The Disinformation Governance Board Lasted Four Months, and That Was Too Long

Somewhere in Washington, a committee was handed a very large problem and a very small name tag. The problem was the truth. The name tag said "Disinformation Governance Board," which sounds like a department you would be sent to if your library book were overdue and also, possibly, wrong.

Let me tell you what happened to it, because the whole saga fits inside a single season. A federal board was announced in the last days of April 2022. It was frozen before the month of May was out. It was dissolved in August. Four months, give or take, from press release to obituary. That is a shorter lifespan than most of the printers in the building where it was conceived, and I would argue the country got its money's worth out of the lesson even if it got nothing out of the board.

What was announced, and by whom

The Department of Homeland Security is a large agency created after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and its job, in the statute and in the public imagination, is to protect the homeland from terrorists, hostile states, disasters and the like. In late April 2022, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas confirmed in congressional testimony that the department was standing up a body to address disinformation, and a public figure in that field, Nina Jankowicz, was named to lead it as executive director.

The department's defenders then did what defenders do. They said the critics had it backwards. The board, they said, would not have operational authority. It would not police speech. It would be a coordinating body, a working group that would develop guidance and best practices across the department's components for dealing with threats such as disinformation aimed at migrants by human smugglers, or foreign interference in elections. The department said that, in its own words and through its own spokespeople, and I take them at their word on what they said.

Here is the problem with that defence. You do not need a board to coordinate a thing that is not happening. If DHS components were already addressing smuggler lies and foreign interference, then a "governance board" for the subject was either redundant or it was something else. And the name was not "Coordination Working Group for Border Messaging." It was Disinformation Governance. Governance is a word with an object. You govern something. The something, in this case, was information, which is to say, what Americans say to each other and what they hear back.

What happened next: the pause and the dissolution

The reaction came fast, and it did not stay on one side of the aisle. Critics on the right called it an Orwellian Ministry of Truth. That was predictable. What made the episode instructive is that the department's own supporters were uneasy about the rollout, and reporting at the time recorded that discomfort in the ranks of those who ordinarily defend the administration. A government that cannot explain its own board to its own friends has a communications problem, and the sort of board that has a communications problem is usually the sort of board that has a deeper one.

Within weeks, the work was paused. The executive director resigned, and the department said the board's work would be put on hold while a review was conducted. The review went to the department's Homeland Security Advisory Council, which in August 2022 recommended that the board be terminated. The Secretary's office announced that the board was being shut down. Total elapsed time from the first headlines to the last: roughly four months.

Now notice what did not happen. No court struck the board down. No statute repealed it. No inspector general delivered a report that made the front page. The board died of exposure. It was brought into daylight, and the daylight did what it always does to an idea that only works in the dark: it turned out to be less popular than the people who invented it assumed.

That is worth saying out loud, because it is the best evidence we have for the most optimistic claim in conservative thought. People who say Americans cannot be trusted with open argument are making a prediction. The prediction is that, left alone, the public will be misled and the republic will fall. What the four-month board shows is the opposite prediction coming true: the public, left alone, noticed what was going on and said no.

The comparison everybody reached for, and why it was fair

Every time a government reaches for the power to declare what is true, somebody reaches for George Orwell. The novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949, and its Ministry of Truth is the department of lies. It rewrites newspapers, alters old records, and drops inconvenient facts down the memory hole. The people who work there do not think of themselves as villains. They think of themselves as correcting errors.

That is the part we skip when we tell the joke. The horror of Orwell's ministry is not that its workers are wicked. It is that they are tidy. They have a mission statement. They have a process. They believe the past needs fixing and the present needs managing, and they have the credentials to do it.

Now, was the DHS board the Ministry of Truth? No. It had no power to delete anything, it had no budget to speak of, and it lasted four months. To say otherwise is a joke, and I make my living on jokes. But Orwell did not warn us about the finished ministry. He warned us about the first memo. The question for a free people is not "did this board do damage?" It is "what is the principle that would have allowed it to, and do we accept that principle?" That is the question the rest of this post is about.

The numbered argument

Let me lay it out, because an argument is easier to check when you can count its steps.

