What the Murthy v. Missouri and Daily Wire Consent Decrees Do—and Don’t—Establish

In March and April, the Trump Justice Department settled two high-profile Biden-era cases involving allegations of government pressure on social and conservative media: Murthy v. Missouri (formerly Missouri v. Biden) and The Daily Wire v. State Department. Since then, the resulting decrees have been cited in Justice Department press materials and across right-leaning media as court-endorsed proof that a “censorship industrial complex” operated under the prior administration.

Neither case came close to establishing that claim.

Murthy v. Missouri, which made it to the Supreme Court, alleged that government jawboning had led social media platforms to censor speech. In June 2024, the Supreme Court reversed the lower courts’ preliminary injunction on standing grounds, and remanded to the district court for further proceedings. But when Trump took office in 2025, the Justice Department shifted its stance away from defending the government’s action, and the parties ultimately settled on March 23 of this year. The decree resolving this case expressly states, like most consent decrees, that it “shall not be construed as evidence or as an admission” of the plaintiffs’ allegations.

The Daily Wire case, which alleged that the State Department had leveraged third-party groups to censor conservative speech, was cut short at an earlier stage of the proceedings. Although the parties were engaged in discovery and the plaintiffs survived a motion to dismiss, the court never ruled on an injunction or the merits. The plaintiffs’ ambitious theory—that the State Department’s funding and promotion of private firms’ foreign counter-disinformation work made the government legally responsible for those firms’ later domestic media ratings labeling The Daily Wire and The Federalist unreliable—remained untested.

Consent decrees settle cases. They can impose binding obligations, but only because they are contracts between the parties. They do not indicate that the plaintiffs established their factual claims and legal theories in court.

What the decrees in these cases reflect is a postelection political shift. Once the administration changed, plaintiffs and defendant alike benefited from converting disputed allegations about Biden-era conduct into court-approved settlement documents. The Daily Wire celebrated its settlement as a “landmark free speech victory,” declaring that the State Department “submits to 10 years of oversight by The Daily Wire.” The Justice Department matched the tone, invoking President Trump’s executive order on “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship” and describing the decree as “righting the historic wrong” of suppressing Americans’ speech.

Consent decrees are real legal instruments. But a significant portion of the value of these decrees is their usefulness for setting a political narrative: They are collateral that can be quoted, cited, and covered as if they resolved questions the courts never actually decided. To that end, a partisan media ecosystem has invested heavily in framing these settlements as meaningful wins, even as the mainstream media has mostly ignored them. In that vacuum, the public meaning of the decrees is being set by the actors most committed to using them as score-settling narrative props.

What the Cases Actually Established

Murthy v. Missouri reached the Supreme Court with a substantial factual record—the plaintiffs had carefully selected a forum likely to yield a specific district court judge, who granted extensive discovery and then issued a sweeping preliminary injunction largely adopting the plaintiffs’ account of a broad government coercion campaign. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed in part but significantly narrowed the injunction, including as it related to the State Department—the agency that would later become the focus of the Daily Wire lawsuit—on grounds that there appeared to be no evidence to justify enjoining it. (The Murthy plaintiffs unsuccessfully petitioned for rehearing to add the State Department back to the injunction.)

The Supreme Court subsequently reversed the injunction, 6-3, on standing grounds. Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s majority opinion held that specific moderation decisions related to the majority of the plaintiffs could not be traced to any government communications. Even the strongest plaintiff—anti-vaccine activist Jill Hines—could only “eke out” traceability for past harms, and couldn’t show the substantial risk of future censorship needed for the injunction she sought. The platforms, the majority observed, had independent incentives to moderate content and had regularly exercised their own judgment. The Court emphasized that the Fifth Circuit had “relied on the District Court’s factual findings, many of which unfortunately appear to be clearly erroneous.” It listed the factual errors in a long footnote, calling the evidence “inapposite.” It did not reach the underlying merits question of whether any unconstitutional jawboning had occurred.

