The only office within the US State Department that monitors foreign disinformation is to be eliminated, according to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, confirming reporting by MIT Technology Review.

The Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub is a small office in the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy that tracks and counters foreign disinformation campaigns. 

In shutting R/FIMI, the department’s controversial acting undersecretary, Darren Beattie, is delivering a major win to conservative critics who have alleged that it censors conservative voices. Created at the end of 2024, it was reorganized from the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a larger office with a similar mission that had long been criticized by conservatives who claimed that, despite its international mission, it was censoring American conservatives. In 2023, Elon Musk called the center the “worst offender in US government censorship [and] media manipulation” and a “threat to our democracy.” 

The culling of the office leaves the State Department without a way to actively counter the increasingly sophisticated disinformation campaigns from foreign governments like those of Russia, Iran, and China.

Shortly after publication, employees at R/FIMI received an email, inviting them to an 11:15AM meeting with Beattie, where employees were told that the office and their jobs have been eliminated. 

Have more information on this story or a tip for something else that we should report? Using a non-work device, reach the reporter on Signal at eileenguo.15 or tips@technologyreview.com.

Then, Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed our reporting in a blog post in The Federalist, which had sued GEC last year alleging that it had infringed on its freedom of speech. “It is my pleasure to announce the State Department is taking a crucial step toward keeping the president’s promise to liberate American speech by abolishing forever the body formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC),” he wrote. And he told Mike Benz, a former first-term Trump official who also reportedly has alt right views, during a YouTube interview, “We ended government-sponsored censorship in the United States through the State Department.”  

Censorship claims

For years, conservative voices both in and out of government have accused Big Tech of censoring conservative views—and they often charged GEC with enabling such censorship. 

GEC had its roots as the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC), created by an Obama-era executive order, but shifted its mission to fight propaganda and disinformation from foreign governments and terrorist organizations in 2016, becoming the Global Engagement Center. It was always explicitly focused on the international information space, but some of the organizations that it funded also did work in the United States. It shut down last December after a measure to reauthorize its $61 million budget was blocked by Republicans in Congress, who accused it of helping Big Tech censor American conservative voices. 

R/FIMI had a similar goal to fight foreign disinformation, but it was smaller: the newly created office had a $51.9 million budget, and a small staff that, by mid-April, was down to just 40 employees, from 125 at GEC. In a Wednesday morning meeting, those employees were told that they would  be put on administrative leave and terminated within 30 days. 

With the change in administrations, R/FIMI had never really gotten off the ground. Beattie, a controversial pick for undersecretary—he was fired as a speechwriter during the first Trump administration for attending a white nationalism conference, has suggested that the FBI organized the January 6 attack on Congress, and has said that it’s not worth defending Taiwan from China—had instructed the few remaining staff to be “pencils down,” one State Department official told me, meaning to pause in their work. 

The administration’s executive order on “countering censorship and restoring freedom of speech” reads like a summary of conservative accusations against GEC:

“Under the guise of combatting “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation,” the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.  Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.”

In 2023, The Daily Wire, founded by conservative media personality Ben Shapiro, joined The Federalist in suing GEC for allegedly infringing on the company’s first amendment rights by funding two non-profit organizations, the London-based Global Disinformation Index and New York-based NewsGuard, that had labeled The Daily Wire as “unreliable,” “risky,” and/or (per GDI), susceptible to foreign disinformation. Those projects were not funded by GEC. The lawsuit alleged that this amounted to censorship by “starving them of advertising revenue and reducing the circulation of their reporting and speech,” the lawsuit continued. 

In 2022, the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana named GEC among the federal agencies that, they alleged, were pressuring social networks to censor conservative views. Though the case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, which found no First Amendment violations, a lower court had already removed GEC’s name from the list of defendants, ruling there was “no evidence” that GEC’s communications with the social media platforms had gone beyond “educating the platforms on ‘tools and techniques used by foreign actors.’”

The stakes

The GEC—and now R/FIMI—was targeted as part of a wider campaign to shut down groups accused of being “weaponized” against conservatives. 

Conservative critics railing against what they have alternatively called a disinformation- or censorship- industrial complex have also taken aim at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Stanford Internet Observatory, a prominent research group that conducted widely cited research on the flows of disinformation during elections. 

CISA’s former director, Chris Krebs, was personally targeted in an April 9 White House memo, while in response to the criticism and millions of dollars in legal fees, Stanford University shuttered the Stanford Internet Observatory ahead of the 2024 presidential elections.  

But this targeting comes at a time when foreign disinformation campaigns—especially by Russia, China, and Iran—have become increasingly sophisticated. 

According to one estimate, Russia spends $1.5 billion per year on foreign influence campaigns. In 2022, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, that country’s primary foreign propaganda arm, had a $1.26 billion budget. And a 2015 estimate suggests that China spent up to $10 billion per year on media targeting non-Chinese foreigners—a figure that has almost certainly grown.

In September 2024, the Justice Department indicted two employees of RT, a Russian state-owned propaganda agency, in a $10 million scheme to create propaganda aimed at influencing US audiences through a media company that has since been identified as the conservative Tenet Media. 

The GEC was one effort to counter such campaigns. Some of its recent projects have included developing AI models to detect memes and deepfakes and exposing Russian propaganda efforts to influence Latin American public opinion against the war in Ukraine. 

By law, the Office of Public Diplomacy has to provide Congress with 15-day advance notice of any intent to reassign any funding allocated by Congress over $1 million. Congress then has time to respond, ask questions, and challenge the decisions—though to judge from its record with other unilateral executive-branch decisions to gut government agencies, it is unlikely to do so. 

We have reached out to the State Department for comment. 

This story was updated at 11:55am to note that R/FIMI employees have confirmed that the office closed.
This story was updated at 12:37am to include confirmation about R/FIMI’s shutdown from Marco Rubio.
This story was updated at 6:10pm to add an identifier for Mike Benz.