An explosive new report from Open the Books investigates how the U.S. government is using your tax dollars to silence free speech, targeting those who dare to go against “approved” narratives.
According to the report, “Since 2021, the Biden-Harris administration has spent $267 million on research grants with the term ‘misinformation’ in the proposal.”
The report reveals that $127M was spent just on studying and countering Covid-related speech alone.
President Trump’s incoming Chairman of the FCC, Brendan Carr, has already signaled his intent to address the issue. He recently sent a letter to the CEOs of Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft on the central roles their companies have played in the censorship cartel.
In his letter, Carr noted that the tech giants were “participating in a censorship cartel that included not only technology and social media companies but advertising, marketing, and so-called “fact-checking” organizations as well as the Biden-Harris administration itself.”
The report from Open the Books underscores Carr’s concerns about direct government funding of these efforts.
Misinformation-related grants actually stretch back to FY2017 during the first Trump presidency. $273 million has been awarded for grant proposals containing the term since then—but there was an explosion of cash during the years-long Covid malaise. The vast majority of that figure ($267 million) was for grants that began in 2021 or later.
METHODOLOGY NOTE: This likely does not cover all grants given to combat misinformation, because transaction descriptions may not include this keyword, but the trend in spending illustrates a sudden explosion of interest in misinformation starting in 2021.
An enormous year-over-year jump in new grants occurred between 2020 and 2021—from $2.2 million to $126 million as the federal government poured money out to address COVID-related “misinformation,” among other projects.
While spending has since slowed down, it is still far higher than it was pre-pandemic in 2020: $18.3 million in new grants began in FY 2024.
While the report provides a deep-dive into how public grants, funded by taxpayers, were focused on “dispelling” misinformation, in 2020, the focus for contracts was “often concerned with monitoring or eliminating supposed misinformation at its source,” often targeting independent news outlets.
The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft is currently involved in the Murthy vs. Missouri lawsuit. The investigation continues in this lawsuit on how the government was pushing social media to silence our website and others.
Read the full report here.
