a claim that officials at the Global Engagement Center have denied and for which there is no evidence. 

The closure is only the latest move in a pattern that has been building for months. In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered the dissolution of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force—the unit dedicated to investigating foreign disinformation and influence campaigns (including election interference), claiming the closure would “free resources to address more pressing priorities, and end risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion.” Trump himself often pushes the same narrative—that disinformation monitors unfairly target conservative voices in the United States. But former officials likened the move to taking a “cop off the beat.”

The same month, the White House cut the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to monitor foreign disinformation and protect election infrastructure, placing officials tasked with disinformation tracking and election security at CISA on administrative leave, despite widespread and well-documented foreign interference attempts in the 2024 election. 

CISA will survive. But the closure of the GEC (and subsequently R/Fimi) could mean the permanent loss of U.S. capability to counter adversarial foreign influence campaigns targeting U.S. interests around the globe, including the U.S. military. 

But GEC was an easy target.

Flawed from the start  

Both parties—and the Obama administration that established it—deserve some of the blame for the GEC closing, according to two sources who were involved in getting it up and running. 

President Barack Obama created the Global Engagement Center via an executive order in March 2016, at a time when the U.S. government was struggling to combat ISIS’s robust use of social media to find recruits and gain support online.

The following year, Congress voted to formally establish it as a permanent entity within the State Department. The year after that, in response to the Russian campaign to influence the 2016 election, Congress broadened the center’s mandate to include “counter[ing] foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.”

A congressional staffer involved in the legislative effort to formalize the GEC and a former senior Defense Department official who also played a role in its formation told Defense One  the decision to establish it within the State Department was a fatal error that hurt the center’s effectiveness. 

Had it been established as part of the National Security Council, they said, at the White House level, it could have coordinated actions and resources to counter foreign influence across the government. But at State, at the relatively low assistant secretary level, the Center was an unloved stepchild, with no authority over any of the bureaus. So if the GEC wanted to support a campaign within a certain country, it had to get permission from one of the country teams, which have their own agendas and concerns. 

“It was obviously being stood up at the end of the Obama administration, and then the Trump administration obviously was not at all interested in empowering or enabling an organization like that,” the congressional staffer said. And the Biden Administration did little to expand it, they said, keeping it primarily focused on things like research. 

So the GEC was far less effective than it could have been, due to lack of authority to carry out its mission, lack of budget, and not being structured well, according to those who helped establish it.

However, Trump allies like Elon Musk characterize the GEC as a hugely powerful organization, “the worst offender” in censoring American speech.

There is no evidence to support claims that the organization puts pressure on social media companies to delete or suppress conservative speech. But the idea may have come from the GEC awarding grants to disinformation monitoring groups like Graphika, which writes reports on foreign actors pushing deceptive stories through social media, the staffer said.

The level of outrage at a disinformation monitoring office speaks to a fundamental change in American politics. Historically, both parties recognized the value of calling out foreign attempts to influence the U.S. public through disinformation. Consider the 2019 bi-partisan Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian information tactics during the 2016 election, a report released under then-Committee Chair Rubio. 

Russia has waged disinformation campaigns against both the American political left and the political right. But concerns about those efforts are no longer shared equally across party lines. Russian influence campaigning—including discredited conspiracies about bioweapons labs in Ukraine, false corruption accusations against members of the Biden family, the downplaying of Russian involvement in the 2016 election, and the discrediting of the legitimate results of the 2020 election—have found a new home on the right. 

The Department of Justice in December found that Russia was paying several rightwing influencers who repeated many of the false claims—and members of the Trump administration, including President Trump himself, have repeated them as well. That has blurred the line between foreign information warfare and legitimate political speech, which, of course, is exactly what such campaigns are designed to do. 

“We’ve allowed this transition where now the identification of misinformation is censorship,” the congressional staffer said.

What are the implications of this shift? A poll out this week from journalist watchdog group NewsGuard and survey company YouGov found that almost a third of Americans now believe at least one false claim directly attributed to Russian state media outlets. 

The silencing of America’s voice

The Trump administration has also taken other steps that will allow Russian, Chinese and other information campaigns to gain market share and broader influence around the world, which could make operations more difficult for the U.S. military in places like Africa and South America.

In February, President Trump ordered USAID to be shut down, after a funding freeze. Staff were laid off or reassigned en masse and USAID’s functions were dismantled, under the guidance of Musk and the White House efficiency task force, DOGE.

The administration justified the rollback by alleging rampant waste and corruption in its programs. ​ 

The group Reporters Without Borders, citing an internal USAID memo, found that in 2023, the agency helped pay for the training of 6,200 journalists, helped fund 707 independent news outlets, and supported 279 civil society organizations focused on strengthening independent journalism. And government officials who spoke to Defense One in February said the beneficiaries of the U.S. retreat from funding independent media and journalism would be Russian and Chinese efforts globally to entrench themselves in local politics around the world.

U.S. military operations may also be adversely affected by China’s and Russia’s growing influence, as they were in Niger in 2023 when a Russian campaign helped install a new, anti-democratic government that expelled the U.S. from a key base, as AFRICOM Commander Gen. Michael Langley testified in March 2024. 

Then, last month, Trump took direct aim at the U.S.-funded international broadcasters—including Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Asia, signing an executive order to “reduce” the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the independent agency overseeing those outlets. 

RFE/RL’s president condemned the cut as “a massive gift to America’s enemies,” noting that authoritarian regimes in Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran would “celebrate the demise” of these outlets that had challenged their state propaganda for decades. 

Indeed, Chinese and Russian state media openly cheered the news. The Chinese state-run Global Times crowed that VOA was “discarded by its own government like a dirty rag.” And RT’s editor exclaimed, “America did [to VOA/RFE] what we couldn’t do ourselves.”

Turning a blind eye to the world

The White House has not only shuttered groups and offices that track disinformation. They’ve also shut down Defense Department entities that collect and analyze information about populations around the globe, a critical component of influence campaigning. 

Shortly after Pete Hegseth became secretary of defense, the Pentagon moved to eliminate its social science research programs. Chief among them is the Minerva Research Initiative, which is tasked with helping military leaders understand the “social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the U.S.” In other words, what makes people globally more (or less) prone to conflict or amenable to U.S. diplomatic efforts. 

In late February, the Pentagon notified academic grant recipients that Minerva-funded projects were being terminated mid-stream, and a planned new cycle of Minerva grants was canceled outright​. A formal announcement came March 10, when the Pentagon confirmed it was scrapping 91 social science studies—including the entire Minerva Initiative—as part of a cost-saving purge. Hegseth explained the rationale in a post on X: “The Department of Defense does not do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting.”

But a researcher who worked with Minevera told Defense One that one effect of closing the initiative will be a less-informed U.S. national security apparatus. That will also have a direct effect on future U.S. efforts to persuade populations to trust U.S. military forces or the United States in general, and will mean further erosion of U.S. diplomatic efforts globally, the researcher said. 

“There’s a lot of ways of counteracting effective Russian and Chinese operations, but you need the social science to figure out what actually persuades people in this world.”

Without this view into the primary drivers of populations around the world, the United States is more likely to find itself again in drawn-out, less winnable conflicts due to flawed assumptions about the willingness to fight, or not fight, U.S. interests, the researcher said.

“This is the reason we lose big wars,” they said.

Defense One