The Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub is a small office in the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy that tracks and counters foreign disinformation campaigns.
In shutting R/FIMI, the department’s controversial acting undersecretary, Darren Beattie, is delivering a major win to conservative critics who have alleged that it censors conservative voices. Created at the end of 2024, it was reorganized from the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a larger office with a similar mission that had long been criticized by conservatives who claimed that, despite its international mission, it was censoring American conservatives. In 2023, Elon Musk called the center the “worst offender in US government censorship [and] media manipulation” and a “threat to our democracy.”
The culling of the office leaves the State Department without a way to actively counter the increasingly sophisticated disinformation campaigns from foreign governments like those of Russia, Iran, and China.
Shortly after publication, employees at R/FIMI received an email, inviting them to an 11:15AM meeting with Beattie, where employees were told that the office and their jobs have been eliminated.
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Then, Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed our reporting in a blog post in The Federalist, which had sued GEC last year alleging that it had infringed on its freedom of speech. “It is my pleasure to announce the State Department is taking a crucial step toward keeping the president’s promise to liberate American speech by abolishing forever the body formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC),” he wrote. And he told Benz, “We ended government-sponsored censorship in the United States through the State Department.”
Censorship claims
For years, conservative voices both in and out of government have accused Big Tech of censoring conservative views—and they often charged GEC with enabling such censorship.
GEC had its roots as the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC), created by an Obama-era executive order, but shifted its mission to fight propaganda and disinformation from foreign governments and terrorist organizations in 2016, becoming the Global Engagement Center. It was always explicitly focused on the international information space, but some of the organizations that it funded also did work in the United States. It shut down last December after a measure to reauthorize its $61 million budget was blocked by Republicans in Congress, who accused it of helping Big Tech censor American conservative voices.
R/FIMI had a similar goal to fight foreign disinformation, but it was smaller: the newly created office had a $51.9 million budget, and a small staff that, by mid-April, was down to just 40 employees, from 125 at GEC. In a Wednesday morning meeting, those employees were told that they would be put on administrative leave and terminated within 30 days.
