Ted Cruz grills feed more than $66 million in taxpayer dollars to ‘disinformation’

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz is demanding that the National Science Foundation (NSF) prove that the tens of millions of dollars it spent fighting “disinformation” were not used to infringe on lawful speech, according to materials obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation .

Cruz identified 105 grants disbursed between 2021 and 2023, worth a cumulative $66 million, aimed at improving groups, sometimes government entities, to identify and correct “misinformation.” the senator presented a list of questions to NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan asking him to demonstrate that the earmarked grants are consistent with the First Amendment or, if they are not, to “indicate whether [he] will re-evaluate and possibly rescind the award.”

“When you fund other people who engage in censorship, you are undermining support for your very important agency,” Cruz told Panchanathan at the Oct. 4 hearing. Panchanathan defended himself by arguing that the NSF does not censor anyone or work with groups that enforce censorship.

“I want to say one thing very categorically, we don’t: NSF is not involved in censorship. We don’t regulate any content and we don’t engage with anyone who does either,” Panchanathan said to the audience

Cruz says his analysis of the NSF grants “directly contradicts [Panchanathan’s] they claim that NSF is not involved with anyone who regulates content,” as “NSF has funded more than 100 academic projects that purportedly aim to reduce “misinformation, misinformation, and misinformation,” much of which is simply content that the progressive left does not agree with.

one grant at the University of Wisconsin for $5 million that Cruz identified was aimed at creating a “digital dashboard” that could be used by “election administration officials” or “public health organizations” so they could “identify networks of disinformation current on social media platforms” and “Strategically Correct Misinformation”.

The NSF distributed An additional $5 million to the University of Washington to “provide the public with skills to determine the veracity of claims” and “resources to address the social and emotional impacts of misinformation,” while designing and implementing “a sociotechnical platform that supports the digital support”. interventionists in literacy”.

Two other grants flagged by Cruz, $441,200 for the University of Utah and $396,000 a New York Universitywere published “to transform the efficiency, effectiveness and scale of fact-checking… enable[ing] fact-checkers to detect misinformation early, prioritize effort, and unify the different tools and techniques used for fact-checking.”

Another grant noted Cruz, this time $16,014 was awarded to the University of Oklahoma to develop “a software platform that can be integrated into crisis management systems such as public health (WHO, CDC), emergency management (FEMA) and Transportation (DOT). agencies to facilitate the transmission of correct information and provide the option to notify social media providers of identified misinformation.”

Cruz pressed the NSF to say whether it believes grants like these are “consistent with the First Amendment.”

The goal of the National Science Foundation’s Expert Voices Together project is to “support journalists in times of crisis while helping the media industry build long-term resilience.”

In other words, taxpayer-funded therapy for left-wing journalists who find real facts… pic.twitter.com/tzJWsWKOmB

— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) October 5, 2023

Cruz also questioned the NSF over a $5 million grant to George Washington University, first reported by the DCNF, to provide psychological care to journalists who they believe are the targets of “disinformation-driven harassment campaigns.” Cruz asked the agency to “explain in detail how this award advances NSF’s statutory mission of “promoting the progress of science.”

The Supreme Court on October 20 agreed to hear a case arguing that the Biden administration violated the First Amendment by coordinating with social media companies to suppress online speech. A lower court earlier governed that the Biden administration had likely violated the First Amendment with its conduct, and the judge overseeing the case called it “Orwellian.”

The NSF declined to comment.

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