Washington: The Trump administration has suddenly suspended journalists at US-funded TV stations, including Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, ordering them to leave their offices and surrender equipment in a relocation that critics say weakens America’s global media influence.

Hundreds of journalists and other staff at VOA, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe and other stores received a weekend email in which they said they will be excluded from their offices and should surrender press cards, office-issued phones and other equipment.

Trump, who has already devised the US auxiliary agency and education department, issued an executive order on Friday showing the US Global Media Agency as among “elements of the federal bureaucracy that the president has decided is unnecessary.”

Kari Lake, a four -fire Trump supporter and former Arizona News -anchor who was held responsible for the media agency after she lost a US Senate bid, wrote -in an E email to media she monitors -that federal appropriations “no longer affect the agency’s priorities.”

An official in the White House, Harrison Fields, took a much less legalist tone in a post of X, just writing “goodbye” in 20 languages, a sarcastic jab at Voa’s multilingual coverage.

The head of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, who began to emit into the Soviet block during the Cold War, called the cancellation of financing “a massive gift to America’s enemies.”

Gift to China?

“The Iranian Ayatollah’s, Chinese communist leaders and autocrats in Moscow and Minsk would celebrate the passing of RFE/RL after 75 years,” its president, Stephen Capus, said in a statement.

“Giving our opponents a win would make them stronger and America weaker,” he said.

US-funded media has been reorgling since the end of the Cold War and lost much of the programming aimed at newly democratic central and Eastern European countries and focused on Russia and China.

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

Outlets have an editorial firewall with a declared guarantee of independence despite funding from the US government.

The policy has angry some around Trump, who has long written against media and in his first stint in office had suggested that US government -financed business should promote his policies.