The Biden administration built a sprawling apparatus to control what Americans could say online.
One Trump Cabinet official just dismantled a key piece of that machine.
And Marco Rubio made one move that left the censorship machine in ruins.
Secretary Rubio terminates State Department censorship operation
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced in April that he permanently shut down the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office.¹
The agency operated under the name Global Engagement Center until December 2024.²
“Under the previous administration, this office, 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,” Rubio stated.³
The GEC was created through executive order by Barack Obama in 2016.⁴
Obama claimed it would counter “foreign propaganda” and terrorist messaging.
But the agency quickly morphed into something far different.
The 2017 National Defense Authorization Act expanded the GEC’s mission to combat “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.”⁵
That vague language gave the agency cover to target domestic speech.
The GEC funneled millions in taxpayer dollars to left-wing organizations that flagged conservative media outlets and American citizens for censorship.⁶
How the censorship machine actually worked
The GEC partnered with groups like the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and the Election Integrity Partnership.⁷
These organizations created lists of social media accounts they claimed spread “disinformation.”
Journalist Matt Taibbi exposed how the system worked when he revealed the Twitter Files.
The GEC and its partners sent Twitter lists of accounts engaged in what they called “state-backed coordinated manipulation.”⁸
Twitter employees who reviewed the lists found they were sloppy and included multiple American citizens with no connection to any foreign entity.⁹
The GEC also funded the Global Disinformation Index, which ranked conservative outlets like The Federalist and New York Post as the most likely to spread disinformation.¹⁰
Left-wing outlets like HuffPost and ProPublica received the opposite rating.
The real goal wasn’t stopping Russian bots.
It was creating an international censorship pipeline where American speech could be flagged by a “partner” in Europe or Asia, then filtered back to U.S. tech companies.¹¹
This gave the State Department plausible deniability while shaping online discourse without constitutional constraints.
The GEC worked alongside the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Department of Homeland Security to suppress speech that contradicted the regime’s preferred narratives.¹²
During COVID-19, the GEC targeted anyone questioning vaccine mandates or suggesting the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab.¹³
Those conspiracy theories turned out to be true.
But the GEC flagged Americans discussing them anyway.
Rubio’s surgical strike against the Deep State
Republican lawmakers tried for years to defund the GEC.
Congress finally let the agency’s authorization expire in December 2024.¹⁴
But Biden bureaucrats tried to keep the censorship operation alive by reorganizing it as the R/FIMI office.
That’s where Rubio came in.
Sources told Conservative Treehouse that Rubio’s team cut off the agency’s funding, moved staff to other departments, and terminated its operations.¹⁵
Rather than making public announcements, they opted for a surgical approach.
They quietly dismantled the machinery piece by piece.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, along with The Daily Wire and The Federalist, sued the State Department earlier this year.¹⁶
The lawsuit accused the GEC of conspiring to “censor, deplatform and demonetize” conservative media outlets.
“Congress authorized the creation of the Global Engagement Center expressly to counter foreign propaganda and misinformation,” the Texas Attorney General’s Office stated. “Instead, the agency weaponized this authority to violate the First Amendment and suppress Americans’ constitutionally-protected speech.”¹⁷
A 2022 State Department Inspector General report found the GEC relied too heavily on contractors and lacked clear lines of authority.¹⁸
The report revealed the agency operated in a support role rather than leading counter-disinformation efforts as Congress mandated.
But the IG still concluded the GEC was “generally effective” at its real mission of funding censorship partners.
The broader implications for free speech
Rubio’s dismantling of the GEC marked the first serious rollback of what critics call the “Censorship Industrial Complex.”
The closure removes one key node in a network that includes CISA, academic programs like Stanford’s Internet Observatory, and foreign government partners.
Democrats and former national security officials claimed shutting down the GEC leaves America vulnerable to foreign disinformation.
That’s nonsense.
The agency spent years targeting domestic speech while doing little to counter actual foreign propaganda.
U.S. Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Chris Murphy sent Rubio a letter warning that making the GEC’s files public could lead to harassment of staff and partners.¹⁹
Translation: they’re worried Americans will find out exactly which citizens the government targeted for censorship.
Rubio wrote in The Federalist that “the American people don’t need an obscure agency to ‘protect’ them from lies by pressuring X to ban users or trying to put The Federalist out of business.”²⁰
President Trump vowed during his campaign to dismantle the censorship apparatus built under Biden.
Rubio delivered on that promise.
The question now is whether the censorship machine will simply reorganize under different names and NGOs.
Many of the same operators who ran GEC programs already work for “private” initiatives that mimic government censorship while avoiding oversight.
But Rubio’s move proves the Trump administration is willing to take on the bureaucratic structures that enabled the suppression of conservative speech.
For the first time in years, the federal government is defending Americans’ right to speak freely rather than working with tech companies to silence them.
The GEC was the beating heart of government-backed censorship.
Now that heart has stopped.
And conservatives finally have proof that fighting back against the Deep State isn’t just possible – it’s happening.
¹ Marco Rubio, “Protecting and Championing Free Speech at the State Department,” U.S. Department of State, April 16, 2025.
² “Global Engagement Center,” Wikipedia, October 22, 2025.
³ Rubio, “Protecting and Championing Free Speech at the State Department.”
⁴ “Global Engagement Center – 2009-2017 State.gov,” U.S. Department of State.
⁵ “Termination of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center,” Congress.gov.
⁶ “State Department’s Global Engagement Center Closes Amid Allegations of Censorship,” YourNews, December 26, 2024.
⁷ Ibid.
⁸ “Spending bill to fund State Department agency accused of censoring, blacklisting Americans,” Fox News, December 18, 2024.
⁹ Ibid.
¹⁰ “Report: State Department Officially Dismantled ‘Disinformation’ Agency,” Breitbart, October 26, 2025.
¹¹ “Censorship Industrial Complex Takes a Hit as Rubio Official Dismantles ‘Disinformation’ Agency,” Based Underground, October 26, 2025.
¹² “State Department’s Global Engagement Center Closes Amid Allegations of Censorship,” YourNews, December 26, 2024.
¹³ “Secretary of State Marco Rubio Shuts Down State Dept Censorship Apparatus,” The Last Refuge, April 16, 2025.
¹⁴ “US agency focused on foreign disinformation shuts down,” France 24, December 24, 2024.
¹⁵ “Secretary of State Marco Rubio Shuts Down State Dept Censorship Apparatus,” The Last Refuge, April 16, 2025.
¹⁶ “State Department’s Global Engagement Center Closes Amid Allegations of Censorship,” YourNews, December 26, 2024.
¹⁷ Ibid.
¹⁸ “Termination of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center,” Congress.gov.
¹⁹ “Global Engagement Center,” Wikipedia, October 22, 2025.
²⁰ Marco Rubio, “Rubio: To Protect Free Speech, The Censorship Complex Must Die,” The Federalist, April 16, 2025.
