Trump (and Musk) cancel the center against foreign disinformation: funding cut because it is “anti-conservative”

Il Department of State of the United States announced that the Global Engagement Center (Gec) has ended its operations and has been closed, as announced in recent weeks.

The GEC was the only specialized office responsible for monitoring foreign disinformation but had been heavily criticized by Republicans and Elon Musk because it was accused of going beyond its mission and targeting conservative opinions and limiting free speech .

A choice that comes directly from the president-elect and his billionaire ally even though the closure formally came following Congress' decision to cut its funding.

Founded by Barack Obama in 2011 as the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC), it took its current name in 2016 and 2017 – after Russian interference in the vote for the White House – its skills were also expanded. It had 120 people working on it and had a budget of $61 million. Its mission was to guide the United States government in “recognizing, understanding, exposing, and countering foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, of its allies and partner nations” around the world.

Elon Musk's crusade

Last year Elon Musk, who has since become Donald Trump's main supporter, said the GEC posed “a threat to American democracy.”

As the Washington Post writes, reconstructing the events that led to the closure of the GEC, “in January 2023 the Twitter Files project, supported by Elon Musk, described the Global Engagement Center as overzealous in associating conspiracy narratives about the coronavirus with campaigns of Russian and Chinese disinformation”.

And again: “A 2024 report by a Republican-led House committee criticized the GEC for awarding grants to organizations whose work includes monitoring both domestic and foreign disinformation and assessing the credibility of U.S. publishers.”

“Furthermore – writes the Washington newspaper – a lawsuit brought by the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, which reached the Supreme Court as Murthy v. Missouriinitially named the GEC among the federal agencies accused of pressuring social networks to censor conservative opinions.”