Rubio joins GOP coalition to defund Biden's censorship bureau

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio joined Sen. Tom Cotton and a group of conservative legislators in introducing a bill that would effectively prohibit any taxpayer funds from being used to establish the Biden administration’s new “Disinformation Governance Board” at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. 

According to the legislation, "no Federal funds may be used to establish or support the activities of a Disinformation Governance Board at the Department of Homeland Security, or any other similar entity established in the Department of Homeland Security." 

“The Biden administration wants a government agency dedicated to cracking down on what its subjects can say, an idea popular with Orwellian governments everywhere," Cotton said in a press release. 

“The Biden Administration’s new ‘Ministry of Truth’ is dangerously authoritarian,” Rubio said. “Labeling speech as ‘disinformation’ is the first step for federal censorship and the end of the First Amendment. It has to be defunded.” 

Similarly, in an op-ed published in the National Review, Rubio warned that “under the guise of homeland security, the Biden administration is setting up a new Disinformation Governance Board.”
 
“To maintain their grip on power, authoritarians must control the spread of thoughts and ideas. Discrediting speech that threatens the ruling class is one way to establish that control — and what better way to do that than labelling it disinformation?”

“For President Biden to take America down the same path as China, Cuba, and Nicaragua is alarming,” he added.

Last month, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Congress that his agency had created a "Disinformation Governance Board” which will focus on "misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia," Politico reported.  

During a House Appropriations Committee hearing, Democratic Rep. Lauren Underwood asked Mayorkas what DHS was doing to combat the targeting of minorities in disinformation campaigns. The secretary replied that his agency was establishing the board with Undersecretary for Policy Rob Silvers and Principal Deputy General Counsel Jennifer Gaskill as cochairs and Nina Jankowicz, who served as a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center, serving as the board’s executive director.

"The goal is to bring the resources of the department together to address this threat," he said.

Since its announcement, however, Republicans have warned against the new body and many critics have gone as far as to compare it to Orwell’s 1984.

Along with Sens. Cotton and Rubio, Sens. Todd Young, John Boozman, Ted Cruz, Rick Scott, Jim Risch, Roger Marshall, Mike Crapo, Mike Lee, Thom Tillis, Cindy Hyde-Smith, Marsha Blackburn, Joni Ernst, Cynthia Lummis, Mike Braun, John Kennedy, James Lankford and Kevin Cramer co-signed the bill.