Political | Process

The State Department is facing heightened scrutiny for providing congressional investigators with “incomplete” grant records, including on the agency bankrolling organizations that silence voices online.

Republicans on the House Small Business Committee are re-upping a request to the State Department-housed Global Engagement Center for information on awards the office dished out, including to groups such as the Global Disinformation Index, a British think tank that reported, aims to strip revenue from conservative media outlets.

The request is part of the panel’s broader inquiry into “government censorship and revenue interference of American small businesses by proxy,” lawmakers informed GEC Special Envoy and Coordinator James Rubin in a letter Monday.

“The GEC has funded a myriad of companies that label beliefs running afoul of the radical left’s agenda as ‘disinformation,’” House Small Business Committee Chairman Roger Williams (R-TX) and Rep. Beth Van Duyne (R-TX) wrote in the letter to Rubin. “Despite your recent claim that ‘[w]e are not in the business of deciding what is true or not true,’ the third parties receiving GEC funds focus overwhelmingly on ‘right-wing misinformation’ rather than misinformation across the political spectrum. It is clear the Biden Administration considers itself the arbiter of truth.”

The letter is the latest escalation of congressional efforts to investigate the federal government for its ties to the “disinformation” and “misinformation” tracking industry, which Republicans assert serves as a tool to censor conservatives on the internet. The state of Texas joined two conservative media outlets, the Daily Wire and the Federalist, in accusing the GEC in a December lawsuit of funding an unconstitutional “censorship scheme,” particularly due to the government’s grant of $100,000 to the GDI in 2021.

Meanwhile, the since-passed $886 billion 2023 Pentagon spending bill banned the Defense Department from placing “advertisements in news sources based on personal or institutional political preferences or biases, or determinations of misinformation.”

The provision also prohibited the agency from entering into contracts “related to the placement of recruitment advertising” with the Global Disinformation Index, the New York-based company NewsGuard, or “any similar entity” that purports to track “misinformation.”

In the letter on Monday, Williams and Van Duyne wrote that the GEC has strayed from its congressional mandate, which holds that funds are not intended to be used “for purposes other than countering foreign propaganda and misinformation.”

The GEC has often said its grant to the GDI was to thwart foreign influence, though Republicans have noted that money is “fungible” and taken aim at the GEC for having any remote association with the British think tank.

This sentiment, along with a negative 2022 inspector general report finding that the GEC hasn’t lived up to its mission and was not vetting foreign grants, has propelled the GOP-led House Foreign Affairs Committee to lean toward not reauthorizing the GEC in 2024, according to three sources familiar with the discussions.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee has also investigated the GEC over its grant to the GDI, with members on the panel in late October grilling GEC acting Coordinator Daniel Kimmage in a tense hearing.