Last week's settlement of Missouri v. Biden — the landmark lawsuit exposing the Biden administration's comprehensive scheme to use federal agencies as a censorship machine — is a genuine and hard-won victory for the First Amendment. But it is not a complete one. And the gap between what the consent decree accomplishes and what true justice for the millions of Americans silenced by their own government would require deserves honest examination.
The settlement, reached with the Department of Justice, prohibits the Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency from taking any "actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly … to threaten Social-Media Companies with some form of punishment unless they remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech" — for the next decade. The three agencies are also barred from unilaterally directing or vetoing content moderation decisions by Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO), who brought the original case as Missouri's Attorney General before winning his Senate seat, captured the significance of the moment on X: "This is the first real, operational restraint on the federal censorship machine. It locks in the First Amendment principle we fought for: modern technology doesn't erase your rights, and government labels don't strip speech of protection. The deep state just got checked."
He is right. And yet.
What the Decree Does — and Doesn't Do
The consent decree represents a critical admission by the federal government that its years-long effort to pressure social media companies into suppressing disfavored speech was unlawful. For that admission alone, the settlement is historically significant. But its protections are narrower than many Americans may realize.
Technically, the pact's prohibitions extend only to the named plaintiffs — a handful of individuals and the state governments of Missouri and Louisiana. In practice, the Trump administration may well treat the public at large as equally protected, and other courts may give weight to the settlement as precedent. But a future administration hostile to free speech — and there will eventually be one — could interpret the decree far more narrowly, securing rulings that cut against the broad First Amendment principles the plaintiffs fought to vindicate. And the prohibitions themselves are time-limited, expiring after ten years.
That is not a permanent fix. It is a tourniquet.
A Long Road to a Partial Victory
The case's journey to settlement was neither swift nor straightforward. Louisiana District Court Judge Terry Doughty, and later the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, found that the evidence plaintiffs had amassed of the government's censorious scheme was so compelling that federal authorities had likely violated the First Amendment at mass scale. The courts imposed a preliminary injunction.
The Biden administration appealed to the Supreme Court — and in June 2024, in a majority opinion authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the court declined to act on the merits, ruling instead that the plaintiffs lacked standing to pursue the injunction. The court found that the censored had failed to demonstrate "a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a Government defendant and redressable by the injunction they seek." Barrett buried the court's refusal to rule on whether the government had actually violated the First Amendment in a footnote — a judicial evasion that left the censorship-industrial complex's victims without the definitive constitutional ruling they deserved and needed.
Sent back to the district court, the plaintiffs pressed on. Judge Doughty ruled in their favor in November 2024, agreeing that the Supreme Court's standing ruling did not require dismissal of the underlying case. Three days later, Donald Trump won his second term. The combination of continued litigation and a new administration committed to free speech ultimately produced last week's settlement.
The Victims Who Have Never Been Made Whole
The plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden were not abstract legal entities. They were real people — doctors who challenged COVID lockdown and vaccine mandate orthodoxy at the height of the pandemic and were buried by government-directed suppression for it; conservative journalists and outlets whose reporting on the 2020 election, the Hunter Biden laptop, and other inconvenient stories was flagged, throttled, and removed at the behest of federal officials; activists whose Facebook accounts were suspended for organizing against COVID restrictions.
Among the named plaintiffs was Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which challenged the scientific and public health consensus on lockdowns and has been substantially vindicated by subsequent evidence. Bhattacharya has since been appointed to a senior policy position in the second Trump administration — one of the more striking ironies of the post-censorship era. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a plaintiff in a companion case, has similarly been elevated to a prominent role.
But for every named plaintiff whose vindication is now part of the public record, there are millions of nameless Americans — ordinary citizens who had posts removed, accounts flagged, voices suppressed — who have never been made whole. They received no apology. They received no compensation. The government officials who directed the censorship scheme against them have faced no legal consequences whatsoever.
What Comes Next
The consent decree is a floor, not a ceiling. It should be treated as the beginning of accountability, not the end of it.
Senator Schmitt's colleagues in Congress should follow his lead and pass legislation that permanently codifies the First Amendment protections the lower courts sought to impose — not for ten years, not for named plaintiffs only, but for every American, in perpetuity. The Supreme Court's evasion of the merits in this case cannot be the last word on whether the federal government is constitutionally permitted to use social media companies as instruments of political censorship.
Beyond legislation, the architects of the censorship-industrial complex — the agency officials who sent the emails, made the phone calls, and applied the pressure that got millions of Americans silenced — must face real legal consequences. A government employee who violates the constitutional rights of citizens while acting under color of law should not escape accountability with a consent decree that doesn't even mention their names.
And the censorship-industrial complex itself — the web of nonprofits, academic institutions, and quasi-governmental organizations that served as the administrative infrastructure for speech suppression — has not been defunded. It has not been dismantled. It remains largely intact, waiting for a future administration willing to put it back to work.
President Trump's Day One executive order declaring that "the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the Government's preferred narrative" was a statement of principle. The consent decree is an operational expression of that principle. What remains to be built is the permanent legal architecture that ensures no future government can do to Americans what the Biden administration did — regardless of which party controls the White House.
Justice was delayed. One court, at last, ensured it was not entirely denied. But for the millions still waiting to be made whole, the work is far from finished.
The consent decree in Missouri v. Biden is subject to final approval by Judge Terry Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana.
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03.30.2026