With the closure of the Global Engagement Center (GEC) after eight years of existence, the US Department of State is losing its only agency that tracked and countered disinformation produced by rival countries of the United States, such as China and Russia.
The ax for this organization fell when the measure extending its funding was abandoned in the latest version of the legislative text which made it possible to avoid the budgetary paralysis of the federal state last week. This office had a budget of $61 million and employed approximately 120 people. His account on the X network is already inactive, we can see in the caption which links to the page of the American Department of State to which the agency was affiliated.
The GEC had long been in the sights of Republican parliamentarians, the majority in the House of Representatives, who accused it of censorship and of surveillance of Americans. Last year, Elon Musk, who has since become Donald Trump's main supporter, assured that the GEC represented “a threat to American democracy”.
The richest man in the world, named by Donald Trump as co-head of a commission for “governmental efficiency” whose avowed goal is to make drastic cuts in the federal budget, accused the agency of being “the worst agent of government censorship and instrumentalization of the media.
GEC leaders have always dismissed these claims, believing their work to be crucial to combating foreign interference campaigns on American soil. In June, GEC head James Rubin announced the launch of a multinational organization based in Warsaw to counter Russian disinformation about the war in Ukraine.
And last year, this agency warned in a report that China was spending billions of dollars in order to disseminate disinformation and “significantly reduce” freedom of expression around the world.
