State Department’s disinformation office to close after funding nixed in NDAA

The State Department’s center for fighting global disinformation received a lump of coal in its Christmas stocking this week as congressional lawmakers excluded new funding and authorization for the office beyond this year.

The Global Engagement Center, which tracks foreign disinformation, will lose  its authority on Dec. 24. Despite a concerted push by State officials to lobby Congress for an extension, a measure to extend the center’s authority into 2031 was stripped out of the final version of defense authorization legislation that passed through the Senate.

“The Global Engagement Center will terminate by operation of law [by the end of the day] on December 23, 2024,” a State Department spokesperson told CyberScoop in an email. “The Department of State has consulted with Congress regarding next steps.”

According to figures provided by State, the GEC has a staff of approximately 120 and an annual budget of $61 million. The spokesperson did not address questions about what will happen to the center’s personnel and technology following the closure.

The shuttering will leave the State Department without a dedicated office for countering disinformation abroad for the first time since 2016. The closure comes at the end of a year when U.S. officials, foreign political leaders and private companies tracking disinformation have alleged that Russia and China have engaged in concerted propaganda campaigns targeting democratic elections in Taiwan, Moldova, Georgia, Romania and other countries.

“This is extremely frustrating,” Mark Montgomery, former executive director of the Cyberspace Solarium and a supporter of extending the center’s authority, told CyberScoop. “On a bipartisan basis, both political parties know that Russia, China and, to a lesser degree, Iran and other non-state actors, conduct information operations against us spreading lies, and the GEC was a good tool for ensuring that the truth, as we see it, came out.”

While the center does not focus on disinformation targeting the United States, its work with related organizations faced  criticism from congressional Republicans and Elon Musk, who accused the center in 2023 of being “the worst offender in U.S. government censorship [and] media manipulation.”

Musk is now an adviser  to President-elect Donald Trump and was placed in charge of an advisory board for cutting programs and reducing government spending.

Additionally, Republicans on the Hill raised questions about the GEC’s value, suggesting its work might duplicate existing analysis from  the private sector and other parts of government.

In interviews with CyberScoop and FedScoop last month, GEC leaders pushed back on those views, calling their work “critical” to combatting foreign propaganda campaigns in allied countries and emphasizing that they take active steps to exclude data on U.S. persons from their analysis.

“We are really the first analytical unit in the U.S. government that takes this kind of comprehensive approach of looking at threat actors — Iranians, [China], the Russians — and try to understand … what their influence is broadly on the information space in different geographic regions,” said Carrie Goux, GEC’s acting deputy coordinator.

Lindsay Gorman, a former White House official under the Biden administration, told CyberScoop that there is “a lack of recognition in Congress that the wars democracies are fighting with autocrats overseas are no longer only in the physical domain, but in the cyberspace realm of 1s and 0s.”

“Whether their goal is to marshal support for invading neighbors or undermine U.S. credibility overseas, the U.S. needs a means to fight back. One way is to expose covert campaigns for what they are — important work the GEC is doing,” said Gorman, now at the nonprofit German Marshall Fund. “GEC has been the eyes and ears on the ground when it comes to information threats overseas, tracking where autocratic strategic objectives lie and how tactics are evolving to guide responses.”

Gorman stressed that Russian and Chinese disinformation campaigns “aren’t going away” and are increasingly leveraging social media and emerging technologies like generative AI “to sow discord and undermine democracy around the world.”

GEC officials also said their limited budget  has hindered efforts to acquire advanced technology needed to support their work, including tools to detect AI-manipulated media. 

State Department documents obtained by FedScoop detail a range of solutions and tools the center hoped to acquire if it was reauthorized, including a system for detecting photoshopped images, a “meme detection” model to help analyze and contextualize imagery, a detector for imagery created through Stable Diffusion, and a tool to detect AI-generated assets in video.

Montgomery said that with Republicans set to take control of the State Department and both houses of Congress next month, they are positioned to shape the GEC’s mission and operations to address any concerns about impinging on domestic U.S. issues.

“The frustration is, why not give it an extension now that you’re basically responsible?” Montgomery asked.