What it said
Most of what the Global Engagement Center put out was about other governments. Its August 2020 special report, Pillars of Russia's Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem, ran 77 pages and sorted Moscow's methods into five "pillars": official communications, state-funded global messaging, cultivated proxy sources, weaponized social media, and cyber-enabled disinformation. Its main subject was proxy websites that look independent while carrying Kremlin lines, with the Strategic Culture Foundation as a leading example. In September 2023 it published How the People's Republic of China Seeks to Reshape the Global Information Environment, which said Beijing spends billions of dollars a year on foreign information manipulation, including control of Chinese-language media. A "Faces of Kremlin Propaganda" series profiled individuals, describing Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova as among the most high-profile purveyors of Russia's disinformation.
Exposing a foreign government's hidden hand in its own media is a legitimate thing for an American diplomat to do, and the reports did it in the open, under the State Department's name. Beijing's answer was predictable. Its Foreign Ministry called the 2023 report itself disinformation, called the center a source of disinformation and the command center of 'perception warfare'
, and called the United States an empire of lies
. No official Russian reply to the 2020 report turned up in the sources FRAME checked.
Who made it and why
The office grew out of counterterrorism. Executive Order 13584 created the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications in 2011. On 14 March 2016 President Obama signed Executive Order 13721, which revoked the earlier order and recast that center as the Global Engagement Center. A State Department fact sheet that year described the approach as partner-driven messaging and data analytics.
Congress then gave it a broader mission in statute. The Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, from Senators Rob Portman (R-OH) and Chris Murphy (D-CT), passed inside the FY2017 National Defense Authorization Act.
recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts
The law also created a grant program for NGOs, think tanks, civil society, and outside experts. That program is where the trouble started. The money was real: the Congressional Research Service put FY2016 funding near $16 million and an estimated $32 million by the end of FY2017. In 2017 Secretary Rex Tillerson held back nearly $80 million meant for the office, during what State called a broader policy review; a Brookings post that October defended him. On 26 February 2018 State and the Pentagon agreed to move $40 million to the center. The State inspector general counted about $98.7 million received in FY2018, with 39 grants and cooperative agreements worth $58.6 million issued that year. In late 2024 State told CRS the office had about 120 staff and a $61 million annual budget.
What it got right or wrong
Part of the record is ordinary bureaucratic weakness. An April 2020 inspector general audit (AUD-MERO-20-26) found that 9 of 10 monitoring and evaluation plans lacked required elements and that officials had not reviewed recipients' performance and financial reports as required. A September 2022 inspection (ISP-I-22-15) made 18 recommendations and identified $745,000 in "funds for better use." No public study ever measured whether the center's messaging or grants changed what foreign audiences believed. The office spent tens of millions of dollars a year without a public measure of whether it worked. That alone is a fair reason for a taxpayer to be skeptical.
The sharper dispute was about where the money went. In 2021 the Global Disinformation Index, a London group, received a $100,000 sub-grant from one of the center's implementing partners. The Washington Examiner reported that the money came through Disinfo Cloud, a center platform run by Park Advisors. GDI also published risk ratings that steered advertisers away from some outlets; Reason reported in February 2023 that GDI's index warned advertisers away from Reason itself. State's answer was specific: reports that its money paid for GDI's work in the United States were inaccurate
, the sub-grant covered work in East Asia and Europe, and no domestic-focused activities were included.
In court the government said the center had never funded, promoted, nor encouraged the use of technologies targeting either the Media Plaintiffs or other Americans.
Both things can be true at once. The grant may have been confined to foreign work on paper, and a federal office may still have helped keep afloat an organization whose other products judged American publications. Money is fungible and reputations travel. A public "disinformation" office that funds private raters is one step removed from rating the press itself, and one step is not much distance. The record does not show the center directing a rating of any American outlet. It shows outside grants passing through partners under a monitoring system the inspector general had already found weak, with State's word as the main assurance about where the money stopped.
The lawsuit over the center's grants
On 6 December 2023 The Daily Wire, The Federalist, and the State of Texas, represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, sued the State Department in the Eastern District of Texas. They argued the center financed "censorship technology" and that Disinfo Cloud acted as the government's "alter ego." On 7 May 2024 Judge Jeremy D. Kernodle held that the plaintiffs have satisfied their burden to demonstrate standing at this stage
. He dismissed the Administrative Procedure Act count and let the rest proceed. A Cato Institute post called the allegations "government censorship by proxy." In April 2026 a federal judge entered a consent decree settling the case, with the plaintiffs serving as compliance monitors until 2036.
The decree should be read as written. It says it shall not be construed as evidence or as an admission
of the plaintiffs' allegations, and it contains no judicial finding that a censorship regime existed. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said that The weaponization of the Biden Administration against the American people who they disfavored is over.
That is his characterization of a settlement; the decree itself makes no such finding.
Where the merits are unresolved, the reading that protects speech is still the right default. The First Amendment does not stop at government's own pen. If an office cannot lawfully pressure an American publisher, it should not be paying, even at one remove, for tools that do the same work through advertisers. An office aimed at foreign propaganda should have built a wall between its grants and anything that touched domestic speech, and shown the public where that wall stood. The record does not show it did.
Its legacy
The end came through ordinary politics, which is how it should come. In December 2024 a provision to extend the center's authority to 2031 was dropped from the final defense bill, and CRS reports the statutory authority ended on 23 December 2024. State moved the work into an office called Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, or R/FIMI. On 16 April 2025 Secretary of State Marco Rubio closed it, saying it had spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving
. Other State officials called the censorship accusations "fictitious," and the group Issue One criticized the closure. In September 2025 State said it was ending what it called "censorship frameworks," including one the center had launched.
The lesson is not that foreign propaganda is imaginary or that exposing it is wrong. The Kremlin's proxy sites and Beijing's media spending are real subjects. The lesson is about the architecture: a federal office that grades information, funds others to grade it, and cannot show where its money stopped will end up in court and in the headlines. Compare the DHS Disinformation Governance Board, which lasted a single season, and the private Hamilton 68 dashboard, which showed how quickly a label about foreign influence can land on Americans who never knew they were being counted.
Sources
- FRAME case study "The State Department's Global Engagement Center (2016 to 2025)" (propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/global-engagement-center/), for the chronology, budget figures, quotations, and court record on this page.
- Executive Order 13721, Federal Register, 17 March 2016; State Department fact sheet, The Global Engagement Center (July 2016).
- CRS Insight IN10744, Global Engagement Center: Background and Issues; CRS Insight IN12475, Termination of the State Department's Global Engagement Center.
- GEC Special Reports: Pillars of Russia's Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem (August 2020) and How the People's Republic of China Seeks to Reshape the Global Information Environment (September 2023); State Department, Faces of Kremlin Propaganda: Maria Zakharova.
- State OIG AUD-MERO-20-26 (April 2020) and ISP-I-22-15 (September 2022); GAO-24-107600 (September 2024).
- PRC Foreign Ministry spokesperson's remarks, 30 September 2023.
- Washington Examiner reporting on GDI and Disinfo Cloud; Reason, 14 February 2023; Cato at Liberty; National Endowment for Democracy statement on GDI.
- Daily Wire v. State Department, E.D. Tex., order of 7 May 2024; NCLA case page; DOJ release on the settlement; Lawfare analysis of the consent decree.
- Washington Post, 16 April 2025, on Rubio's closure of R/FIMI; Issue One statement; State Department release, September 2025, on ending "censorship frameworks"; Brookings FixGov, 27 October 2017.