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The Trump administration is shutting down an office focused on battling foreign disinformation from countries such as China, Russia, and Iran, officials told The New York Times.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio put all 40 staffers at the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub on paid leave on Wednesday morning. It’s the initial step to having them fully removed from the department this spring. Last month, the department fired about 80 contractors working at the office and cut nearly all the contracts related to the office.
The office was following disinformation campaigns by rival powers and terrorist groups. Some Republican legislators have accused both federal employees and experts not employed by the government working to track disinformation of trying to suppress the views of right-wing political groups and working with social media companies to take action against them. Russian disinformation is often present in online channels on the far right.
In a statement, Rubio claimed that the office had “spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving,” without backing it up with any evidence.
Former State Department official James Rubin, who ran the predecessor to the office during the presidency of Joe Biden, told The Times that “This amounts to a form of unilateral disarmament in the information warfare Russia and China are conducting all over the world.”
During his time in charge, “no efforts were made inside the United States — only international. All of our efforts were focused on Russian and Chinese operations in Latin America, Europe, and Africa,” he added.
The firings were organized by Darren Beattie, the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy, two officials told The Times. Beattie was forced to leave the White House during the first Trump administration following a CNN report that he had given a speech to a white nationalist group.
Beattie got access to the email accounts of current and former staffers who had worked on countering disinformation, the two officials told the paper. They said that Beattie looked through the emails to find evidence that conservatives had been censored.
Two memos circulating in the department foresee deep cuts, with one suggesting almost cutting its budget in half next fiscal year, and another memo suggesting the closure of 10 embassies and 17 consulates.
The proposed cutbacks come as China has increased its presence around the world and as Russia grows more aggressive in its spreading of disinformation. During his time as a Florida Senator, Rubio often spoke of the importance of expanding government resources to take on both countries across the globe and online.
The office’s predecessor, the Global Engagement Center, was established in 2011 to take on terrorist propaganda from groups such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. It recently had as many as 125 employees and a $61 million budget.
But conservative groups filed lawsuits against the office, with Elon Musk calling the center in 2023 the “worst offender in U.S. government censorship.”
At the time, Rubin told the paper that the office was focusing on “how foreign adversaries, primarily China and Russia, use information operations and malign interference to manipulate world opinion.”
After some House Republicans blocked congressional reauthorization of the center last year, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken renewed the efforts by establishing the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub.
English (US) ·