1. Government may speak. Nothing in the First Amendment stops the United States from telling the public what it thinks. The Supreme Court has long held that when government speaks for itself, it is not bound to be neutral among viewpoints. In Pleasant Grove City v. Summum (2009), the Court put it plainly: government speech is not restricted by the Free Speech Clause. A public health agency may publish its view. A State Department may refute a rumour. The Army may say it is a good place to work. All of that is fine, and it is an ordinary part of governing.

1. Government may not decide what citizens hear from each other. The amendment is written in the negative: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." The grammar is the point. The power it withholds is the power to abridge. A board that exists to govern disinformation is a board whose natural tools are labels, referrals, warnings and pressure on those who carry speech. Those tools are the abridgment, dressed in a lanyard.

1. Declaring something "disinformation" is a judgment of truth, and the judge has a conflict of interest. The official who decides whether a claim is false is a member of the institution the claim may be about. If the claim is that a policy failed, the policymaker is deciding. That is a courtroom in which the defendant appoints the judge.

1. Official truth has been wrong, and the people who said so were often called the problem. Governments and their expert advisers have reversed themselves on large questions within living memory. The error is not the scandal. Humans err. The scandal would be a structure that punished the people who noticed the error before the reversal arrived. That structure is what the board, in its first draft, was a step toward.

1. The remedy for a false statement is a true one. Justice Louis Brandeis said it in Whitney v. California in 1927, in a concurrence: "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." That is a statement of confidence in citizens, and it is the most conservative sentence ever written by a Justice often placed on the other team.

The five steps stack. If government may speak but not abridge, if the judge of truth has a conflict, if official truth has been wrong, and if the cure for error is more speech, then a standing federal body whose job is to govern information is a bad design, whatever its stated modesty.

The strongest case for the board

You should hear the other side's best argument, so here it is, in words its defenders would accept.

Foreign governments do run influence operations against Americans. Smuggling networks do spread lies to migrants about how to cross a border, and people die on the strength of those lies. Fraudsters do impersonate officials to steal from the elderly. A government with a duty to protect the public cannot pretend those things are not there. Moreover, the argument goes, the board's job was to coordinate, to make sure that agencies did not step on each other and that the public got the same facts from the Coast Guard as from Customs and Border Protection. Coordination is a boring, defensible, even good-government function. If we shut down every effort to organise government communication whenever a critic found the name ominous, we would never get anything organised.

That is a serious argument, and part of it is correct. Government should warn the public about scams. Government should publish what it knows about smuggling. Government should defend itself against foreign interference with the tools the law already gives it: counterintelligence, sanctions, indictments, and public attribution of a foreign government's operations.

The answer to the strongest case

Four replies.

First, the lawful functions already exist. Fraud is a crime. Impersonating an official is a crime. Foreign agents have to register. Counterespionage is the FBI's job and has been for a century. If a particular act of deception is a crime, we have prosecutors. If it is not a crime, then what we are talking about is speech that is merely wrong, and the Constitution has a view on that.

Second, the label is the power. The board's defenders say it would not take anything down. Fine. But the word "disinformation" is not a neutral word of art. It is a word with a moral edge, and an official finding that a thing is disinformation, circulated to private companies and the press, is a form of pressure whether or not anybody makes an explicit demand. The Supreme Court spoke to this in NRA v. Vullo in 2024 when it unanimously held that a government official may not coerce private parties to punish or suppress disfavoured speech. We have a separate post on that case: NRA v. Vullo and the Unanimous Rule Against Government Jawboning. Coercion is the line. A standing board with a mandate over the whole field of "bad information" is a standing invitation to cross it.

Third, "coordination" is the sort of word that grows. A coordinating body develops a "common understanding." A common understanding develops into guidance. Guidance develops into a standard. A standard develops into a referral. No one step is dramatic. That is the way the administrative state works, and it is why the Founders put their trust in structure rather than in the good intentions of the person currently holding the office. If you want to know where a mandate is headed, read the title, not the press release.

Fourth, the board's own life proves the point. If a board could not survive the scrutiny of its own party and its own department, it is hard to argue that it was a sturdy answer to a real need. The need, if there was one, could have been met by a press office and a lawyer.

Why the line matters: the Founders' record

The Founders had lived this. The English crown had licensed printers. Parliament's Stamp Act of 1765 taxed newspapers. American colonial governors prosecuted printers for seditious libel, and in 1735 a New York jury acquitted John Peter Zenger rather than accept a governor's claim that true criticism of officials was a crime. We tell that story in John Peter Zenger and the Jury That Defended American Press Freedom in 1735, and it is worth reading before the next press release.

