The Manufactured Myth of the Smith-Mundt "Firewall"

I am continually prompted to revisit the prevailing myth surrounding the Smith-Mundt Act by both long-ago conversations and recent interactions, all set against the glaring reality of our current political environment—one where an entire political faction now relies heavily on the promulgation of disinformation and the active manipulation of misinformation.

Recently, a former U.S. diplomat with over two decades of experience as a public diplomacy officer shared a familiar frustration with me, recounting constant battles over the over-interpretation of the Smith-Mundt Act. This foreign service officer was repeatedly prevented from engaging domestic audiences by their leadership, regardless of the subject, which ranged from global health to counter-WMD, advancing American values, and the purpose and nature of U.S. policy.

This hyper-defensive posture routinely leads to spectacular absurdities. I once saw NATO TV denied permission to use a Voice of America film simply because “an American might see it” (as if Americans are tuning into NATO TV). In another instance, an American official was instructed not to participate in a German radio program for the same reason.

Or consider the American school teacher who wanted to use a free, State Department-produced book on Abraham Lincoln in her classroom. Because of the Act—and despite her own tax dollars funding its production—a State Department official could not simply share the link with her. Instead, the official had to employ an absurd bureaucratic wink-and-nod, instructing the teacher not to visit a specific foreign-facing website where they could download the book free of charge, just like any other person on the planet.

While some of these absurdities are genuinely mandated by the convoluted legal barriers erected decades after the original law was passed, the Smith-Mundt Act is just as often used as a convenient bureaucratic deflection. It has become a bogeyman fueled by institutional laziness and defensive lawyering. When risk-averse officials want to kill an initiative, or simply avoid doing the hard work to find a legal “yes,” they could point to the Act rather than providing an honest, substantive answer. It feels like the law should block these engagements, so it is invoked, and it works precisely because the pervasive myth surrounding it goes unchallenged.

These bureaucratic actions carry a heavy strategic cost. America’s inability to effectively contest the global information space—whether by aggressively combating disinformation or proactively deploying the truth to isolated audiences—is directly tied to this manufactured myth. The fundamental reason the Act is so debilitating today is its reliance on the artificial construct of the “water’s edge”—the archaic notion that information can or should be neatly divided between “there” and “here.” Law review articles and accepted wisdom frequently claim that “Americans aren’t comfortable” with government information operations blurring this line. But Americans are not uncomfortable with the truth; they are uncomfortable with lying and deception. Yet, any attempt to explain the urgent need to engage in a borderless information environment is strangled in the crib by the invocation of this very legislation.

Share

It is an absurdity that echoes the frustrations of Representative John Davis Lodge during the original debates in June 1947: “The idea seems to be that it is all right for us to export money and relief and arms and military aid, but it is all wrong for us to say why we are doing this.” And as Representative Karl Mundt astutely noted moments later the same day: “Never since I have been in Congress have I heard such a disorganized collection of misinformation circulated about any one piece of legislation as about this legislation. It deserves your careful study and your intelligent, relevant attention and consideration.”

Almost eight decades later, Mundt’s warning is more urgent than ever. His plea for careful study has been entirely ignored by the modern legal establishment, allowing the very misinformation he decried to become accepted wisdom. The resulting strangulation and paralysis we see today were never the purpose of the original 1948 legislation. Rather, they are the direct consequence of deliberate legislative sabotage by Senator J. William Fulbright—a targeted bureaucratic hit that birthed decades of institutional timidity.

Yet today, as official government channels disseminate distortions clearly meant to influence public opinion and executive branch resources routinely push partisan narratives at home and abroad, there is not a peep to be heard about the Smith-Mundt Act.

