Democrats, stakeholders continue to warn Trump won't be ready to govern without transition participation

Democrats are raising concerns that a potential second Trump administration would be ill-prepared to govern on day one after taking the reins of the executive branch, pointing to the former president’s ongoing refusal to engage in formal pre-election transition activities. 

Under federal law governing presidential transitions, all major campaigns are tasked with striking agreements with both the General Services Administration and the White House to establish the terms of their access to federal office space, equipment, technology, employees and documents. Former President Trump, despite establishing a transition team, has so far declined to set those agreements and therefore limited his ability to engage with federal agencies directly. 

That decision is risking a turbulent transition into power if Trump is elected, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, said in a letter to Trump Wednesday. Vice President Kamala Harris and her team have signed memoranda of understanding with both GSA and the White House. 

“After an election, a successful presidential candidate has roughly 75 days to transition a new team to lead a federal government with more than 430 departments, agencies, and sub-agencies and a dedicated workforce of roughly 2.3 million people,” Raskin said. “A secure and effective presidential transition is one of the greatest sources of Americans’ pride in our country and there are significant potential vulnerabilities with that transfer of power.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment but told Government Executive earlier this month that it is continuing “to evaluate and communicate with GSA about the options related to the support offered by GSA.” A GSA spokesperson as of Wednesday it had still not signed an agreement with Trump’s campaign but it was “actively working with” his transition team to complete one. An administration official said earlier this month it is similarly working with the campaign on the second agreement. 

Raskin noted that Trump, despite his recent assertions to the contrary, presided over a chaotic—and, on Jan. 6, violent—transfer of power at the end of his first term. Trump’s refusal to concede in 2020 and GSA in turn significantly delaying its “ascertainment” that Biden had won, and could therefore have full access to federal agencies, led to a severely hastened transition timeline. 

Part of the agreements the campaigns sign spell out the ethics and donation restrictions transition team members will adhere to, which Raskin speculated may be motivating Trump’s reluctance.

“With fewer than three weeks left until an election in which the American people will select a new president of the United States, I urge you to put the public’s interest in maintaining a properly functioning government above any personal financial or political interests you may perceive in boycotting the official transition law and process,” Raskin said. 

He called on Trump to accept the funding, resources, information and people his team will need to ensure it is ready to govern on Jan. 20, 2025, and that transition law makes available. 

Raskin is the latest to raise concerns of a potentially rocky transition. Former Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., who led President Biden’s 2020 transition efforts, helped pass the 2010 Pre-Election Presidential Transition Act and whose name is on a subsequent, 2015 transition law, told Government Executive Trump is already significantly behind where his team was this time four years ago. His transition staff began engaging with Biden directly in April 2019 and prior to the election had his sign off for a large swath of the 1,100 political appointees the president swore in on his inauguration day. 

Trump, by contrast, seems to think "he can work it all out in 15 minutes" and that he can run the government “with just a few people in the White House doing whatever they want,” Kaufman said. The former president only sent 500 political appointees to agencies throughout government after the day he took the oath of office and he was well behind schedule in meeting with agencies in 2016. 

Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, a good government nonprofit that houses the Center for Presidential Transition, recently said Trump’s refusal to engage with the Biden administration on transition activities creates a “real risk” for agencies and their employees who need to have already started planning. 

“There’s a lot of investment that goes in, so the uncertainty of not having those MOUs in place presents a real challenge to them,” Stier said. “There’s going to be a ton of work that has to be done…the early investment is critical to get it done and not to put even more burden on the career civil servants.”

Transition planning is already well underway at agencies across government. In the spring, each agency named an employee in a career Senior Executive Service role as transition director. Those executives at major agencies are now sitting on the Agency Transition Director’s Council, as required in a 2016 update to transition law. The council is meeting regularly and helping agencies prepare briefing materials that must be finalized by Nov. 1. 

The White House Coordinating Council—made up of White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan, Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young and more than a dozen additional top White House staffers—also started to meet over the summer. The group hosted representatives from the Trump and Harris campaigns last month, though formal transition coordination with the Trump campaign remains stalled. 

Kaufman said that key officials in the Biden administration are taking transition efforts seriously and have been engaged on the issue for a long time. Raskin warned, however, that all the work agencies are conducting may be for naught if Trump does not engage with them. Even basic communication is likely to prove a challenge, as GSA provides secure networks and .gov email addresses that enable agencies to safely exchange information with verified individuals.

“Without these MOUs in place, federal agencies are unlikely to be able to securely and effectively communicate with your staff, which will endanger ‘the orderly transfer of the executive power’ and threaten our national security,” Raskin said. “I strongly urge you to expeditiously sign both MOUs and submit your ethics plan.”