A State Department program that allegedly works to suppress conservative media and Americans' free speech appeared to be headed for termination until the latest continuing resolution (CR) appeared before Congress.
Department lawyers last week said the Global Engagement Center (GEC) will "substantially likely" be terminated on Dec. 23, nearly a month before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
In fact, the GEC's authorization was not renewed under the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual defense bill that passed the House on Dec. 11.
However, the bipartisan continuing resolution spending plan heralded by Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to avert a partial government shutdown included a one-year extension for the GEC.
The CR since has been scrapped after House Republicans, Trump, and X owner Elon Musk joined in criticizing the deal.
Musk on Wednesday shared influencer Mario Nawfal's X post saying that the 1,547-page CR extended GEC for a year.
"They want to spend YOUR tax dollars on censoring YOU!!" Musk wrote while sharing Nawfal's post.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, The Daily Wire, and The Federalist in February filed a joint lawsuit against the Biden administration's State Department over its alleged funding of technologies that essentially work to blacklist conservative media outlets.
Democrats and mainstream media outlets claim GEC tracks and combats foreign disinformation operations. But after the since-debunked Russian conspiracy connection to the 2016 Trump campaign, GEC focused on targeting free speech content on social media platforms.
"[P]laintiffs allege that the GEC's funding, promoting, and marketing of internet 'risk-raters' Global Disinformation Index [GDI] and NewsGuard amounted to First Amendment-violating censorship-by-proxy," Benjamin Weingarten, editor at large at RealClearInvestigations, wrote in the New York Post.
"These groups aim to purge purported mis- and disinformation by threatening the business models of outlets that publish news and views they deem illegitimate."
Before the House Small Business Committee in June, Weingarten testified that GEC's funding and support of GDI and NewsGuard meant the government "had effectively abridged freedom of speech and of the press — with our tax dollars, and via a foreign-facing entity."
Brendan Carr, Trump's pick for Federal Communications Commission chair, has said we must "dismantle the censorship cartel" and is probing NewsGuard.
Charlie McCarthy ✉
Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.
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