This profound silence reveals the severe defects in the legal analysis and accepted wisdom that the Act was ever designed as an anti-domestic propaganda law. Prominent legal and academic scholarship has long insisted that the Smith-Mundt Act serves as a statutory “firewall,” protecting the American public from the foreign-facing communications of their own government. But this conventional wisdom is historically bankrupt. The firewall is a manufactured myth—a retroactive narrative born of legislative vendettas, bureaucratic discomfort, and defensive lawyering, falsely elevated into a grand philosophical safeguard.

The defective analysis found in law review articles like the widely cited Apple Pie Propaganda did not occur in a vacuum; it perfectly mirrors the broader academic scholarship. Over the decades, a conventional wisdom took root. Senator Edward Zorinsky’s 1985 rhetoric about taxpayers not wanting to be propagandized by their own dollars was embraced as gospel. Modern scholars assert the law has broad domestic applicability because it was supposedly Congress’s original 1948 intent to censor what the U.S. government said abroad.

This absolutist position ignores earlier, more nuanced scholarship. In their 2006 analysis, Palmer and Carter recognized that the historical record didn’t quite align with this strict “firewall” narrative, questioning its validity and calling it “outdated.” Yet, the accepted wisdom barreled forward, resting entirely on the claim that what the government said abroad was “propaganda.”

By using the word “propaganda” to characterize government information as inherently untrustworthy and manipulative, modern scholars engage in the propaganda of propaganda. Whether born of intentional derogation or intellectual laziness, this framing strips away critical historical qualifiers. When 1940s policymakers discussed these programs, they spoke of ours versus theirs, good versus bad, honest versus dishonest.

By 1947, the United States was “Losing the War of Words in Europe” against Soviet lies, disinformation, and subversion. American leaders firmly believed that we could not succeed by lying to populations already subjected to Soviet deceit. Truth was our weapon.

As Secretary of State James Byrnes testified to Congress in February 1946: “A fair and balanced picture of American policies, and of the national life that lies behind those policies, is all we want or need to convey. If that is propaganda, it is honest propaganda. Dishonest propaganda isn’t worth the money or effort spent on it.” A week later, former head of the Office of War Information Elmer Davis stated: “The truth is that a fact—an incontrovertible fact—is often the most powerful propaganda.”

When Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs William Benton urged taking the offensive to contrast liberal democratic ideas with Soviet dictatorship, Secretary of State George C. Marshall replied in March 1947 that “the use of propaganda as such is contrary to our generally accepted precepts of democracy,” insisting the “sole aim in our overseas [information] program must be to present nothing but the truth, in a completely factual and unbiased manner.”

Does this sound like a program pumping out malign manipulation that required quarantining from the American public? The actions of the men who actually built and directed this apparatus prove it was not. Archibald MacLeish, the first Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, designed the information program with the explicit mandate to operate transparently on both sides of the border. During his December 1944 confirmation hearing, MacLeish defined the very purpose of his role and the broad nature of the program, testifying:

As I understand the Secretary’s wishes, the duties of the assistant secretary in charge of public and cultural relations are to be of two kinds: first, to direct the information policies and activities of the department at home and abroad. Second, to direct the department’s activities in connection with what has been called “cultural cooperation”… The principles which would control my performance of these duties are the principles of freedom of the press and freedom of the exchange of information.

From the very beginning, this apparatus was far more comprehensive than a simple overseas radio operation. Rooted in the belief that “the right of the people to read and to hear and therefore to think as they please” is the foundation of freedom, MacLeish made it clear that the foreign relations of the United States were the business of the American people—not a state secret to be hidden behind an artificial wall.

Structurally, however, the radio operation was viewed as something wholly different from the rest of the information program. As early as July 1945, the prevailing recommendation was to separate broadcasting from the government entirely—a path his successor, William Benton, and the State Department pursued in earnest starting that October. Benton fiercely advocated that the government’s role in this space must be limited to supplementing private, independent media. George V. Allen, a career Foreign Service officer who followed Benton, staunchly defended those non-compete boundaries to protect private American enterprise from state encroachment. And Edward Barrett—a seasoned journalist who later became Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism and founded the Columbia Journalism Review—codified this entire philosophy when he took the helm, titling his memoir Truth is Our Weapon.

