BUDAPEST, Hungary — During the Cold War, the United States beamed its own radio service to Eastern Europeans starved for any information that did not slavishly adhere to the line of their authoritarian leaders.

In Hungary, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it rolled up that service, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, in 1993, considering the collapse of Communism to be mission accomplished.

So it is likely to be taken as something of an affront to the current government under Prime Minister Viktor Orban that the United States may relaunch the pro-democracy news agency.

The move by the United States Agency for Global Media, an independent federal agency, reflects Hungary’s drift away from a free and open government, and is a blow to President Trump’s outreach to the country’s far-right prime minister.