Then, in 1798, the Federalist-controlled Congress passed the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous and malicious writing" against the government. The people who passed it were sincere, and they were worried about foreign influence in a time of near-war with France. The act was used against newspaper editors and even against a sitting congressman, Matthew Lyon of Vermont, who won re-election from his jail cell. The country's verdict on it was delivered at the polls in 1800, and the act expired in 1801. Thomas Jefferson pardoned those convicted under it. The point of the history is not that Federalists were fools. The point is that sincere people with a real foreign threat reached for a speech remedy, and the republic decided the remedy was worse than the disease. The Sedition Act of 1798 Jailed a Congressman Who Won Reelection From His Cell tells the story in full.

And in 1943, in the middle of a world war, the Supreme Court said in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette: "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein." You can read that opinion passage by passage in Barnette's Fixed Star, Reading the 1943 Opinion on the Pledge Passage by Passage. No official, high or petty. A Disinformation Governance Board, however modest, is an office whose purpose is to decide what is orthodox.

What the episode teaches, and what it doesn't

Let me be fair about the limits of the lesson. The board's brief life does not prove that every government effort against deception is a plot, and I would not want anyone to leave thinking that. A public warning about a phone scam is good government. A declassified report naming a foreign government's propaganda network is good government. A rebuttal from a press secretary is the system working.

What it proves is narrower and sturdier. It proves that the design of an office matters. An office built to inform is a different animal from an office built to govern. The first has an audience. The second has subjects. A free people ought to be an audience for its government's speech, never a subject of its government's curation.

And I will say this, because I think it is the part that deserves a bit of joy. Four months! The republic's immune system worked, and it worked in public. The press asked questions, the Congress asked questions, the department's own advisers asked questions, and the board was folded up like a card table after a long weekend. When you are tempted to believe that the country has lost its capacity for self-correction, remember the Disinformation Governance Board. It was announced with great seriousness and it was withdrawn with great haste, and nobody had to storm anything. That is how a free people looks when it is paying attention.

The warning, though, is that the idea did not die with the board. The impulse to put an authoritative referee over the national conversation comes back under different names: "trust and safety," "information integrity," "resilience." Names change. The structure to watch for does not: a government actor, a standing mandate, and a private company that is expected to do what it is nudged to do. Read the next proposal for those three things. If you find them, you have found the board again, and it has found a new letterhead. For how that pressure operated in practice in the platform context, see Murthy v. Missouri Lost on Standing, Yet the Record It Built Still Stands.

The principle in one line

Government may speak, and when it speaks it ought to be accurate, and when it is not, the rest of us ought to be free to say so loudly, with no board standing by to classify our objection. That is the whole of the First Amendment principle at stake. It is not complicated. It is only difficult, because every generation of officials discovers that they are the ones who could be trusted with the referee's whistle.

You are allowed to find that funny, as I do, and to keep the whistle in the drawer anyway. Keep an eye, too, on how the coverage of these fights is framed. When a story says a board "fights disinformation," the reader should ask who defined the term, because the verb sounds like the pest control company and the noun is a judgment about what citizens may be told. Why the Fact-Check Became Its Own Genre and How to Check the Checkers has a few habits worth keeping for exactly that reading.

The case in brief

1. The Disinformation Governance Board was announced in late April 2022, paused within weeks and dissolved by August 2022, and it died of public exposure, not litigation.
2. Government may speak for itself, but the First Amendment withholds the power to abridge speech, and a standing body to "govern" information is built from the tools of abridgment.
3. The official who decides what is false has a conflict of interest, and official truth has been wrong often enough that the remedy for error must be more speech, as Justice Brandeis wrote in 1927.
4. The lawful tasks the board's defenders cite, such as fraud prosecution and counterintelligence, already have lawful homes, so the new body added only the label and the pressure that comes with it.
5. The board's short life is good news about a self-governing public, and the right response is to watch for the same design under new names.

What you can do: Read the First Amendment's forty-five words in the Constitution and then ask your own members of Congress, through my representatives, whether they will oppose any federal office whose mandate is to decide which lawful speech is false.