The US State Department has settled a lawsuit brought by The Daily Wire, The Federalist, and the State of Texas, accepting a consent decree that bars it from using, financing, or promoting technology designed to suppress or “fact-check” the constitutionally protected speech of American citizens and domestic media outlets.
The settlement also prohibits the Department from working with foreign governments or NGOs for those purposes, whether through formal agreements or informal arrangements.
We obtained a copy of the joint motion for you here.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance, which represented The Daily Wire and The Federalist, secured what amounts to a binding admission that the government had been doing exactly what it was accused of. The Department now acknowledges that its plaintiffs’ speech on COVID-19, sexual ethics, the biological nature of sex, and election integrity was constitutionally protected all along. It took three years of litigation to get the government to say that out loud.
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The consent decree runs until 2036. The Daily Wire and The Federalist will serve as compliance monitors, receiving annual reports from the State Department on its activities.
If violations surface and go uncorrected, a federal judge in Texas has the authority to force the Department into compliance. The agreement is binding on future administrations, meaning the next president, whoever that is, inherits the same restrictions.
The mechanism that made all of this possible was the Global Engagement Center, a State Department office originally tasked with countering foreign propaganda. The GEC funded, marketed, and promoted roughly 300 “Countering Propaganda and Disinformation” tools. Some of those tools were aimed at foreign adversaries. Others targeted American news outlets that published stories the government didn’t like.
Companies like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index received GEC-linked funding and used it to brand domestic outlets as unreliable or risky.
The effect was financial. Advertisers were encouraged to pull spending from outlets that appeared on these blacklists, and the outlets that kept showing up were the ones running stories that challenged government messaging on Covid-19, vaccines, and elections. The Daily Wire and The Federalist were among them. The GEC didn’t delete their articles. It tried to starve them of revenue instead.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio first confirmed the core allegations in an April 2025 op-ed published, pointedly, at The Federalist, where he announced plans to abolish the GEC entirely.
Congress had already declined to renew the GEC’s funding in late 2024. The Biden Administration responded by moving its operations to a different office inside the State Department and giving it a new name, the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference framework. Same people, same activities, different letterhead.
The settlement also requires the State Department to remove specific material it funded, including “media literacy training” videos produced by Media Literacy Now that targeted The Daily Wire and The Federalist by name. “Media literacy” has become a preferred euphemism for government-adjacent efforts to tell people which outlets they should and shouldn’t trust.
These particular videos, funded with taxpayer money, told viewers that two specific publications were not to be believed. The State Department will train all employees in 2030 and 2035 on how the First Amendment limits the government’s ability to suppress Americans’ speech.
This settlement lands less than a week after the NCLA settled Missouri v. Biden, the companion case that barred the CDC, CISA, and the US Surgeon General from threatening social media companies into censoring protected speech on Facebook, Instagram, X, and YouTube. The two consent decrees represent the most significant legal constraints placed on the federal government’s censorship apparatus since it was first exposed.
The pattern these cases revealed should worry anyone who values free expression, regardless of political alignment. Government agencies used taxpayer money to fund private companies that rated and suppressed domestic media. They encouraged social media platforms to censor viewpoints that contradicted official messaging. They did all of this while claiming to fight “disinformation,” a category that the government itself got to define, redefine, and apply at will.