The architects of this program were not trying to protect Americans from our own lies; they were authorizing the deployment of the truth.

To understand the actual mechanics of the 1948 law, we must highlight the significant difference between the broader information program and the radio broadcasting program.

Voice of America (VOA) was deliberately kept after the war to provide a direct, unfiltered line to foreign audiences. The debate over its survival was heavily informed by a July 1945 report on the post-war international information program, which was initiated by MacLeish in January of that year and authored by a respected political scientist, Arthur MacMahon.

The report analyzed responses from seven U.S. companies that held international broadcasting licenses. These companies responded to a June 1944 inquiry from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that asked what the government’s role in international broadcasting should be after the war. When asked if U.S. broadcasting should be curtailed or expanded, not a single company advocated for a reduction. The composite view among private broadcasters was that operations must be kept at wartime volume or expanded. For example, the representative for the Crosley Corporation argued that short-wave broadcasting should be expanded because it was “perhaps, the only available means of disseminating American thinking and planning directly into the homes of the people of other nations.” Similarly, the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) advocated for the continuation of international broadcasting “without the slightest hope of profit, to keep a vital democratic process alive after the war.”

Despite this democratic idealism, the MacMahon report acknowledged a stark financial reality: direct international broadcasting by private operators did not pay its way before the war, and relying solely on commercial advertising to support post-war operations was largely unviable. The report ultimately concluded that the justification for maintaining direct international broadcasting was fundamentally political, driven by the desiderata of “national interest, international collaboration, and the rise of a world community.”

This reality formed the base argument for a government-sustained VOA: commercial media were simply not financially able to maintain global short-wave operations, and they were structurally incentivized to abridge, summarize, or even ignore Presidential speeches and official statements. In an April 1946 address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Assistant Secretary William Benton outlined exactly why the government could not rely solely on private media.

First, there were critical areas where private American services simply could not operate for political reasons. Second, there were areas where it was not commercially profitable or practicable for private agencies to operate. Third, telling the “American story” required certain media—like short-wave broadcasting, libraries, and documentary films—which were not profitable for private agencies to operate anywhere. Benton explicitly stated he would welcome private agencies taking over these tasks if they could do an adequate job, particularly in short-wave broadcasting. Fourth, spot news needed background material adapted to foreign comprehension.

When the 1948 legislation was finally enacted, Congress reconciled this exact tension between the urgent need for a global voice and the deep-seated American preference for private enterprise. Reflecting on this in November 1948, George V. Allen noted that lawmakers understood private industry “would not undertake an extensive short-wave information program because it was not commercially feasible.” Consequently, “government money, therefore, had to be voted for it to be done.” However, because Congress “stated clearly that private industry could do a better job than Government and could do it more efficiently and more effectively,” the State Department “was put under strict instructions to use private industry for short-wave broadcasting to the maximum extent feasible.”

Voice of America did not broadcast domestically simply because that was not its mission. Its purpose was to reach foreign audiences, so its transmitters were naturally pointed outward. There was absolutely no fear among lawmakers or diplomats that VOA programming would somehow pollute the American mind, nor was there any intentional barrier erected to hide the broadcasts from domestic ears. Addressing the frequent question of why Americans could not easily hear the network, Allen explained in August 1949 that the broadcasts were “beamed on short-wave directional antennae toward particular areas overseas from transmitters near New York, Boston, Cleveland, and San Francisco.” While it was difficult to pick up the signal domestically, he noted that it was “not impossible.” Furthermore, he added, 85 percent of the programs were broadcast in foreign languages, so most Americans would not recognize the broadcasts even if they did tune in.

Far from trying to keep the network a secret from the American public, Allen emphasized that the State Department was “glad to furnish full schedules and wave lengths on request,” and that scripts of all programs, in English translation, were publicly “available on request.”

