Politicizing Public Diplomacy and Escalating Cyber Posture Without Oversight
Project 2025 proposes consolidating U.S. international broadcasting into a centralized pro-freedom messaging machine and directing the State Department to help the Pentagon go 'on offence' in cyberspace, both of which risk politicizing public diplomacy and escalating conflict without accountability mechanisms.
Project 2025's call to 'consolidate broadcasting resources' under a single pro-freedom message (pp. 195–196) echoes Cold War propaganda playbooks but ignores the central danger: a centralized state messaging apparatus is a tool for political capture, not for foreign policy success. When one administration's 'freedom' becomes another's 'disinformation,' the line between public diplomacy and domestic propaganda vanishes. The Church Committee warned in 1975 that executive branch information operations had systematically misled the American public; consolidating broadcasting now recreates that vulnerability without the safeguards Congress built.
On cyberspace, the document urges State to help DoD 'go on offence' (p. 196) and to replace voluntary norms with enforceable ones. This is a recipe for perpetual cyber conflict without congressional debate or public accountability. Offensive cyber operations are war by other means, yet they bypass the War Powers Resolution and treaties. The U.S. cyber command already conducts operations under secret authorities; this proposal removes the diplomatic off-ramp. Meanwhile, the document says nothing about protecting whistleblowers who might expose misconduct, nor about enforcing the Foreign Agents Registration Act that could check the foreign lobbying campaigns—for Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, Egypt, and Azerbaijan—that shape the very policy this chapter aims to execute.
The humanitarian alternative
Instead of consolidating broadcasting into a pro-freedom messaging tool, Congress should codify the editorial independence of U.S. international broadcasters via an independent oversight board modeled on the BBC Trust. Cyber diplomacy should prioritize multilateral enforceable norms — not unilateral offence — and require a presidential finding and congressional notification for any offensive cyber operation. Finally, the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) should be revamped to require real-time disclosure of foreign lobbying activities, closing the loopholes that currently allow influence campaigns to go unpublicized.
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 7: Intelligence Community (pp 228-231)"— 195 — Department of State a tool to communicate directly with the people of Europe during World War II. During the next half-century, America’s international broadcasting efforts both expanded and increased in sophistication as the United States shifted out of its “hot” war in Europe and into the Cold War with the Soviet Union. U.S. international broadcasting prowess, and the confident willingness to communicate the correctness of American ideals in the face of global resistance, arguably hit its peak near the conclusion of the Cold War in the late 1980s. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of Soviet and Eastern Bloc Communism, factors including the false appeal of a so-called peace dividend triggered a slide in the U.S. ability to communicate a pro-freedom message to the rest of the world and in its commitment to do so. Ironically, this slide accompanied the rise of the Internet and mobile phone technologies, which arguably facilitated the most significant revolution in human communication since the invention of the printing press. The United States must reassert its public diplomacy obligations by restoring its international br…"