EXCLUSIVE: ADF Investigates Free Speech Violations by US Science Agency

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—A religious liberty law firm has launched an investigation into censorship of Americans’ free speech within the government’s science agency.

Alliance Defending Freedom’s Center for Free Speech filed two public records requests shared with The Daily Signal to federal government agencies seeking information related to possible free speech violations within the National Science Foundation.

The law firm plans to file a total of a dozen Freedom of Information Act requests into possible censorship.

The National Science Foundation is an independent agency of the government established in 1950 to “promote the progress of science, to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare, and to secure the national defense.”

The two letters sent Friday ask the National Science Foundation to disclose information related to its funding of tools that may be used to censor Americans’ speech and to provide information regarding its cooperation with organizations to moderate online speech.

One of the public records requests seeks all communications between any NSF personnel and any personnel of Meta, Facebook, Instagram, Alphabet, Google, YouTube, Snap, Twitter, X, Reddit, or Wikipedia containing terms including “disinformation,” “hate speech,” “election integrity,” “lab leak,” “misinformation,” and others.

“The American people have a right to know if their tax dollars were used to create censorship tools to suppress certain voices and how involved state actors were—and are—in social media and online censorship,” said Phil Sechler, ADF senior counsel and director of the ADF Center for Free Speech.

The National Science Foundation declined to comment.

Vice President JD Vance has warned against free speech violations in Europe spreading to the United States.

“In Washington, there’s a new sheriff in town,” Vance said at the Munich Security Conference last week in Germany. “Just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite, and I hope that we can work together on that.”

On Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “Restoring Free Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.”

On Thursday, Vance defended his statements in Munich to The Daily Signal, saying, “I said what I said.”

“We do have special relationships in the [United Kingdom] and also the civilian European allies, but we also know that there have been infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British,” Vance said during a White House meeting with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

“Of course, what the British do in their own country is up to them, but it also affects American technology companies and, by extension, American citizens,” he continued, adding that the Trump administration and Starmer would be discussing the matter.