The Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub is a small office in the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy that tracks and counters foreign disinformation campaigns.
In shutting R/FIMI, the department’s controversial acting undersecretary, Darren Beattie, is delivering a major win to conservative critics who have alleged that it censors conservative voices. Created at the end of 2024, it was reorganized from the Global Engagement Center, a larger office with a similar mission that had long been criticized by conservatives who claimed that, despite its international mission, it was censoring American conservatives. In 2023, Elon Musk called the center the “worst offender in US government censorship [and] media manipulation” and a “threat to our democracy.”
The culling of the office will leave the State Department without a way to actively counter the increasingly sophisticated disinformation campaigns from foreign governments like those of Russia, Iran, and China. The office could be shuttered as soon as today, according to sources at the State Department who spoke with MIT Technology Review.
Shortly after publication, employees at R/FIMI received an email inviting them to an 11:15AM meeting with Beattie, where employees were told that the office—and their jobs— is being eliminated.
Censorship claims
For years, conservative voices both in and out of government have accused Big Tech of censoring conservative views—and they often charged R/FIMI’s predecessor office, the Global Engagement Center (GEC), with enabling such censorship.
GEC had its roots as the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC), created by an Obama-era executive order, but shifted its mission to fight propaganda and disinformation from foreign governments and terrorist organizations in 2016, becoming the Global Engagement Center. It was always explicitly focused on the international information space. It shut down last December after a measure to reauthorize its $61 million budget was blocked by Republicans in Congress, who accused it of helping Big Tech censor American conservative voices.
R/FIMI had a similar goal of fighting foreign disinformation, but it was smaller: The office had a $51.9 million budget and a staff that, by mid-April, was down to just 40 employees, from 125 at GEC. Sources say that those employees will be put on administrative leave and terminated within 30 days.
With the change in administrations, R/FIMI had never really gotten off the ground. Beattie, a controversial pick for undersecretary—he was fired as a speechwriter during the first Trump administration for attending a white nationalism conference, has suggested that the FBI organized the January 6 attack on Congress, and has said that it’s not worth defending Taiwan from China—had instructed the few remaining staff to be “pencils down,” one State Department official told me, meaning to pause in their work.
