The State Department has been subpoenaed after it refused to share with Congress how it spends taxpayer dollars on firms interfering with American small businesses’ ability to compete online.
The House Small Business Committee served a subpoena to the State Department, ordering the agency to provide information on payments by its Global Engagement Center (GEC). The GEC reportedly granted $100,000 to the Global Disinformation Index, The Washington Examiner reported.
According to the report, the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) has urged organizations to boycott right-leaning media groups.
GDI deemed certain outlets unreliable due to so-called “disinformation.” The GDI is not designed to operate on American media sources, yet it censored, by proxy, outlets holding to a particular ideology.
One of the documents that the Republicans requested the State Department provide is a file called “GEC-GDI-BLACKLIST.”
Chairman of the House Small Business Committee, Rep. Roger Williams (R-TX), said in a statement that the committee was investigating the “government’s use of taxpayer dollars to interfere with American small businesses’ ability to compete online” for over a year.
“All Americans deserve a fair shot to compete in the marketplace, and the government should not be tipping the scales against any business for their legal speech on the internet. The refusal to comply with repeated document requests is unacceptable, especially when the livelihoods of many small businesses are on the line,” he said. “While the Committee does not take issuing a subpoena lightly, the GEC’s repeated failure to comply with our requests has left us with no other option.”
Williams wrote in a letter accompanying the subpoena to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and GEC Special Envoy and Coordinator James P. Rubin that the committee has been “investigating the U.S. government’s censorship-by-proxy and revenue interference of American small businesses because of their lawful speech, including by the U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC).”
The investigation’s purpose was to “evaluate legislative solutions to federal funds being used to demonetize, tarnish, or censor domestic small business on the basis of their lawful speech,” William explained.
In a May 2023 letter, Williams and Rep. Beth Van Duyne (R-TX) informed Rubin of the committee’s investigation and called for documentation of any awards for a number of entities that have participated in censorship schemes. “It is clear that the Global Engagement Center (GEC) funded third parties who acted to censor and interfere with the revenue of certain small businesses (and their owners) based on their lawful speech,” the Republicans wrote.
“These third parties pressure advertising and social media companies to remove certain businesses’ online advertisements, disallow ad placement on businesses’ websites, remove online speech, and ban accounts entirely. The federal government cannot circumvent constitutional protections by using private actors to accomplish what the State itself is prohibited from doing.”
