State Department Settles Censorship Lawsuit, Agrees to 10-Year Court Oversight Banning Domestic Speech Suppression

What the Settlement Requires

On April 1, 2026, a federal judge entered a consent decree in the case of The Daily Wire, The Federalist, Texas v. State Department, settling a lawsuit brought by the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) on behalf of those media outlets and the State of Texas. The consent decree was approved and published by NCLA on the same date.

Under the terms of the settlement, the State Department acknowledges that the plaintiffs engaged in constitutionally protected speech on topics including COVID-19, sexual ethics, biological definitions of sex, and election integrity. The State Department agrees it will not use, finance, or promote technology that suppresses or fact-checks constitutionally protected speech by Americans or domestic media outlets.

The decree also prohibits the State Department from working with foreign governments or non-governmental organizations — formally or informally — to suppress or fact-check protected American speech. The plaintiffs are designated as compliance monitors under the consent decree until 2036 — a period of 10 years, according to Just the News's reporting on April 1, 2026.

The Global Engagement Center and How It Worked

NCLA's lawsuit, filed during the Biden administration, alleged that the State Department's Global Engagement Center (GEC) used federal funding to promote approximately 300 "Countering Propaganda and Disinformation" tools. According to NCLA's April 1 press release, some of these tools primarily targeted domestic speech or press outlets rather than foreign adversaries.

The GEC encouraged private companies, government bodies in the United States and abroad, and non-governmental organizations to use these technologies to flag what the State Department characterized as domestic misinformation or disinformation — including on topics such as COVID-19, vaccines, and other domestic policy issues.

Among the specific entities cited in the lawsuit were NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index, both of which were financed or promoted through the GEC's network. According to NCLA, these entities demonetized domestic news organizations by categorizing them as unreliable or risky. The Daily Wire and The Federalist were among the outlets specifically targeted.

The settlement also requires the State Department to work to remove specific online material it funded, including "media literacy training" videos produced by Media Literacy Now that the lawsuit alleged denigrated The Daily Wire and The Federalist, according to the NCLA press release.

Prior Actions That Set the Stage

Secretary of State Marco Rubio published an op-ed in The Federalist in April 2025 announcing plans to abolish the Global Engagement Center, citing evidence developed in NCLA's lawsuit. Rubio described the GEC's financing of NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index as tools that demonetized domestic news organizations.

In September 2025, Acting Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Darren Beattie announced to The Daily Wire that the State Department was dismantling the GEC's remaining activities. Beattie stated that the former GEC framework had, in his characterization, devolved into tools for political censorship instead of protecting Americans from foreign adversarial propaganda, according to The Daily Wire's reporting at the time.

Congress declined to renew GEC funding in late 2024, but the Biden administration reallocated the program's activities within the State Department under the name Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference framework before leaving office.

Training and Compliance Obligations

Beyond the prohibition on future censorship activity, the consent decree imposes ongoing compliance requirements. In 2030 and again in 2035, the State Department will be required to train all its employees on how the First Amendment limits the government's ability to suppress Americans' constitutionally protected speech, according to NCLA's published summary of the decree.

NCLA noted in its press release that this settlement followed another major censorship-related settlement it had reached in the prior week, describing the organization as having been the first to recognize and sue over the Biden administration's whole-of-government censorship framework across social media platforms.

Key Statements on the Record

Zhonette Brown, General Counsel and Senior Litigation Counsel at NCLA, stated in the organization's April 1 press release: "When a government organization like the Global Engagement Center, which was founded and partially managed by persons with expertise in tactical 'psychological operations,' turns its efforts to discrediting American media, the First Amendment violation is obvious. The prohibitions, reporting, and training required by the Consent Decree will protect Free Speech for well more than the decade that the Decree is in force."

Margot Cleveland, Of Counsel at NCLA, said in the same press release: "The State Department, under the prior administration, sought to censor so-called disinformation regardless of whether the speech targeted raised national security concerns or the speaker was a foreign adversary or an American citizen or domestic media outlet. The Consent Decree ends that practice and prevents a future administration from returning to these unconstitutional ways."

Caleb Robinson, CEO of The Daily Wire, said in the NCLA press release: "Today marks an important day for preserving free speech in the digital era. The U.S. Government has acknowledged its censorship structures under the Biden Administration, and will now be subject to limitations on similar behavior in the future."

Context and Scope

The case is one of several legal challenges brought against what critics have called the federal government's "censorship industrial complex" — a network of government agencies, federally funded nonprofits, and private companies that coordinated to flag and suppress domestic online speech. A separate major Supreme Court case, Murthy v. Missouri (formerly Missouri v. Biden), addressed related allegations that the Biden White House and federal health agencies pressured social media platforms to remove content on COVID-19 and other topics.

The State Department's GEC was established under a 2016 law to counter foreign state propaganda and disinformation, particularly from Russia and China. The legal dispute centered on whether its subsequent domestic activities exceeded its congressional mandate and violated the First Amendment rights of American media outlets.

The consent decree is enforceable by the federal court that entered it. Its compliance period runs through 2036, during which The Daily Wire, The Federalist, and Texas serve as monitors empowered to bring enforcement actions if violations occur, according to Just the News's April 1 reporting on the settlement.