A $1.2 trillion spending bill just rushed through the House of Representatives in the US has enabled allocation of funding to what would have been prohibited recipients/policies.
This includes earmarking money in support of censorship efforts, a US CBDC (central bank digital currency), and vaccine mandates, among other things.
In a series of posts on X, Representative Andrew Clyde singled out examples from the 1,000+ page document, which was published early on Thursday giving members of the House less than 24 hours to decide on how to vote.
Clyde was one of the Republicans who held no punches in slamming the bill as a result of backroom deals, saying that what he referred to as “the Swamp” (i.e., Washington) is about to bankroll some “catastrophic policies” with huge amounts of money.
The Department of State’s controversial Global Engagement Center (GEC) is one of those that benefit from the bill, as is to get funds to supposedly target only foreign countries and non-state actors engaged in “propaganda and misinformation.”
But the reasons GEC has gotten itself in the news have been allegations that its activities so far also targeted lawful speech of Americans.
Some instances of this behavior, known as “government-Big Tech collusion” are subject to lawsuits, as GEC is accused of acting as a linchpin in White House’s effort to utilize private companies for censorship the government is constitutionally prohibited from getting involved in.
In his posts, Clyde refers to this as “government-by-proxy censorship,” and prohibiting the Financial Services and General Government (FSGG), as well as State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs (SFOPS) from spending funds toward this are also now provisions missing from the bill.
Another has to do with preventing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from coming up with another entity like the short-lived Disinformation Governance Board, or funding its “resurrection.”
The same goes for the ban on the Department of Defense giving or renewing security clearance to intelligence officers implicated in the conspiracy theory “explaining” the Hunter Biden laptop scandal as “Russian disinformation,” which turned out to be false.
And last but not least, according to the congressman, the spending bill “surrendered a provision that would have prohibited the Treasury Department from establishing a US CBDC or discontinuing paper currency.”
