The Global Engagement Center, the State Department's censorship arm, closes its doors

The Global Engagement Center (GEC), a controversial agency within the State Department's Bureau of Global Public Affairs, officially closed its doors.

The GEC, long accused of censoring Americans and actively harming conservative national media outlets according to lawsuits and news reports, will close after Republican lawmakers halted its funding at the time of negotiating the latest continuing resolution (C.R.) proposal to avoid a government shutdown. The embattled agency had a budget of about $61 million and 120 employees.

"The Global Engagement Center will terminate by operation of law [by the end of the day] on December 23, 2024," a State Department spokesman said in a statement. "The Department of State has consulted with Congress regarding next steps."

The GEC has been consistently labeled by Republican leaders, conservative figures and U.S. media as a censorship weapon of the State Department.

Elon Musk, ally of President-elect Donald Trump, said at the time that the Global Engagement Center was the "worst offender of U.S. government censorship and media manipulation."

Renowned journalist Matt Taibbi, author of the Twitter Files, also revealed at the time several of the GEC's tactics for censoring U.S. citizens or media.

According to Taibbi, this agency funded a secret list of subcontractors helping "to create an insidious - and idiotic - new form of blacklists" during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The journalist revealed that the GEC indicted U.S. accounts as Russian individuals or agents claiming that COVID-19 could have originated from research conducted at the Wuhan institute, a theory that, so far, is considered plausible in the face of little information provided by China. The agency also took it upon itself to flag people who described COVID-19 as a biological weapon or a virus created by the CIA.

In his news report, Taibbi also outlined that the federal government, through the GEC, flagged accounts that reported and shared the news that Twitter (now X) banned the conservative website ZeroHedge, which had been blocked for allegedly provoking "disinformation narratives."

According to Fox News, in addition to being part of the State Department, the GEC also works with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Special Operations Command and the Department of Homeland Security.

A lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and media outlets The Daily Wire and The Federalist accused the GEC of being used as a censorship weapon by the State Department, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other government officials named in the lawsuit.

"Congress authorized the creation of the Global Engagement Center expressly to counter foreign propaganda and misinformation," the Texas Attorney General's Office said in a statement. "Instead, the agency weaponized this authority to violate the First Amendment and suppress Americans’ constitutionally-protected speech."