A conservative legal group is probing the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for its involvement with entities that engaged in censorship during the Biden administration.
The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) pushed USAID on Wednesday to turn over any communications between its staff and private groups that may have developed or used censorship tools to target protected speech, according to a Freedom of Information Act request reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“The U.S. government should defend our First Amendment right to free speech,” ADF Legal Counsel Logan Spena said in a statement to the DCNF. “Federal officials should champion those rights, not threaten them, and not look for ways to get around them by inducing private groups to do their censoring for them. Officials under the previous administration have tried to do that. In the name of countering so-called ‘disinformation,’ they’ve gone after speech deemed unfavorable to the government.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Monday that 83% of programs funded by USAID — a total of 5,200 contracts involving “tens of billions of dollars” — would be canceled.
USAID Acting Executive Director Erica Carron directed staff on Tuesday to shred or burn documents from the agency’s classified safes and personnel documents, according to an email obtained by CBS News.
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly called the CBS report “fake news hysteria” Tuesday on X, noting USAID’s building would soon be occupied by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
“This was sent to roughly three dozen employees,” Kelly wrote. “The documents involved were old, mostly courtesy content (content from other agencies), and the originals still exist on classified computer systems.”
President Donald Trump signed an executive order implementing a freeze on foreign aid funding. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has worked to dismantle USAID due to its spending on projects such as Peruvian transgender comic books and a transgender clinic in Vietnam.
USAID also developed a “Disinformation Primer” resource in 2021 that outlines potential solutions for combatting disinformation, including fact-checking, making social media platforms “democratically accountable” and working with advertisers to “disrupt the funding and financial incentive to disinform.” The document states that “cutting this financial support found in the ad tech space would obstruct disinformation actors from spreading messaging online.”
“Americans have a right to know how their money has been used to support censorship,” Spena said. “Our country should never police the activity of citizens simply because of their political views.”
ADF’s Center for Free Speech has submitted several other requests seeking information about government involvement in the “censorship-industrial complex” and potential free speech violations.
In February, ADF asked the National Science Foundation (NSF) to supply information about its funding of censorship tools and cooperation with platforms to moderate speech. The legal group also requested information from five major universities that received grants, including from the NSF, to develop tools that target speech.
The DCNF reported on NSF funded censorship tools in 2023. An NSF official suggested pulling videos about the NSF funded projects from YouTube after the DCNF’s report, according to a House Judiciary Committee report.
Trump signed a day one executive order on “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship” to ensure federal officials and taxpayer dollars would not “unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”
The State Department and USAID did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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