The Daily Wire v. State Department case (brought by The Daily Wire, The Federalist, and Texas, represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance) was much earlier in its litigation timeline. The plaintiffs’ claim was that the GEC, which was tasked with countering foreign propaganda abroad, had funded and promoted foreign-focused counter-disinformation tools and organizations, including NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index (GDI). These two organizations had each at some point also rated the plaintiffs as “unreliable sources” in proprietary media ratings products. The ratings, plaintiffs argued, fed into advertiser decisions and negatively impacted their distribution, depriving them of revenue and reach. The legal theory was that State Department support for some of these organizations’ work made the downstream harms from other workstreams attributable to the government as well.

The government filed a motion to dismiss, arguing lack of standing and contending that GEC had “never funded, promoted, nor encouraged the use of technologies targeting either the Media Plaintiffs or other Americans.” In opposing dismissal, plaintiffs acknowledged NewsGuard’s declaration that none of the money it received from the State Department funded its “Nutrition Ratings” of domestic media publications. But the plaintiffs claimed it didn’t matter—because GEC had financed the promotion of NewsGuard, including it in a GEC-operated directory of disinformation tools called “Disinfo Cloud.” GEC-funded videos and posts, they argued, had promoted NewsGuard’s broader “Nutrition Ratings.” The theory rested on a fungibility-and-promotion argument: Government support for a firm’s foreign counter-disinformation work could make the government responsible for later domestic ratings for which it had not paid directly. (The other company, GDI, had won a $100,000 award in GEC’s 2021 U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge. Plaintiffs argued that by funding GDI’s infrastructure, GEC had funded operations that reached domestic media outlets.)

Whether those arguments would ultimately have succeeded is a question no court ever decided. The causal chain from State Department grantmaking and promotion, through third-party ratings firms, to specific downstream harms affecting specific domestic plaintiffs was supposed to be tested later, on a fuller factual record. It never was. Nonetheless, the existence of the case, combined with Twitter Files allegations boosted by Elon Musk, bolstered the narrative on the right that GEC was a “censorship center.” Congress defunded it in late 2024, the State Department wound down its successor office in April 2025, and the Trump Justice Department settled in April 2026.

Binding What, on Whom?

A consent decree is a real legal instrument, and these decrees are not empty. But what they actually require—and, just as important, what they do not—matters.

The Murthy decree is the narrower of the two. It binds only three federal entities: the Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). It applies only to five major platforms—Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and YouTube—and only to the plaintiffs’ own protected speech, not to speech generally. It bars those officials and their “employees and agents” from threatening the platforms with legal, regulatory, or economic punishment to induce them to remove, suppress, or reduce the plaintiffs’ protected speech, and from unilaterally directing or vetoing platforms’ moderation decisions. It also includes a recital affirming that labeling speech as “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “malinformation” does not strip it of First Amendment protection—a statement that was already settled law.

The consent decree forbids these entities from doing what the Supreme Court held these plaintiffs had been unable to demonstrate they’d ever sought to do in the first place. It simultaneously expressly preserves ordinary government-platform communication — including telling platforms that content is false or harmful — so long as it is not coupled with a threat of punishment. In other words: it preserves the agencies’ right to do what they actually did.

The Daily Wire decree is broader, more operational, and more politically useful. It bars the State Department from using, recommending, funding, promoting, or assisting the development of tools intended to suppress, censor, demonetize, downgrade, or “fact-check” the protected speech of Americans or domestic media outlets. It runs through Jan. 31, 2036, and requires notice to employees, contractors, and grantees; training in 2030 and 2035; annual compliance letters to the media plaintiffs; and an enforcement process under which plaintiffs can trigger an investigation and seek supporting documentation before going back to court. It also seeks to scrub specific GEC-linked artifacts, including the @DisinfoCloud account and certain GEC-funded materials, from the internet.

Yet even this decree preserves substantial room for the foreign-facing work the GEC did: Still allowed are internal development or use of tools addressing foreign national security threats, collaboration with foreign governments or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) on foreign threats, internal assessments that incidentally touch domestic speech, and provenance or authenticity tools aimed at content from foreign governments or NGOs. It does not eliminate all counter-disinformation efforts abroad but raises the legal and political costs of any activity that could later be claimed—by media plaintiffs who received “Unreliable” ratings from NewsGuard—to touch American speech.

