Michael Pack is Trump's head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the agency that supervises Voice of America and this government's other international broadcasting efforts. He was a Steve Bannon ally back before Steve Bannon found himself indicted, and he has been described as "paranoid" in his management style. Even among Trump agency heads, Pack stands out for his devotion to sabotaging his agency by purging it of the supposedly anti-Trump and disloyal and replacing them with fellow far-right hacks.
He is also taking steps to ensure that the next administration will not be allowed to take the agency back. As a Bannonite fascist, Pack has devoted himself to purging journalists whose reports may make Dear Leader look bad, to summarily ending whatever government rules and regulations prohibit that behavior, packing the agencies with far-right loyalists and now rewriting government contracts to declare that he and those other embedded Trump allies cannot be fired for at least two years.
As reported by NPR, Pack and the new Trump-allied boards of Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Asia have added "binding contractual agreements intended to ensure they cannot be removed for the next two years." The boards were previously bipartisan. Pack fired the bipartisans and installed, of course, unqualified hacks.
This means that while Joe Biden can quickly boot Pack from his role as agency head, Pack and his allies will still be able to sabotage efforts to un-sabotage the networks for at least half of a new Democratic presidency.
Being able to manipulate what news is reported and how it is reported is, in every autocratic regime, essential. Having gained substantial power over how news is reported by U.S.-sponsored radio, or at least having gained the power to remove any journalists whose reporting angers them, the Trumpians are not going to easily give it up.
