By Stephen Dinan – The Washington Times – Friday, November 22, 2024
The Biden administration has spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to study and police “misinformation,” according to a report released Friday.
OpenTheBooks, a spending watchdog, said the federal government has spent $267 million since 2021 on contracts and research grants that include the term “misinformation” in the proposals. During the Trump administration, $7 million was spent on grants involving misinformation.
That works out to a 44-fold increase in spending under President Biden in an area where even experts disagree over what constitutes misinformation and its cousins, disinformation and mal-information.
Much of the spending under Mr. Biden went toward studying information about the coronavirus and Americans’ response to the pandemic. Programs also included broader attempts to combat what the government deems misinformation. One U.S. university walked away with nearly $250,000 to construct misinformation “escape rooms” at libraries.
OpenTheBooks argued that it’s a fool’s errand.
“Learning to think critically and discern truth from lies is an important life skill, but the federal government has proven it is not capable of addressing that need responsibly. It’s the worst possible arbiter of truth, as it were, because it makes the state a gatekeeper of speech,” the group said in its report.
OpenTheBooks examined spending dating back to fiscal 2017, which roughly coincides with the start of Mr. Trump’s first term in office.
It tallied $274 million in total spending, including less than $500,000 that first year and no more than $3 million in the subsequent three years under Mr. Trump.
Misinformation spending soared in 2021, when Mr. Biden took office, with $126 million spent — chiefly on pandemic-related projects. It has steadily dropped but totaled $18 million in the just-ended fiscal 2024.
Most of the COVID-19 spending went to Health and Human Services Department projects to boost vaccine use and other government-urged measures for racial and ethnic minorities. That includes “evidence-based interventions to address vaccine misinformation.”
HHS also authorized grants that paid for outfits to monitor social media for vaccine and other medical information contradicting the department’s preferred narratives.
The National Science Foundation sent $200,000 to researchers to study how political polarization made people more susceptible to disinformation. According to OpenTheBooks, the result was a paper “slandering President-elect Trump.”
The authors concluded that governments should “allow the experts to have the main say” in responding to health crises.
They urged governments to use that same expert-based approach in policing information about climate change.
OpenTheBooks said it smelled hypocrisy in many of the efforts after initial claims about social distancing and the risks of the virus to younger people proved imprecise.
Analysts are also raising questions about the effectiveness of heavy-handed policing of social media conversations, which spurred even more resistance to what agencies were urging.
“Americans simply cannot trust that continued grant and contract spending and various bureaucratic programmatic activities involved in ‘misinformation’ will not be ideologically motivated to silence critics,” OpenTheBooks said.
Beyond the virus, NSF has funded projects to create a “misinformation tipline” and Fact Champ, which says it investigates “racially targeted misinformation.”
The Institute of Museum and Library Services paid the University of Washington $249,691 to build misinformation escape rooms at libraries.
“We co-design and study the effects of escape rooms for increasing awareness of misinformation techniques, encouraging reflection on emotional and cognitive biases, and changing people’s attitudes and social media behaviors when engaging with problematic information,” the researchers said.
At the Department of Homeland Security, officials spent $1.2 million on a contract with Guidehouse to analyze “misinformation, disinformation and mal-information.” That contract began in September 2023.
The government has received some high-profile black eyes in attempts to police the issue.
Homeland Security had to scuttle its Disinformation Governance Board soon after Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced it in 2022 because of troubling questions about the panel’s purview.
The Biden administration is still battling over allegations that government agencies unfairly pressured social media companies to censor posts contradicting the government’s narrative about the COVID-19 pandemic and acceptable medical care options.
John Hart, CEO of OpenTheBooks, said the government should be wary of inserting itself as information police.
“The best way to counter ‘misinformation’ isn’t with more mandates but with more transparency, more information and more speech,” he said. “Our founders understood that the best way to purge falsehood from the public square was through more speech, not less.”
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at [email protected].
