The US State Department announced Tuesday that its office specializing in foreign disinformation, much criticized by Republicans and Elon Musk, had closed down after a decision by Congress cutting its funding.
With the closure of the Global Engagement Center (GEC) after eight years of operation, 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 — with a budget of $61 million and which employed around 120 people — 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.
The GEC had long been in the crosshairs 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 draconian 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, the head of the GEC, 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.