The lack of a domestic broadcast was a practical reality of its foreign orientation, coupled with this fundamental, congressionally mandated deference to private media at home. As Allen noted: “Radio broadcasting inside the United States is a private industry... I hope the Government never begins to encroach on this field of private enterprise.”^⁠1

The State Department recognized the unique challenge of government-run radio. Guided by the findings of the July 1945 MacMahon report, and reinforced by the Office of War Information’s closing memo to President Truman a month later, the Department was already working by October 1945 to spin the radio operation off into a separate non-profit organization.

The Associated Press, however, began attacking the information program in January 1946, though its attacks were narrowly focused on the radio operation. The AP, a wire service actively selling content abroad and dramatically increasing its international customer base, held a different view than the radio broadcasters: the AP viewed any government role in news dissemination as direct competition.

In truth, the AP’s economic fear was justified: a local foreign newspaper or radio station could easily listen to VOA and repeat the news without buying the AP service. This is exactly where the government’s diplomatic imperative collided with the AP’s profit motive.

The hypocrisy of the AP’s position was glaring, and contemporary observers were quick to call it out. In January 1946, one U.S. magazine noted the absurdity of the AP cutting off its own government while continuing to sell its wire service to Moscow: “In any case, the objection to the American government use of its service is a little curious considering that one of the [AP’s] customers is TASS, the Russian Government News Agency. Does this mean that the AP Directors are more certain of the objectivity...of the Soviet Government than of that of their own?”

Benton pressed this exact point. He challenged the AP’s rationale by reminding its directors that if the use of AP news by foreign, state-run entities like the BBC and TASS did not hurt their reputation for objectivity, how could U.S. government broadcasts possibly reflect poorly on them?

Furthermore, the State Department knew exactly what happened to American wire stories once they entered the Soviet system. A June 1945 report by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), following an investigative trip to Moscow, had explicitly warned that while TASS brought in outside news, “it is screened politically and does not give a real picture.” If the AP was the only source of American news, the unvarnished American perspective would be filtered, warped, or silenced entirely. VOA was essential to bypass these filters, acting as a vital diplomatic supplement to private media rather than a competitor.

Nevertheless, the AP’s hostility remained so intense that it actively opposed VOA’s admission into the Congressional Press Galleries—a ban that persisted until 1981.

To ensure the integrity of the broadcasts and preempt accusations of state manipulation, Benton proactively formed a high-level advisory committee in May 1946 to appraise the “quality, effectiveness and objectivity” of the Voice of America programs. Tasked with overseeing an operation that was already broadcasting more than 400 program-hours a week in 24 languages, the committee included media heavyweights like CBS vice president Edward R. Murrow, Time president Roy E. Larsen, and Louisville Courier-Journal publisher Mark Ethridge.

Share

This commitment to external scrutiny continued when the AP’s aggressive commercial boycott prompted the ASNE to form a special committee to review VOA operations in October 1946. The committee noted the massive scale of the broadcasts—with 43 percent directed to Latin America, 33 percent to Europe, and 23 percent to Asia.^⁠2 Deprived of the AP wire, the Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs (OIC) told the committee it had to rely on alternative wire services and metropolitan newspapers for its news fraction. Defending its mission, OIC spokesmen—including Benton—argued that the flow of American news from private agencies was piecemeal and occasionally “misleading as to the whole story,” necessitating supplemental context on complex issues like race relations, divorce rates, and the full texts of presidential statements.

The ASNE committee asked whether a “wicked” administration might abuse this powerful apparatus to shape domestic and foreign opinion? The OIC’s reply was telling. They pragmatically argued that a wicked administration “would do far more dangerous things on other parts of the diplomatic fronts,” and that any “virtuous minority in Congress...could readily expose such depravity.”