Both decrees technically deliver something to their plaintiffs. Neither amounts to a judicial finding in support of the larger “censorship regime” claim.

When the Defendant Wants to Lose

A consent decree normally reflects a bargain, carefully negotiated between genuinely adverse parties. “In exchange for the saving of cost and elimination of risk,” the Supreme Court has explained, “the parties each give up something they might have won had they proceeded with the litigation.” A defendant agrees to restrictions because the risk of losing the case—or the cost of continued litigation—outweighs the price of settlement. The resulting order is a compromise. 

That logic breaks down when the defendant has political incentives to embrace the plaintiff’s account rather than contest it. By the time the Trump Justice Department settled these cases, the defendant and the plaintiffs largely shared the same goal: enshrining a particular account of Biden-era conduct into a court-approved document. The department’s own press releases made that plain; they accused the prior administration of having “trampled free speech rights.”

There is nothing unprecedented about a new administration changing the government’s litigation position. What is unusual is the degree to which the settlements—together with the Justice Department’s public messaging around them—transformed that shift into validation of the plaintiffs’ broader story, as if a court had actually assessed the merits of plaintiffs’ claims.

Formally, the decrees remain legal documents. But readers encountering them later—litigants, journalists, law review authors, even artificial intelligence (AI) systems—may see only official-looking text and miss the crucial context: Once the administration changed, the party on the government’s side of the “v.” wanted to lose. The “defendant” had become, in significant part, a co-narrator of the plaintiffs’ story.

Spinning Settlements Into Proof

Storytelling is the point here. Eric Schmitt, Missouri’s former attorney general and now a U.S. senator, took a victory lap after the Murthy decree announcement, framing it as vindication of the coercion theory the Supreme Court had declined to credit. He has long emphasized the importance of legal cases in telling a preferred story, leveraging them for narrative warfare regardless of whether he wins or loses. The current Missouri AG illustrates how this works in practice: her press release claimed that "the consent decree acknowledges that: The Biden Administration censored social media posts 'about COVID-19, the Hunter Biden laptop report, and the 2020 Presidential election.'" It does not. The decree's text recites what plaintiffs alleged in their complain —citing back to plaintiffs' own pleadings—about events that, for two of three items, predate the Biden Administration entirely.

But in both cases, a wider ecosystem quickly moved to lock in a similar narrative: Daily Wire and Federalist triumphalism, Fox News coverage, New York Post stories, Matt Taibbi video interviews. The New Civil Liberties Alliance crowed about a “fatal blow” to the “censorship industrial complex.” All treated the decrees as legal confirmation that the “Biden censorship regime” had finally been exposed and taken down. Wikipedia entries for Murthy v. Missouri, the Twitter Files, and related articles were promptly edited to frame the settlements as substantive adjudications rather than postelection political compromises. That matters because Wikipedia often serves as an early reference point for journalists, researchers, clerks, and AI systems.

Mainstream and legacy outlets, by contrast, have mostly treated the decrees as procedural news—if they’ve covered them at all. Reuters and Bloomberg Law reported the settlements occurred. The Washington Post’s revamped editorial board wrote a brief op-ed on Murthy but seemed to blur some of the underlying facts. The nonprofit Public Knowledge offered one of the few substantive critiques, arguing from a civil liberties perspective that the Murthy decree is too narrow and misses where jawboning risks now actually lie. Outside of these examples, coverage has been sparse.

In other words: One side is producing sustained, ideologically cohesive commentary designed to expand a long-running political narrative; the other has largely left that field uncontested. The public meaning of the decrees gets set by the actors most committed to using them for score-settling.

Neither case established on the merits that any Biden-era “censorship regime” existed. What the Trump administration and its allies accomplished is narrower than the spin suggests: It secured documents memorializing an agreement between the parties approved by a court—not documents representing judicial rulings that found one side victorious. But whether that distinction holds—in briefs, in coverage, in the law reviews and Wikipedia entries that shape the narrative from here forward—depends on whether the legal and journalistic communities treat them as what they are, or as what the press releases say they are.