By Joshua Arnold

How far will the Biden administration go to block speech it doesn’t like? The outer limit may never be reached, but it does go international, according to an interim report by the House Committee on Small Business (HCSB) published earlier this week.

“The Global Engagement Center (GEC), an interagency body housed within the U.S. Department of State … circumvented its strict international mandate by funding, developing, then promoting tech start-ups and other small businesses in the disinformation detection space to private sector entities with domestic censorship capabilities,” stated the report. Additionally, “The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a private non-profit funded almost entirely by Congressional appropriations, violated its international restrictions by collaborating with fact-checking entities in assessing domestic press businesses’ admission to a credibility organization.”

The GEC’s proclivity toward domestic censorship was already exposed by a House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government report in November 2023, which exposed its collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and big-tech companies to censor disfavored political viewpoints during the 2020 election. This collaboration was separate from the DHS’s short-lived Orwellian innovation in the spring of 2022, the justly stillborn Disinformation Governance Board.

Where the HCSB broke new ground was in identifying ways that government funding was inappropriately subsidizing a burgeoning censorship industry — specifically by using foreign-only funds to subsidize domestic censorship projects. It focused on the GEC because it “is the only Federal entity known to this Committee: (1) whose purpose is countering foreign disinformation that threatens the United States, … [and] (3) that administers taxpayer dollars to small private entities that interfere with the ability of American businesses to compete online because of their lawful speech.”

The HCSB report identified multiple instances where GEC awards were subcontracted to other groups. This practice decreases the transparency of these awards, since the State Department has refused to inform the committee of all subaward recipients, and in some cases professes not to know who received a subaward. However, the committee did uncover enough information to raise further concerns about “GEC’s compliance with its international mandate.”

For instance, “one such award was to the Institute of War & Peace Reporting (IWPR), which administered a subaward to the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, Inc. (Poynter),” detailed the committee. “This subaward was used to convince international news outlets to join Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network’s (IFCN) Code of Principles. … To join the Code of Principles, organizations must apply and be accepted by the IFCN’s assessors.”

“It appears that[,] in implementing this award, GEC staff was added to a Google Group email in which IFCN assessors (including representatives from the NED and fact-checking organizations Snopes, Full Fact, and Poynter/IFCN) critiqued applicants, including domestic businesses such as The Daily Caller and its fact-checking organization,” continued the HCSB report. At the very least, this means that GEC staff were aware that, despite their strict international mandate, this award affected domestic, American media.

The committee also noted NED’s role in this domestic enterprise. “As set forth in its Articles of Incorporation and the National Endowment for Democracy Act, it is a violation of the NED’s mandate to operate domestically, and therefore to interfere with the operations of domestic press,” stated the report. It found evidence that NED staff weighed in, from their official email addresses, on the credibility of U.S.-based media organizations. On February 22, 2021, NED program officer Dean Jackson wrote:

“On the other hand, you really have to ask yourself if you want to be featured on a website with a history of [here he linked to a Snopes article claiming that ‘many’ Daily Caller writers had expressed white supremacist views, when in fact they exposed one who was immediately fired], next to headlines like [here he linked to a Daily Caller article titled, ‘Public Schools Are Becoming Cesspools Of Woke Liberal Activism. What Happened?’]. It’s something everyone has to answer for themselves. I personally wouldn’t lend them the credibility.”

Jackson worked for a federally-funded organization whose strictly international mandate prevented them from interfering with the operations of domestic press. Yet, using his work email, he publicly opined about the credibility of a domestic news organization based on how they covered domestic education topics.

Jackson no longer works for NED. In fact, he left NED in June 2021 for a position with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a left-wing group. During his two years there, he also worked as an analyst on the January 6 subcommittee. Jackson’s post-NED resume demonstrates not only his political leanings but also the left-wing ecosystem in which the National Endowment for Democracy exists.

The political bias on display with NED underscores why federally-funded non-governmental organizations should stay out of domestic media markets in the first place. In the last century, the U.S. government founded Voice of America (VOA) to counter propaganda coming from hostile foreign governments. But it restricted VOA’s reach on U.S. soil precisely to safeguard the freedom of the press. The committee report recognized that organizations like GEC have a role to play in countering propaganda from new hostile actors, ranging from pro-terrorist Imams to states like Iran, Russia, and China.

But there should still be guardrails to protect the freedom of domestic, American press from undue government interference. The HCSB report describes how the GEC and NED overrode those guardrails.

The HCSB identified another award “to a small domestic business” that was “not subject to international restrictions” and affected domestic news media. The GEC awarded contracts to Park Capital Investment Group, LLC (Park Advisors), which had a residential address on the GEC contract list and is now defunct. In 2020 and 2022, Park Advisors sub-awarded a total of $75,000 to a tech start-up, NewsGuard, which created new methodology for evaluating the trustworthiness or “health” of news organizations.

The HCSB did not have to search far to find bias in NewsGuard’s ratings. It found misleading headlines in mainstream media articles (regarding the Trump assassination attempt and a malicious misquotation to imply that Trump promised a “bloodbath” if he lost the election) and noted that these headlines did not affect NewsGuard’s scoring system.

In a few short years, NewsGuard has “partnered with three of the top five global advertising agencies and five of the top ten ad exchanges,” as well as Microsoft, YouTube, and other companies to discredit certain news organizations and “influence[] thousands of ad buys.” The report suggests, at least implicitly, that NewsGuard’s rapid rise was due in part to the patronage of the GEC.

The HCSB report is only an interim report because of aggressive stonewalling on the part of the State Department. To date, the committee has reviewed 40 hours of interviews and hearings, as well as 6,185 pages of documents, but largely from other sources. “The Committee sent an initial request for award records to the GEC on June 7, 2023,” the report summarized. “Subsequent requests for additional documentation were made over the course of one year, during which the Committee gave significant leeway in time and scope to State. Despite these accommodations, only two heavily redacted lists of awardees were produced, with none of the requested award application, risk assessment, or contract information.”

After 14 months of such delays, the small business committee issued a subpoena for the relevant documents. The State Department responded that it would take them 21 months — nearly a whole Congress — to fulfill it. This is an unacceptably long time, the report noted. Not only has the State Department already had months to collect the information, but the State Department should already have many of the documents compiled in response to requests from other committees. “The aforementioned failures are all indicative of a wider problem experienced by other committees — that the Biden-Harris Administration does not properly adhere to Congressional oversight,” they stated.

“The Federal government is a primary component of the CIC [censorship-industrial complex], and it is this nexus which concerns the Committee,” summarized the HCSB report. Due to the nature of the committee, their particular area of concern is the award of State Department grants to small businesses. “There are some awardees who tout ideological beliefs as fact, and work to diminish the reputation of American businesses if their speech negates those narratives,” it stated. “The Committee has received only a fraction of the documents it requested and subpoenaed from the GEC …. There is much more to learn[,] and transparency is in short supply.”

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.