The massive taxpayer-funded collection of news outlets under the U.S. Agency for Global Media is supposed to be a nonpartisan booster of information and American ideals abroad. But over the past six months, President Donald Trump s handpicked leader, Michael Pack, has dramatically reshaped the agency to promote not news or democracy but the president himself.

Pack announced last week that he was rescinding the firewall between the agencys political leaders and its newsrooms. The agency employs hundreds of journalists who work for Voice of America , Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Radio Free Asia, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting and other organizations.

Many correspondents are among the few sources of reliable news for people living in the worlds most repressive societies, places where press freedom is a dream and rulers rarely face real public scrutiny.

Now Trump and his appointee want to make their work more vulnerable to political whims.

Pack argued in a statement Monday that he should be able to take actions such as blocking stories to check what he views as biased reporting. The result is that an $800 million dollar news operation with major influence on global opinion is in disarray and vulnerable to exploitation just ahead of a presidential election that Trump is already undermining with unfounded allegations of fraud and corruption.

For a president who is clear that he doesnt see winning the most votes or even counting all of them as his path to reelection, the biggest priority over the next week is messaging: Persuading people that any outcome in which he does not win is illegitimate.

The agency is not permitted to target Americans with its journalism. But it can help shape the international conversation about the likely election chaos in the U.S., affecting the calculus of foreign officials and governments that Trump administration officials said the president is counting on to help him retain power.

The Republican-held Senate confirmed Pack a conservative filmmaker who once railed against liberal indoctrination on campuses to head the agency in June, soon after Trump and the White House began publicly berating VOA for not hewing to the administrations line that the devastating effects of the coronavirus were due to China and not Trumps own failed strategy.

Since then, Packs team has accused a longtime correspondent of anti-Trump bias and ousted veteran officials while hiring people such as a former conservative radio host who once called House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) a Nazi.

Other agency leaders pushed editors to highlight damage caused by Black Lives Matter protests and told reporters that Twitter behavior disparaging the president could harm their jobs.

Packs aides dug around in trash cans for signs of employees disloyalty, ran content promoting Ivanka Trump and Vice President Mike Pence and denied visa renewals to dozens of foreign journalists.

It would be very difficult for the president to convert a taxpayer-funded news outlet entirely into Radio Trump without congressional approval. But lawmakers, experts and journalists themselves are terrified about the damage Pack could do to the agencys professionalism and credibility both in the post-election period and in the long run, even if he is ultimately removed by a President Joe Biden next year.

Pack has already signaled one of his priorities is not original reporting but the renewal of VOA editorials, the part of USAGM that is intended to directly communicate the views of the U.S. government. In recent months, these editorials have put an enormous emphasis on religious liberty above other human rights issues.

Meanwhile, BBGWatch, a website run by current and former USAGM staff, has become increasingly aggressive in pushing a pro-Trump line.

The attempted removal of the firewall suggested that even broader changes lie ahead, putting journalists on edge as they wonder if the future will involve restrictions on their reporting.

The action seems to send a very clear message to the newsroom, said an employee with a USAGM-supported network who spoke to HuffPost on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution. Fall in line or else.

A USAGM spokesperson denied that Pack aimed to instill political loyalty to Trump or to promote propaganda.

When [Pack] served at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, he sought to bring objectivity and balance to its programming. He fully intends to do the same with USAGMs networks in order to ensure that they adhere to their mission statements and maintain their professional journalistic standards and principles, the spokesperson wrote in an email to HuffPost.

Packs shake-up has chilling parallels in other nations. For hard-right political forces worldwide, a top goal is reshaping independent media organizations to amplify their own message and reduce the risk of reporting that can challenge their power. In Poland, for instance, the ruling Law and Justice party quickly turned the countrys state media into a mouthpiece that now spreads disinformation and targets party enemies.

If USAGM becomes sort of Fox [News] international, which I fear it will, or a sort of [Steve] Bannon news on steroids, then basically we will have replicated the information space that we tried to resist in Eastern Europe, said Jay Tolson, a former news director for Radio Free Europe.

A Partisan Process

Trump nominated Pack in June 2018. But top Democrats and a handful of Republicans held up his confirmation in the Senate over concerns that he would harm the agency.

Pack rejected offers to be briefed by existing leaders at the agency and by outside analysts of its work, such as Martha Bayles, a Boston College expert on American public diplomacy who has known him for years.

When he was first nominated, I felt relieved, Bayles later wrote in The American Interest. She now sees the beginnings of a nightmare.

Right-wing activists pressured the Senate to move Pack forward, particularly after former agency chief John Lansing left the post last September. They argued the presidents nominee deserved a vote and that a new leader was needed to clean up the agency, which they believed too often took what they viewed as the liberal bent of mainstream media and was vulnerable to foreign influence.

Pack and his supporters received an unexpected boost this spring when Trump began alleging that the VOA was unfair to the U.S. and overly sympathetic to Beijing, picking up a complaint that his former adviser Bannon, a long-time Pack associate, had promoted for years.

The White House on April 10 issued a statement claiming the agency spends your money to promote foreign propaganda, citing its coverage of a Chinese light show to celebrate the end of the coronavirus-related lockdown in Wuhan. Days later, the president called the agency out during a briefing on the pandemic: What things they say are disgusting toward our country, Trump said.

By the end of the month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told employees to ignore interview requests from VOA because of the White Houses view of the agency, according to an email later obtained and published by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

Faced with clear intent to challenge USAGMs journalistic independence, Pack and his supporters avoided challenging Trump and instead saw an opportunity.

It was unusual when the president sort of expressed his views on VOA in a press conference, said Katrina Lantos Swett of the Lantos Foundation, a longtime human rights advocate who is one of the few Washington establishment figures to welcome Pack. I think that certainly raised the profile of the quieter battle that was going on, and it may have had an impact in sort of coalescing Republican votes.

A USAGM spokesperson told HuffPost that Pack found Trumps remark absolutely appropriate, for he is also firmly on the side of reform.

In early May , Trump personally called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky to tell him pushing Pack through was a priority. The Senate approved him 58-38 on June 4 as Packs opponents noted that he was under investigation by the District of Columbia attorney general over allegations he had illegally funded his private film company with nonprofit donor funds. (That probe is ongoing .)