Biden spent $50 million a year using your money to starve conservative media into silence.
Today a federal judge made it permanent: every story he tried to kill was protected speech all along.
And the outlets he targeted just got put in charge of making sure it never happens again.
How the Global Engagement Center Turned Taxpayer Money Into a Conservative Media Blacklist
The Global Engagement Center was born in 2016 to counter terrorist propaganda overseas. Biden's State Department turned it into something else entirely.
The GEC funded and promoted over 300 so-called "Countering Propaganda and Disinformation" tools – many of them aimed squarely at American newsrooms.
Two companies did the dirty work. NewsGuard assigned credibility scores to news outlets and sold those rankings to advertisers. The Global Disinformation Index – a British outfit funded with American tax dollars – compiled blacklists of conservative sites and handed them directly to ad buyers.
NewsGuard gave the New York Times a 100/100 credibility rating for a 2020 story calling Hunter Biden’s laptop a Russian op while smearing conservatives websites that told the truth for pushing misinformation.
Advertisers got the message. Ben Shapiro later told Congress the blacklist cost his company millions in ad revenue — money that never came back.
The GEC spent more than $50 million a year running this operation. It used a shell company called Park Capital Investment Group – run by a former State Department employee – as a middleman to obscure the money trail.
When Republicans in Congress demanded records, the GEC stonewalled them. The House Small Business Committee had to issue a subpoena just to get the agency to respond.
Biden Renamed the Censorship Industrial Complex and Kept It Running
Congress defunded the Global Engagement Center in late 2024. Biden's team didn't shut it down.
They moved the staff into a new office – the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference framework – changed the letterhead, and kept running the same operation.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio exposed the shell game in April 2025, announcing that every employee in the renamed office had received layoff notices. He published the announcement, pointedly, in The Federalist – one of the outlets the program had targeted.
The lawsuit that finally killed it was filed in December 2023 by the New Civil Liberties Alliance on behalf of two conservative media organizations and the State of Texas. Discovery produced evidence that the GEC had promoted censorship tools to Twitter, Meta, LinkedIn, and YouTube through a dedicated Silicon Valley office.
An FBI agent named Elvis Chan – who separately pushed Twitter to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story – told Congress he worked regularly with the GEC and noticed the agency showed little concern for First Amendment protections.
The Consent Decree Biden's Successor Had to Sign
The settlement entered Wednesday is binding on every future administration.
The State Department is now permanently barred from funding, promoting, or assisting any technology designed to suppress, censor, demonetize, or downgrade the constitutionally protected speech of Americans.
It cannot work with foreign governments or NGOs to accomplish the same ends through back channels.
The State Department must also remove specific "media literacy" training videos it funded – videos that named conservative outlets by name and told teachers those outlets could not be trusted.
Employee training on First Amendment limits is mandatory in 2030 and 2035.
A federal judge in Texas holds enforcement authority. If future administrations violate the decree, they answer to that court.
This settlement lands eight days after the companion case – Missouri v. Biden – produced a similar consent decree barring the CDC, CISA, and the U.S. Surgeon General from threatening social media companies into censoring protected speech on Facebook, Instagram, X, and YouTube. That decree runs for ten years.
Together, these two consent decrees represent the most significant legal constraints ever placed on the federal government's domestic censorship apparatus.
Biden Built a Machine Designed to Survive Him
The GEC didn't just censor conservative media during the Biden years. It built infrastructure – tools, ratings systems, Silicon Valley relationships, foreign partnerships – designed to outlast any single administration.
When Congress defunded it, Biden rebranded it. When Republicans subpoenaed it, it stonewalled. When a federal court finally forced the issue, Biden's State Department spent three years claiming in court that everything it did was aimed at foreign adversaries.
Discovery proved otherwise. The agency's own documents confirmed it treated American newsrooms as targets.
The consent decree does something no court has done before: it puts the censored outlets in charge of compliance monitoring. The State Department must now report annually to the very journalists it tried to bankrupt. Any violation goes to a federal judge who has no patience for bureaucratic evasion.
Biden's operation assumed it could always find a new name and a new office. It ran out of offices.
Sources:
- Margot Cleveland, "The Federalist Scored A Huge Win For Free Speech — And Exposed More Of The Censorship-Industrial Complex," The Federalist, April 1, 2026.
- Luke Rosiak, "Daily Wire Wins Landmark Free Speech Victory In Censorship Lawsuit Against State Department," The Daily Wire, April 1, 2026.
- Dan Frieth, "US State Dept Settles Free Speech Suppression Lawsuit," Reclaim The Net, April 1, 2026.
- Ashley Oliver, "'Orwellian' Biden-era censorship reined in; red states celebrate 'historic' settlement," Fox News, March 26, 2026.
- John Vecchione, "A consent decree for freedom of speech," RealClearWire/World Net Daily, March 29, 2026.
- Washington Examiner, "State Department 'censorship' office finds lifeline in 1,500-page spending bill," December 19, 2024.
- Washington Examiner, "Ex-State Department 'censorship' tool under spotlight in new conservative media lawsuit," December 6, 2023.
