Authored by Kimberley Hayek via The Epoch Times,

The Trump administration announced plans to direct funding toward promoting free speech in Western allied democracies, a senior State Department official said on Monday. The initiative bolsters efforts to counter European online regulations categorized by Washington as censorship.

Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers discussed the initiative during a trip to Europe. It includes grants to support free expression, a result of concerns about rules such as the European Union’s Digital Services Act and Britain’s Online Safety Act.

These laws, which E.U. officials say aim to deter hate speech and misinformation, have been scrutinized by U.S. officials as restricting the free speech of American tech firms and suppressing immigration policy critiques.

“One way my office is going to operate differently is we’re going to be very forthright and transparent about everything we do,” Rogers said during a panel discussion in Budapest on Monday. She added that her role allows directing U.S. funding through grants, stating, “I want to promote free speech in Western allied democracies, and ... that’s what my grantmaking is going to be doing.”

Rogers, appearing alongside a top aide to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, underscored the importance of free speech for democracy.

“The United States government, via me, but not only me, has been engaging aggressively on the issue of free speech, because you don’t have self-governance without freedom of speech, you can’t have a democratic deliberation if viewpoints are proscribed from the public square,” she said.

Rogers is scheduled to stop in Dublin, Budapest, Warsaw, and Munich to discuss digital freedoms with officials and others.

The administration’s December National Security Strategy said that European leaders were censoring speech and suppressing opposition to immigration policies, warning of the continent’s “civilizational erasure.”

Rogers said European polls showing European views on migration are similar to those in the United States.

The United States imposed last month visa bans on a former European Union commissioner and four anti-disinformation activists. The administration labeled them agents of censorship for working to regulate U.S. social media platforms. European leaders lambasted the bans. They defended the commissioner and activists’ rights to push for regulations on foreign companies operating locally.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio revealed the designations on Dec. 23, 2025. He called the individuals “agents of the global censorship-industrial complex” and blocked their entry to the United States.

The European Commission unveiled a new “anti-racism” strategy on Jan. 20, aiming toward a “Europe free from racism” with increased anti-discrimination enforcement and training.

The Commission said the training will help civil servants “recognise and tackle racial bias, while fostering greater cultural awareness and sensitivity.” It also requires European educators to “address teacher training and professional development on diversity and inclusion, as well as promoting diversity in the teaching profession itself.”

Eric Kaufmann, a professor at the University of Buckingham, said the strategy “betrays an illiberal moralizing worldview” that could lead to “suppressing free speech and asphyxiating the historical pride and culture of Europe’s ethnic majorities.”

Jacob Reynolds of think tank MCC Brussels called it a “slide to cultural socialist ideas.”

Reynolds previously told The Epoch Times that he believes that the policy “has got nothing to do with racism” and is “a classic example of how the EU proceeds to amass for itself more powers to regulate orderly life and get involved in politics.”

“This is not [anti-racism], as ordinary people understand it,” he said. “This is the kind of woke [diversity, equity, and inclusion] agenda that has come to dominate the way that lots of civil servants, lots of academics, lots of civil society organizations think.”

“E.U. in this strategy is clearly not concerned about the things that ordinary people would understand as racism, discrimination against people on the basis of the [color] of their skin, but is actually about regulating thought,” he told The Epoch Times.

The initiative increases funding for the Citizens, Equality, Rights, and Values program, with a proposal for 3.6 billion euros ($4.2 billion) for 2028–2034 to aid civil society projects.