Rubio eliminates successor to 'censorship nerve center' that Congress defunded last year

The State Department's Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub (R/FIMI), the months-old successor to the congressionally defunded Global Engagement Center, is shutting down at the direction of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, he announced in multiple media Wednesday.

"Over the last decade, Americans have been slandered, fired, charged, and even jailed for simply voicing their opinions. That ends today," Rubio wrote on X, claiming GEC "cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year and actively silenced and censored the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving."

Mike Benz, former State official in the first Trump administration, broke the news two minutes before Rubio shared his post, saying Rubio and acting Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy Darren Beattie last month terminated more than 100 contractors with whom R/FIMI worked, "which formed a deep partner web between censorship operatives in the private sector and the muscle of the US gov’t to go after speech."

The reduction in force will "permanently end the positions at GEC / R-FIMI, so there is no more reshuffling of positions or simple renamings of the office to carry out the same malign censorship efforts," said Benz, who coined the term "censorship nerve center" to describe GEC's work across the federal government.

Rubio wrote an essay for The Federalist explaining GEC's history, evolution and alleged rebranding as R/FIMI.

"Some of the third-party implementers GEC paid to fight so-called disinformation were downright laughable," he wrote. "One such implementer, which continued to receive funding even after Congress sunset GEC, flagged the DOGE Dog as a symbol associated with Nazi SS officers. No, I’m not kidding (I wish I were)."

Rubio gave a State-hosted interview to Benz 20 minutes after his X announcement. 

Set up in the Obama administration, GEC was pitched as counter-messaging against al Qaeda, and "who's going to be against that?" he said. But its original head, Rick Stengel, dropped the pretense years later by saying President Trump "talks just like a Russian spy," Rubio paraphrased.

It funded nongovernmental organizations that were "supposed to be impartial" but then tagged and labeled conservatives including Ben Shapiro and The Federalist as "foreign agents," Rubio told Benz. "Some of these people got deplatformed ... it was outrageous." ("My choice to publish this piece in The Federalist is no coincidence," Rubio wrote for the publication.)

Rubio said that "to the extent we're spending money now, we are going to spend money on messaging, it's going to be pro-American messaging" and not try to silence purported disinformation, which he called "a label that you can use to go after people you don't like."

He said mainstream media spread disinformation every day, citing coverage of "a Maryland man deported to El Salvador" who is actually a Salvadoran citizen.