This illustrates the architects’ actual safeguard against abuse. They did not propose hiding the material behind a geographic firewall; they relied on transparency, prominent journalistic oversight, and congressional scrutiny. In fact, this precise logic contributed to Congress formalizing Benton’s ad-hoc oversight model by creating the bipartisan U.S. Advisory Commission on Information in the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, institutionalizing the exact kind of timely, structural oversight the OIC had described.

Notably, the rest of the State Department’s U.S. Information Service materials—magazines, speaker engagements, libraries, and cultural exchanges—were not the focus of the AP’s opposition. The content of these programs was always available. The mandate to use private media resources wherever possible, and to avoid competing with them, applied broadly across the entire information program. It was an operational principle anchored in letting private industry lead the way, not an intent to quarantine “propaganda” from the American public.

A fatal flaw in the modern legal analysis is the failure to distinguish between disseminating material and making it available.

The 1948 Act’s provision that materials produced by the government be available to the American press and public “by request” was not a mandate to hide information. Originally, Congress wanted everything translated and made immediately available in English to facilitate robust oversight. Realizing the massive administrative burden and cost this would entail, Congress agreed to the “by request” language as a cost-saving measure—an intentional logistical speed bump, not a mechanism of censorship.

During a 1967 congressional hearing on the Informational Media Guarantee (IMG) program,^⁠3 Frank Stanton, testifying before Senator J. William Fulbright, brought historical receipts to this exact point. Stanton noted that during the original debates, Stanton noted that during the original debates, Representative Richard Simpson specifically asked that Voice of America broadcasts be made available to the domestic press, stating, “that after these Voice of America broadcasts have been made available overseas, that the information be made available to our various means for dissemination of knowledge here in the United States.” Mundt agreed, replying, “May I say what the gentleman proposes is completely consistent with what the [House Foreign Affairs] committee has in mind in making the reports available to Congress. The gentleman’s amendment makes them available to other public service groups as well, and the committee will be happy to accept the amendment.”^⁠4

Furthermore, Senators John McClellan and J. Alexander Smith, the co-sponsor of the Mundt bill in 1947, stated there was “no excuse for withholding” the information and that it should be available “to everybody.” As Stanton correctly pointed out to Fulbright, the intent of Congress as found in the law and the debates was inherently in favor of domestic availability, not against it.

Similarly, the phrase “dissemination abroad” was not a prophylactic imposed by Congress to protect Americans. It was a blanket authority requested by the State Department because it lacked the clear legal authority to operate any of these programs anywhere in the world.

The conceptual walling-off of this information did not begin in 1948; it was a retroactive weaponization of the law culminating in Senator J. William Fulbright’s 1972 amendment. Law reviewers give Fulbright a pass, framing his amendment as a principled foreign policy safeguard. Prominent academics frequently note the problematic nature of the firewall but treat it as an accidental structural defect rather than a deliberate, punitive weapon. The supreme irony is that academia frequently treats Fulbright as a godfather of public diplomacy, willfully ignoring his overt desire to dismantle it.

In reality, Fulbright was attacking an agency. He despised American overseas broadcasting, and the information program in general. When the United States Information Agency (USIA) was created in 1953, he hoped it would last a few years, ten at most—one reason he fought to keep educational exchanges safely housed at the State Department rather than going to USIA.

By 1967, he was actively trying to gut the agency. He rejected the idea that the Soviet Union posed an existential threat, arguing for relaxed trade and telling his Senate colleagues, “I refuse to admit that the Communist dogma per se is a threat to the United States.” During the 1967 hearings, he continuously brought up Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty (RL) while discussing VOA and USIA, complaining that allowing Americans to know what VOA broadcast abroad would somehow make the agency an arbiter of the truth at home. In February 1972, Fulbright said that “these radios should be given an opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of cold-war relics.”

During the IMG hearing, Stanton pointed out the absurd double standard in Fulbright’s logic: we were essentially dictating that what people in Africa or Indonesia were hearing about the United States, the people in the United States were not allowed to hear.

