US government agency targeting foreign disinformation is shutting down | News

The State Department division, created in 2016, is closing its doors after the US Congress failed to extend funding amid Republican accusations.

A top United States government agency that tracks foreign disinformation has shut down, the State Department said, after Congress failed to extend its funding after years of Republican criticism.

The Global Engagement Center (GEC), a State Department unit created in 2016, closed on Monday as officials and experts tracking propaganda warned of the risk of disinformation campaigns by US adversaries such as Russia and China.

“The State Department is consulting with Congress on next steps,” it said in a statement when asked what would happen to GEC staff and its ongoing projects after the shutdown.

The GEC had an annual budget of $61 million and a staff of about 120 people. Its closure leaves the State Department without a dedicated office to track and counter disinformation from America's adversaries for the first time in eight years.

A measure to extend funding for the center was removed from the final version of the bipartisan federal spending bill that passed the US Congress last week.

The GEC has long come under scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who accuse it of censoring and monitoring Americans.

It has also come under fire from Elon Musk, who accused the GEC in 2023 of being “the worst offender in US government censorship (and) media manipulation” and called the agency “a threat to our democracy”.

GEC leaders rejected these views, calling their work critical to combating foreign propaganda campaigns.

Musk strongly objected to the original budget bill, which would have kept GEC funding, though without singling out the center. The billionaire is an adviser to President-elect Donald Trump and has been appointed to lead the new so-called called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tasked with cutting government spending, in the incoming Trump administration.

In June, James Rubin, special envoy and coordinator of the GEC, announced the launch of a multinational group based in Warsaw to counter Russian disinformation about the war in neighboring Ukraine.

The State Department said the initiative, known as the Ukraine Communications Group, will bring together partner governments to coordinate messaging, promote accurate reporting of the war and expose the Kremlin's manipulation of information.

In a report last year, the GEC warned that China was spending billions of dollars globally to spread disinformation and threatened to cause a “sharp contraction” of free speech around the world.