What that portends depends very much on who you listen to:

At Wired, Noah Shachtman reports,

Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the move “a crucial step toward keeping the president’s promise to liberate American speech” in an op-ed for the right-wing site The Federalist. Critics say it’s part of a larger effort by the Trump administration to withdraw from a decades-long contest of ideas and information with America’s adversaries.

“Marco Rubio Kills State Department Anti-Propaganda Shop, Promises ‘Twitter Files’ Sequel,” April 16, 2025

Shachtman is clearly unhappy about the shutdown but admits:

The so-called “Twitter Files”—reports based on Musk’s release of internal company emails—seemed to show the GEC being far too aggressive in its attempts to tamp down on alleged COVID disinformation during at the end of Trump’s first term.

Violated its overseas-only mandate?

Image Credit: blvdone - Adobe Stock

Global Engagement Center was one of a number of agencies that have sprung up in recent years, dedicated to fighting “misinformation.” By no means everyone is unhappy about the demise of one of them:

Last December at RealClearPolitics, Gabe Kaminsky, who had run-ins with them, offered,

The Global Engagement Center, an office housed within the State Department and aiming to thwart disinformation and misinformation, has been forced by Congress to close up shop. It’s no mystery why; the taxpayer-backed GEC violated its mandate to work only overseas and devolved into a partisan enabler of speech suppression in the United States.

“Obama’s ‘Censorship’ Office Goes Bankrupt,” December 30, 2024

Among other things, he says,

Taibbi, the former Rolling Stone writer, demonstrated that the GEC pressured social media platforms in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to moderate extensive content, testifying to Congress in March 2023, “We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA.” “Goes Bankrupt,”

GEC appears to have been involved in a variety of covert censorship and deplatforming operations. But for the mostly unpolitical public, the wakeup call may have been the attempt to skew Covid news — because everyone was affected by that. The Twitter files offers a free front-row seat.