Fulbright tried but failed to amend the law in 1967, probably because Karl Mundt was still in the Senate. But in 1969, Mundt suffered a severe stroke. With Mundt incapacitated, Fulbright had an open field. In 1972, Fulbright found his pretext. Triggered when conservative Senator James L. Buckley—a staunch ideological opponent—shared a USIA film about Czechoslovakia with his New York constituents, Fulbright successfully amended the law. He stripped the “by request” clause, legally blinding the American press and public from accessing USIA materials.

There is no evidence Fulbright was triggered by the actual content of that film; his goal was to further isolate the agency, knowing that if fewer people could see what it did, it would be easier to kill. In doing so, Fulbright completely ignored Frank Stanton’s earlier warning about the absurdity of a double standard. Fulbright wasn’t challenging the substance of what USIA was broadcasting to the rest of the world; he simply declared it unfit for domestic consumption. If the material was truly toxic or manipulative “propaganda,” the appropriate response from a “virtuous” senator would have been to expose the “wicked” administration and fix or even shutdown the broadcast—exactly the constitutional safeguard the program’s architects had envisioned back in 1946. Instead, by merely walling the agency off from American taxpayers, Fulbright showed his motive was bureaucratic suffocation, not philosophical purity.

If Fulbright was truly crusading against “domestic propaganda,” why did his legislative machinations completely ignore the Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office (JSPAO) in Vietnam? Led by USIA’s Barry Zorthian, JSPAO ran the infamous “Five O’Clock Follies”—daily press briefings that funneled massive amounts of government information directly to the American public through the U.S. press corps. If one argues JSPAO was exempt because it heavily involved the Defense Department, it is worth noting that back in 1961, Fulbright sent a memo to the Secretary of Defense demanding he stop military personnel from spreading John Birch Society materials on domestic bases. Fulbright knew how to police the Pentagon when it suited him. Fulbright ignored JSPAO because his invocation of Smith-Mundt was never a philosophical stand against domestic influence; it was a targeted bureaucratic hit aimed solely at suffocating the agency’s broadcasting megaphones.

Fulbright’s targeted hit created a blueprint for bureaucratic punishment, which Senator Edward Zorinsky exploited in 1985. Seizing upon the recently amended law, Zorinsky explicitly closed what he called the “loophole” left by Fulbright, dictating that “no program material prepared by the United States Information Agency shall be distributed within the United States.”

Although Zorinsky used lofty words about taxpayers not wanting to be propagandized by their own dollars, his true motivation was internal agency management. He was enraged by USIA’s partisan grant making and egregious nepotism, such as the agency hiring the children of high-ranking officials. Like Fulbright, Zorinsky was punishing a bureaucracy rather than policing content. His amendment was a surgical strike to discipline USIA’s front office, not a sweeping directive to protect the American mind.

The clearest illustration that Zorinsky was not building a government-wide firewall lies in the Iran-Contra affair. During the 1980s, the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean (S/LPD) ran an extensive covert domestic propaganda campaign. A 1987 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report formally declared the office’s operations illegal.

Crucially, the GAO found that S/LPD violated the publicity and propaganda riders of the annual appropriations bills. The GAO report was utterly and completely silent on the Smith-Mundt Act. This silence occurred just two years after Zorinsky supposedly fortified the “firewall.”

Why didn’t the GAO invoke Smith-Mundt? And why didn’t Zorinsky—who sat on the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the very time S/LPD was running its operation—invoke his newly minted closing of the “loophole”? The silence is deafening. S/LPD was a unit within the State Department that conducted foreign affairs. Conceptually, the office was similar to any geographic bureau, entities which today are routinely claimed by risk-averse lawyers to be bound by Smith-Mundt regarding communications. Yet, during one of the most notorious domestic propaganda scandals of the 20th century, the law was entirely absent from the conversation. Zorinsky and the GAO understood what modern legal scholars willfully ignore: the Smith-Mundt restrictions applied exclusively to the USIA bureaucracy. They were never a universal firewall governing foreign communications, nor did they apply to the broader federal government.

