Trump freezes US-funded media outlets worldwide, as critics warn move is ‘gift to America’s enemies’

US President Donald Trump’s administration has put journalists at Voice of America and other US-funded broadcasters on leave, abruptly freezing outlets long seen as critical to countering a Russian and Chinese information offensive.

Hundreds of reporters and other staff at VOA, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe and other outlets received a weekend email saying they will be barred from their offices and should surrender press passes, office-issued telephones and other equipment.

Trump, who has already eviscerated the US aid agency and Education Department, issued on Friday an executive order listing the US Agency for Global Media as among “elements of the federal bureaucracy that the president has determined are unnecessary.”

The head of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which started broadcasting into the Soviet bloc during the Cold War, calls the cancellation of funding “a massive gift to America’s enemies.”

“The Iranian ayatollahs, Chinese communist leaders, and autocrats in Moscow and Minsk would celebrate the demise of RFE/RL after 75 years,” its president, Stephen Capus, says in a statement.

“Handing our adversaries a win would make them stronger and America weaker,” he says.

US-funded media have reoriented themselves since the end of the Cold War, dropping much of the programming geared toward newly democratic Central and Eastern European countries and focusing on Russia and China.

Radio Free Asia, established in 1996, sees its mission as providing uncensored reporting into countries without free media including China, Myanmar, North Korea and Vietnam.

The outlets have an editorial firewall, with a stated guarantee of independence despite the funding from the US government.

The policy has angered some around Trump, who has long railed against media and in his first stint in office had suggested that US government-funded outlets should promote his policies.