After more than two years of litigation, The Federalist successfully negotiated a deal with the State Department to end the lingering effects of the Global Engagement Center’s unconstitutional and ultra vires targeting of domestic media outlets and to ensure a future administration does not restart the censorship activities that flourished under the Biden Administration.
The Federalist and The Daily Wire filed suit against the State Department, its Global Engagement Center, and several officers and employees in December of 2023. The complaint filed by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a public interest firm committed to fighting the administrative state, alleged violations of the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and freedom of the press and also alleged the defendants exceeded their statutory authority, which was limited to foreign affairs.
Early Wednesday, attorneys representing The Federalist and The Daily Wire filed a Motion for Entry of a Consent Decree, along with a detailed Consent Decree which places significant limitations on the State Department’s ability to target speech — or fund tech companies which target speech — under the guise of fighting misinformation and disinformation. The Consent Decree includes an injunction that details activities that State Department, its employees, and its contractors, “shall take or not take .,,”
Among other things, the State Department and those acting on its behalf can no longer “request or recommend that third parties use electronic tools or technologies to knowingly or intentionally suppress, censor, demonetize, or downgrade constitutionally protected speech of Americans or domestic media outlets.” The State Department is also barred from funding, promoting, or assisting in the testing or development of so-called Countering Propaganda and Disinformation tools or technologies which seek to suppress, censor, demonetize, downgrade, or fact-check “the constitutionally protected speech of Americans or domestic media outlets.”
Discovery evidence obtained by the plaintiffs revealed that the GEC had regularly promoted technologies that targeted domestic speech, such as NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index, also known as GDI, including to technology companies and foreign governments. NewsGuard and GDI branded The Federalist and the Daily Wire as unreliable or risky, costing both media outlets advertising revenues and negatively impacting their reach.
While under the Biden Administration, the State Department and the GEC maintained throughout the litigation that they only targeted foreign misinformation, discovery evidence told a different story. And following President Trump’s election and the confirmation of Marco Rubio as secretary of state, the new administration took steps to halt the violation of the First Amendment rights of Americans.
In a piece published at The Federalist in April of 2025, Secretary Rubio announced “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).” While Congress had previously allowed GEC’s funding to lapse, the Biden Administration quietly reassigned the staff to a newly created “Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R-FIMI) office …”
“Today, we are putting that to an end. Whatever name it goes by, GEC is dead. It will not return,” Secretary Rubio wrote.
But the destruction of GEC did not end the harm, for GEC had compiled hundreds of reports on various censorship tools and technologies, many of which targeted only (or mostly) American speech. Those assessments remained floating around. The Consent Decree, however, prohibits the State Department from sharing those or other materials compiled to target domestic speech.
The Consent Decree also provides assurances that a future administration will not reverse course and create a new center to stealthily prompt technology companies to censor Americans’ speech. Nor will a future administration be able to fund grants to assist in the development of tools and technologies that target domestic media outlets or domestic speakers — something discovery evidence confirmed the GEC did.
On an annual basis, the State Department must verify its compliance with the Consent Decree and inform its employees of the terms of the court order. The Consent Decree also requiring the State Department to provide training to employees on the limits the First Amendment places on their activities.
Prior to settling the case, the State Department reproduced select documents for the plaintiffs during the discovery process, removing the confidentiality designation. With the confidentiality designation removed, the plaintiffs are now free to share a few dozen documents with the public, which they will do over the coming days and weeks. Those documents confirm the State Department and GEC viewed themselves as ministers of truth and rarely distinguished between foreign and domestic speech.
Yet, hundreds of other documents were withheld by the State Department during discovery based on claims of the deliberative-process privilege. Some of the third parties subpoenaed likewise withheld responsive documents, or in the case of GDI, designed everything it produced as “attorney’s eyes only,” meaning The Federalist and The Daily Wire remain in the dark concerning the potentially nefarious dealings revealed by those documents. In short, the country may have learned a lot about the censorship industrial complex, but much remains hidden.
Nonetheless, today’s filings represent a victory for free speech, with the government acknowledging that yes, The Federalist and The Daily Wire’s coverage of topics, including everything from COVID, gender-identity, and abortion, to election integrity, was indeed constitutionally protected. And now added to those First Amendment protections are the many detailed protections contained in the Consent Decree, which awaits the judge’s signature.
In addition to serving as The Federalist’s Senior Legal Correspondent, Margot Cleveland is Of Counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance and served as lead counsel in The Daily Wire/The Federalist v. State Department.
Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion, National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press.
She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance.
Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