When, in 1999, most of USIA’s functions were folded back into the State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors became an independent agency, the Fulbright-Zorinsky amendments went unchallenged. Worse, the bureaucratic culture internalized and broadened the “firewall,” resulting in an era of defensive lawyering and censorship by association.

Because broadcasting and USIA had been the explicit targets of Fulbright and Zorinsky, reflexively risk-averse lawyers, diplomats, bureaucrats, scholars, and journalists began selectively applying that restriction to programs and communications far beyond its original scope. At the State Department, the absurd, ahistorical idea emerged that “public diplomacy” material was releasable to the U.S. public only after being “scrubbed” (reviewed, possibly revised, and approved, or not) by the domestic-facing Office of Public Affairs (PA).

This created a bizarre semantic trap. At U.S. embassies abroad, the diplomats conducting foreign-facing public diplomacy are actually titled “Public Affairs Officers” (PAOs)—reflecting an incomplete adoption of the term “public diplomacy” when it was introduced in the mid-1960s to promote an agency (USIA) under fire. Under this defensive legal framework, are these overseas PAOs censored simply because of their job title, or because their text was prepared using Smith-Mundt authorized funds? What happens if a PAO speaks off the cuff, or in a capacity other than standing formally before a foreign audience? Does an impromptu remark suddenly trigger a domestic propaganda violation if an American is in the room? And what about the domestic PA office’s own foreign-facing comments? The logic collapsed entirely into institutional timidity.

This failure of logic is even more glaring today. In 2019, during the first Trump administration, the State Department created the Assistant Secretary for Global Public Affairs (GPA), merging parts of the Bureau of International Information Programs with the Office of Public Affairs. Conceptually, if not always in practical terms, this setup returns the department to the holistic operations era of MacLeish, Benton, Allen, and Barrett, where domestic and foreign public affairs were not artificially severed.

This censorship by association was starkly in evidence at the Pentagon as well. In 2006, the Defense Department produced a legal analysis concluding that because it was conducting information operations similar to State’s “public diplomacy,” State’s Smith-Mundt restrictions on “public diplomacy” must also apply to the Defense Department’s activities. This was absolutely absurd and furthered bureaucratic strangulation. U.S. military and diplomatic personnel were routinely paralyzed by the phantom menace of Smith-Mundt, halting everything from rebroadcasting films to conducting local information operations in combat zones “because an American might see it.”

This institutional insecurity is directly reflected in the emergence of terms like “public diplomacy” and, recently, “cognitive warfare.” These phrases were adopted to paper over bureaucratic shortcomings, creating a pseudo-academic excuse for why the government was failing to effectively counter foreign subversion. The firewall became a convenient shield. Agencies used it to protect institutional turf, pass the information-warfare buck to other organizations, and dodge oversight from a Congress largely unfamiliar with these capabilities. Above all, it let them escape the difficult work of integrating public opinion into national security policy. Instead of trying to find “yes” in the law, lawyers defaulted to “no,” blaming a nonexistent statutory firewall rather than looking in the mirror.

This entrenched narrative was so powerful that when the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 partly realigned the law with its original 1948 intent—allowing material to once again be made available domestically upon request—it could barely break through the noise. Law reviews and conspiracy theorists alike shrieked that an ancient, sacred “ban” was being lifted. The legal scholars remained ignorant that their sacred firewall was a modern, punitive invention. The conspiracy theorists, meanwhile, conflated the Act with the fallout of Citizens United and the rise of domestic disinformation entrepreneurs, eagerly weaponizing an obscure bureaucratic fix to accuse the Obama administration of legalizing state propaganda against its own citizens.^⁠5

This brings us back to the ultimate proof that the “firewall” is a manufactured myth: the current administration’s use of Truth Social.

