Inside the GOP’s tense negotiations with Democrats to ban Pentagon-funded ‘censorship’

The final draft of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, an $886 billion spending bill released this week by the Senate and House armed services committees, includes an amendment Republicans hope will stop the Pentagon from contracting with groups “censoring” conservatives.

That provision, which along with others will need to pass both chambers and receive President Joe Biden‘s signature before becoming law, made it into the bill text after House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Republicans fought “tooth and nail” with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), according to eight congressional staffers and sources familiar with the high-level negotiations. It is also, in part, a result of a Washington Examiner investigation into how the State Department-housed Global Engagement Center, an interagency group working with the Defense Department, granted $100,000 in 2021 to the Global Disinformation Index, a British think tank pressuring advertisers to defund conservative news outlets.

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“For the first time ever, the NDAA will prevent the Pentagon from using any advertiser for recruitment that uses biased censorship entities like NewsGuard and GDI,” Taylor Haulsee, a spokesman for the House speaker, told the Washington Examiner. “This is a massive step in the right direction in the fight against censorship in America ensuring the Biden administration is not sabotaging our military’s recruitment efforts.”

The release of the bill text on Wednesday came one day after the state of Texas joined two conservative news outlets, the Federalist and the Daily Wire, in filing a lawsuit against the State Department accusing the agency of “one of the most egregious government operations to censor the American press in the history of the nation.” The lawsuit cited how the Global Engagement Center and Pentagon awarded grants or contracts to GDI and NewsGuard, a New York-based “misinformation” tracking company that rates media organizations on purported accuracy.

GDI, in particular, is far less transparent than NewsGuard on its ratings system and does not make public the outlets on its “dynamic exclusion list,” which GDI feeds monthly to advertisers to inform them of which media operations they should defund. The British group has alleged in public reports that the “riskiest” outlets for “disinformation” include the Federalist, the Daily Wire, the New York Post, Newsmax, and other right-leaning companies. Following the Washington Examiner first reporting on GDI and its covert blacklist in February, the State Department-backed National Endowment for Democracy, a nonprofit group, announced it would no longer fund the British group after granting GDI roughly $860,000 from 2020 to 2022.

Microsoft launched an internal investigation into its relationship with GDI earlier this year, followed by Oracle cutting ties with the think tank over “free speech” concerns. However, Microsoft later stonewalled on providing any details about its review, and declined a request for comment from the Washington Examiner on Friday.

‘State-sponsored censorship’

The NDAA amendment on NewsGuard and GDI specifically pertains to “military recruitment advertisements” and would require the Pentagon to certify entities receiving contracts in connection to this process don’t “place advertisements in news sources based on personal or institutional political preferences or biases, or determinations of misinformation,” according to the bill text. Moreover, the amendment holds that the Pentagon would have to “submit a notification” to Congress if the agency ever does enter into “a contract related to the placement of recruitment advertising” with NewsGuard, GDI, and “any similar entity” that purports to track “misinformation.”

NewsGuard “has not had and does not have any contracts with the Pentagon relating to recruitment advertising, nor have we ever sought any,” NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz told the Washington Examiner. The Global Engagement Center notably awarded NewsGuard $50,000 in 2022 to lend its “Misinformation Fingerprints database” technology to the government “to track how false Russian claims are picked up and promoted by propaganda operations run by the socialist government of Venezuela, including to spread these claims to other countries in Latin America,” according to Crovitz.

GDI did not return a request for comment.

“NewsGuard’s work for the Pentagon instead relates to identifying and analyzing disinformation operations against the U.S. and our allies launched by hostile state actors such as Russia, China, Iran, and Hamas,” Crovitz, former publisher for the Wall Street Journal, said in a statement. “We are proud to help defend citizens of Western democracies from this information warfare.”

AP Images/Washington Examiner/Canva Collage/Mike Johnson and Lloyd Austin

Still, many Republicans are pleased with the NDAA’s “disinformation” amendment language, viewing it as a historic congressional action to thwart what they have continued to dub the “Censorship Industrial Complex.” The Biden administration likely skirted the First Amendment while urging social media companies “to remove disfavored content and accounts from their sites,” an arrangement heavily covered in the “Twitter Files,” sets of documents X Owner Elon Musk released to journalists showing the company’s communications with the U.S. government about content moderation under ex-CEO Jack Dorsey, according to a federal appellate court’s September ruling in the landmark free speech case Missouri v. Biden.

“This amendment is a monumental step forward in protecting the freedom of speech and combating state-sponsored censorship,” said Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO), who, as the Show-Me State’s attorney general in 2022, led Missouri v. Biden.

