The U.S. Department of State, led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has officially shut down the Global Engagement Center (GEC). 

This is according to recent reporting from Paul Sperry, a senior investigative reporter for RealClearInvestigation.

On Friday, he revealed:

NEW: State Dept has officially dismantled its Global Engagement Center office which used leftist-backed NewsGuard and Global Disinformation Index to censor/blacklist The Daily Wire, Federalist and other news sites. GEC files will be released like Twitter Files over coming wks ...

— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) October 25, 2025

Background

This move was expected, for Rubio announced that he was planning to shut down the GEC back in April 2025.

At the time, he wrote:

Over the last decade, Americans have been slandered, fired, charged, and even jailed for simply voicing their opinions. That ends today. I am announcing the closure of the @StateDept's Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, formerly the Global Engagement Center (GEC), which cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year and actively silenced and censored the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.

Rubio released this message in response to reports that the Trump administration had placed on leave dozens of GEC staffers.

Now, it would appear that Rubio and the State Department have followed through on this by shutting the GEC down.

Sperry reported:

State Dept has officially dismantled its Global Engagement Center office which used leftist-backed NewsGuard and Global Disinformation Index to censor/blacklist The Daily Wire, Federalist and other news sites. GEC files will be released like Twitter Files over coming wks.

Obama's weapon

Back in April, Rubio also released an op-ed exposing the truth about the GEC, including its connection to former President Barack Obama.

In the piece, Rubio explained how the GEC's focus, under Obama, shifted from combatting international terrorism to combating so-called "foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts."

Rubio wrote:

This pivot was no accident. Obama’s man in charge at GEC, Rick Stengel, touted his efforts to protect “democracy” while redefining it so that “democracy” came to mean silencing the part of the electorate he doesn’t like. In 2019, Stengel directly equated President Trump’s campaign with foreign and terrorist propaganda, writing, “Trump employed the same techniques of disinformation as the Russians and much the same scare tactics as ISIS.” That same year, Stengel wrote an entire article about, “why America needs a hate speech law.”

The Trump administration is clearly doing what it can to restore the Constitution's protection of free speech.

Closing down the GEC is one significant step in this direction.