The President posts constantly, using a “no-profit”^⁠6 entity operated for his own explicit financial and political benefit. He uses it to broadcast the administration’s messaging to the public, targeting domestic and foreign audiences—from American voters to foreign ministers—simultaneously. Truth Social posts are essentially foreign policy pronouncements; they are the words of the President broadcast abroad. Transmitting the entirety of presidential statements to foreign audiences was an explicit, foundational purpose of the Voice of America.

If RFE and VOA were tools of foreign information dissemination that allegedly required strict censorship at the water’s edge to protect the fragile American mind, why is no one invoking Smith-Mundt against Truth Social?

A legal scholar or a Smith-Mundt purist might dismiss this comparison. They could argue that Truth Social is “political speech,” or that it is exempt because it does not use agency-appropriated funds. But this rebuttal exposes the fatal narrowness of their own argument.

The original 1948 Act didn’t test for “political speech.” Fulbright and Zorinsky didn’t test for the content of the material being distributed; they targeted the source—the specific agency producing it. Law reviews argue that the ban supposedly applied because the material was “propaganda,” yet these same scholars are crystal clear in their ignorance of the actual content of the material they labeled as propaganda.

By admitting that the President can blast foreign policy pronouncements directly to domestic and foreign audiences without triggering Smith-Mundt, the purists unwittingly concede the truth: Fulbright and Zorinsky were focused on policing an agency bureaucracy, not regulating what was said. The “firewall” was never about a societal discomfort with domestic influence; it was a targeted hit that did not align with the original 1948 Act.

The architects of the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act understood the Information Age they were navigating far better than we understand ours today. When faced with a global explosion of rapid communication and aggressive Soviet subversion, their instinct was not to isolate the American public or hide government content behind an artificial “firewall.” Instead, they mandated domestic transparency to enable direct oversight by the press and the public, welcomed robust congressional scrutiny, as they aggressively fought disinformation, corrected misinformation, and filled information gaps with unvarnished facts.

Share

The Smith-Mundt firewall is a manufactured myth. The legislation did not even originate as a weapon for the cold war. When Representative Karl Mundt introduced his bill in January 1945—an action entirely unrelated to, yet concurrent with, Assistant Secretary Archibald MacLeish commissioning the seminal MacMahon report—the United States was not yet aware a cold war had begun. The original framework was built on a profound realization, best articulated in MacMahon’s July 1945 report: “Modern international relations lie between peoples, not merely governments.” The effort was designed for transparent engagement and robust oversight by Congress, the press, and the public, but it was systematically marginalized starting less than a decade later.

When the information program was reduced and segregated into USIA in 1953, an agency perpetually couched in its reactionary language, the government—and later, scholars—forgot that original 1945 revelation and the purpose of the Smith-Mundt Act, a collective amnesia that only intensified the myth later on. By its very creation, USIA removed information from the policymaking table, relegating it to the margins long before any legal walls were raised. Senator Fulbright’s vendetta in the 1970s drove a nail into the coffin of both the concept and the organization. By legally blinding the American taxpayer to the agency’s work, Fulbright simultaneously blinded the legislative and executive branches to their own capabilities.

Our dysfunctional relationship with our own history of information statecraft severely hamstrings our ability to navigate modern political warfare. The Smith-Mundt myth does not prevent the United States from developing a whole-of-government information strategy; the sheer absence of political will from the White House on down does that. The profound irony that the current administration actively relies on disinformation only compounds this paralysis. But if we are ever going to properly engage in today’s struggle for minds and wills, we must anchor our debates, actions, and legislative fixes in historical reality, not bureaucratic lies. The State Department and Congress, supported by the press and the public, originally championed this legislation to share unvarnished facts, understanding that international relations had fundamentally evolved. A necessary first step to effectively countering adverse influence is finally dispelling the propaganda that surrounds the Smith-Mundt Act itself.