EXCLUSIVE — Republican lawmakers are accusing the State Department of wasting taxpayer dollars over a newly released program to train journalists in Africa on “fact-checking” and fighting so-called disinformation and misinformation.
The Biden administration plans to award one eligible organization an estimated $250,000 to lead the initiative, which is run through the Department of State’s Bureau of African Affairs, according to funding documents. The grant announcement, which was quietly made on Friday, comes as the broader agency faces a flurry of lawsuits and congressional investigations for similar programs the GOP says are promoting censorship of conservative voices online.
“Of all the things the Biden State Department could be doing with American tax dollars, exporting their censorship regime to developing countries is both the least helpful and, sadly, the most unsurprising,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) told the Washington Examiner. “Leftist bureaucrats telling people what to think will be as poorly received overseas as they are here at home.”
According to the funding documents, the recipient of the federal funds will plan a series of workshops on “understanding and identifying misinformation/disinformation” and its impact, “fact-checking, online/offline content verification methods,” and how artificial intelligence fits into identifying alleged falsehoods. The project will last six months and “consist of online presentations and dialogues between American experts and African audiences, discussing theories and case studies, and sharing best practices, strategies, and resources,” the Biden administration said.
In a statement to the Washington Examiner, the State Department pushed back on the idea that it engages in censorship of speech.
“The best tool to fight disinformation is more information that empowers audiences to understand the true source and intention behind the information they are consuming — this way they can make the best decisions for themselves and their communities,” an agency spokesperson said. “That is the intention of this program.”
But to Republicans in Congress, who helped pass a law banning the Pentagon from funding certain groups accused of censorship and have overseen investigations into the Global Disinformation Index and other entities, the State Department perpetually props up GDI and other censorious activist hubs that unfairly target conservatives.
The State Department’s Global Engagement Center, a foreign-focused office formed during the Obama administration, is notably facing a lawsuit from conservative media outlets for funding GDI and a New York-based company rating news outlets called NewsGuard. The plaintiffs say the Global Engagement Center funded an unconstitutional “censorship scheme” to “covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press,” citing reporting from the Washington Examiner on GDI secretly blacklisting right-of-center websites from advertising dollars.
Therefore, Republicans say they don’t trust the agency’s determinations on what constitutes disinformation or misinformation, including overseas.
“It appears many of the awards have been given inappropriately to entities that are acting outside of Congress’ intent,” said Rep. Roger Williams (R-TX), chairman of the House Small Business Committee, which is investigating the State Department over “government censorship and revenue interference of American small businesses by proxy.”
The Africa-focused grant “is a prime example of something this administration is funding abroad that doesn’t benefit America,” Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) told the Washington Examiner.
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN), who, like Mast, sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called the new program “a complete waste of taxpayer dollars.” The GOP-led panel recently investigated the Biden administration for funding GDI.
The State Department said in the funding documents that the Africa-focused program aims to thwart “false narratives” that “have directly incited violent conflicts, supported political turmoil, intimidated members of civil society into silence, and obscured acts of corruption and exploitation.” Moreover, there is a “clear correlation” between “disinformation and societal unrest,” the U.S. government said in the documents.
“There are certainly issues in Africa we should be addressing, like the U.S. pulling our troops out of Niger and scam callers in places like South Africa ripping off American seniors,” Burchett said. “But Americans’ hard-earned money should not be used to combat disinformation and cyberbullying against journalists on another continent.”
Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA), another GOP lawmaker who has long accused the government of censoring disfavored speech, is also concerned about the program.
“Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars should never be wasted on unelected bureaucrats’ censorship efforts to combat ‘disinformation’ — here or abroad,” Clyde told the Washington Examiner.
“This concerning use of federal funds should certainly be up on the chopping block as we craft fiscal year 2025 appropriations bills,” Clyde said. “Given our unsustainable economic outlook, Congress must get our nation’s fiscal house in order by significantly cutting spending – starting with ridiculously wasteful and unnecessary programs like this one.”
The African program, which aims to target countries such as Cote d’Ivoire, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Central Africa, and Sierra Leone, is hardly an anomaly when it comes to State Department funding. The agency announced in 2022 it was spending up to $100,000 to fly Africans into the U.S. to train them on how to “combat disinformation and deceptive news,” records show.
That same year, the Biden administration said it was using federal funds to educate youth in Cambodia on disinformation and misinformation, records also show.
The May 2024 grant posting, which is titled “Understanding and Countering Disinformation for African Journalists,” is accepting applications until June. Its existence is also raising concerns among some outside conservative groups.
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“This is just another example of the woke Biden administration misusing American taxpayer funds and putting America last,” said Wade Miller, vice president of Center for Renewing America, a think tank led by ex-top Trump administration official Russell Vought.
“When ‘fighting disinformation amongst journalists in Africa’ is a priority over combating the issues we face in our own country, there is a huge problem,” Miller said.