“Previous to this amendment, in certain instances, the Biden administration would not allow the military to place recruiting advertisements in conservative media outlets,” Schmitt told the Washington Examiner. “Excluding conservative-minded Republicans from recruiting efforts is unacceptable and undermines this administration’s efforts to cast a wide net when trying to address our military’s record lows in recruiting.”

The 2024 NDAA amendment stems from Rep. Rich McCormick’s (R-GA) proposal in June called “Prohibition on Availability of Funds Relating to Censorship or Blacklisting of News Sources Based on Subjective Criteria or Political Biases.” The amendment from McCormick, a freshman member who served in the Marine Corps and Navy, broadly sought to ban Pentagon funds for any reason to NewsGuard, GDI, a New York-based company called Graphika Inc., or “any other entity the function of which is to advise the censorship or blacklisting of news sources based on subjective criteria or political biases, under the stated function of ‘fact checking’ or otherwise removing ‘misinformation,'” documents show.

But as NDAA negotiations escalated, Schumer and Durbin grew increasingly angry with GOP-led attempts to target these entities, and Republicans had to become creative in finding ways to directly name NewsGuard and GDI, in particular, in the bill text, or else lose the “misinformation”-related provision altogether.

‘Schumer and Durbin were really pissed’

One person, who was granted anonymity by the Washington Examiner to discuss confidential discussions, said NewsGuard reached out to McCormick’s office to lobby the congressman on why the company preferred that the proposal not be sweeping, and, instead, focus on military recruitment advertising.

J. Scott Applewhite

A second person familiar with the NewsGuard-McCormick discussions, however, relayed the situation in a different way. NewsGuard didn’t make “language suggestions” and, instead, urged the proposal to be “dropped” completely in meetings with McCormick’s office, according to that individual.

“Essentially, the gist of it was they plead their case for innocence and they weren’t biased in attempts to stop disinformation,” the second person said. “Their claim was there was disinformation from some of the conservative outlets.”

Julie Singleton, a McCormick spokeswoman, told the Washington Examiner her office is “grateful to Speaker Johnson for his hard work to keep this amendment in the final language of the NDAA.”

“At the end of the day, we are grateful that some of the language still made it in, because that’s the only significant language that addresses censorship that’s going to pass this year,” Singleton said. “That’s a Republican win. It didn’t go as far as it did in our original amendment. This is still good progress for free speech.”

A senior Republican Senate aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said “Schumer and Durbin were really pissed about” the GDI and NewsGuard amendment. The person emphasized that the amendment is “pretty strong” given Democrats control the Senate and presidency and that the amendment will “reform the contracting process to bar these organizations from conservative media censorship.”

At the same time, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC), a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, thinks a constant problem with Congress is that bills become watered down when they head to the Senate. Therefore, he and other like-minded Republicans “aren’t going to pass the NDAA anyway,” he told the Washington Examiner, asserting it isn’t strong enough on border security and is “dead on arrival.”

“What they’re doing is taking the teeth out of it,” Norman said in an interview. “It’s like running a stoplight and saying, ‘there’s no fine.'”

‘Victory for free speech’

Jacquelyn Martin/AP

As a whole, the NDAA has come under fire from certain Republicans for not prioritizing “culture war” issues. Lawmakers, including Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) of the Freedom Caucus, have been sharing a graphic on social media this week blasting the NDAA for not banning race-based curricula in schools, government-sponsored transgender drag shows, and taxpayer-backed gender transition surgeries, among other policy suggestions.

Heritage Action, one of the most influential conservative advocacy groups in the United States, came out on Thursday in opposition to the NDAA, particularly because the bill includes a short-term extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a law that has faced congressional scrutiny in recent years for allowing the government to spy on foreigners without a warrant. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) is also opposed to the NDAA, posting on X Friday, “After all we’ve learned about the FBI in recent years, the fact that some members of Congress are still willing to reauthorize FISA 702 without reforms — not even a warrant requirement for ‘backdoor’ surveillance of Americans — makes me wonder if they’re illiterate.”

As for the NewsGuard and GDI amendment, several conservative media outlets are happy with how it turned out, including Newsmax, which lobbied Congress in favor of it and views the amendment as a “major step forward,” according to a source familiar.

“This is the first absolute, unadulterated victory for free speech we’ve had against the Biden censorship regime,” Dan Schneider, vice president for Media Research Center’s Free Speech Alliance group, told the Washington Examiner. “There have been partial victories along the way, but this is the first absolute one from a legislative standpoint.”

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The Senate and House Armed Services committees declined to comment.

Spokespeople for Schumer, Durbin, the Pentagon, and GDI did not reply to requests for comment.