When Ahmed Younis first took a job at the State Department in September of 2016, the cross-country commute between his office in Washington, DC and his home in Los Angeles, where his wife and daughter live, seemed worth it. An Islamic scholar and college professor, he had been asked to help lead the State Department’s newly formed Global Engagement Center, whose mission is to fight terrorist propaganda, as well as the state-sponsored variety that Russia proliferated in the run-up to the 2016 election. For Younis, who had studied terrorist organizations and their messaging, the critical need for this kind of work made the weekly bicoastal trek worth it.

But one year later, the GEC's once-promising mission had become paralyzed by what Younis calls “administrative incompetence.” A lack of coherent policy priorities at the State Department and the absence of subject matter expertise among President Trump’s political appointees made it impossible to execute, Younis says. And so, just 11 months into the job, he, along with two other high-level analysts, left.

“Before the inauguration there was a very clear perspective on what the Global Engagement Center was supposed to be,” Younis recalls. “Once it became clear that wasn’t the reality, it made no sense for me to sacrifice that much for this government job.”

The US anti-propaganda effort extends beyond just the GEC; other corridors of the State Department and the Department of Defense monitor Russia's actions closely, as well. But even as Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle interrogate US tech companies about their role in disseminating this disinformation, former State Department staffers say that the government agency specifically tasked with analyzing and combating this issue has effectively been frozen.

“The headline is: There’s nothing that’s being done,” said one former State Department staffer. “On this issue of state aggression, I would say we’re doing almost zilch.”

Global Engagement

President Obama created the Global Engagement Center with an executive order in March of 2016. Its initial purpose was to track terrorist propaganda and disinformation online, to work across government agencies to craft coherent anti-terrorist messaging, and work with other governments and grassroots organizations to fight information warfare abroad. Much of the work focused on non-state threats, like ISIS, but the 2016 election demonstrated that state-sponsored disinformation, particularly from Russia, could have calamitous effects on democracies as well.

In July of last year, Republican senator Rob Portman and Democratic senator Chris Murphy introduced the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which created a second mission for the GEC: attacking state-sponsored propaganda. Even though the US government was aware of Russian meddling in the presidential election earlier, it wasn't until December, when President Obama signed the bill into law as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, that responding to this new threat fell under the GEC's purview.

'Countering terrorist messaging is a much different challenge than countering state sponsored propaganda.' Romesh Ratnesar, Former Chief of Staff for Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs

Initially, State Department officials expressed some skepticism that the GEC, essentially an 80-person startup within the State Department, could handle this new mission, says Romesh Ratnesar, former chief of staff in the office of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. "There was definitely concern that this was more than what the GEC could handle," he says. "Countering terrorist messaging is a much different challenge than countering state sponsored propaganda."

But Younis and other members of the team believed the key to understanding both threats was understanding how people are persuaded into beliefs online, and knowing how to counter those messages in speeches, on social media, and on the ground, with help from grassroots organizations. He also believed the GEC could act as the connective tissue between government agencies—from the Department of Defense to the State Department—that had already confronted the issue.

When President Trump took office, appointing former Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State, Younis anticipated the usual bureaucratic hurdles that accompany any new administration. But the hurdles his team faced in the first year of Trump’s tenure were higher than anyone expected.