Trump still declining federal transition services even as second deadline passes

Presidential transition planning for the federal government has hit a snag as former President Trump’s refusal to date to accept official services has disrupted the process from moving forward on a normal schedule. 

Both campaigns faced a Tuesday deadline to move into a new stage of the quadrennial transition planning, but Trump’s team is still weighing its options on how or whether to formally work with the government in that process. Its wavering has the potential to hold up preparations for both he and Vice President Kamala Harris. 

Campaigns and their transition teams had until Sept. 1 and Oct. 1 to enter into two separate memoranda of understanding with the government. Channing Grate, a spokeswoman for the General Services Administration, the agency that leads transition efforts, said GSA is responsible for signing the earlier MOU, while the White House signs the second agreement with the Oct. 1 deadline. 

The Harris transition team in mid-September—more than two weeks after the Sept. 1 deadline—signed an MOU, the first of the two laid out in transition law, with GSA. That agreement, as spelled out in statute, details the office space, technology support, equipment and other services GSA will provide. An agency spokesperson said GSA has offered services to both campaigns, but only the Harris team has so far signed an MOU. 

GSA “is prepared to provide services to the Trump transition team once an MOU is executed and services are accepted,” the spokesperson said. 

Brian Hughes, a senior advisor to the Trump campaign, declined to detail when or if the Trump team would reach an agreement. 

“The Trump-Vance Transition continues to evaluate and communicate with GSA about the options related to the support offered by GSA,” Hughes said. 

Tuesday’s deadline pertained to a second MOU with the transition teams and the White House, which is designed to set the conditions for transition staffers to access federal agency facilities, documents and employees. Part of that agreement is required to include ethics requirements for transition team members. 

The White House typically issues its agreements at the same time to both transition teams, making it difficult to set up its MOU with Harris before Trump. It would also be challenging to establish the second agreement with Trump without his first signing GSA’s document, as GSA provides secure networks and .gov email addresses that enable agencies to safely exchange information with verified individuals. 

Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, a good government nonprofit that houses the Center for Presidential Transition, ahead of the Sept. 1 deadline called it "imperative" that Harris and Trump are "ready to run our government on day one." 

The support from GSA, he said, "will be crucial to help them both plan for this tremendous responsibility.”

Harris has tapped Yohannes Abraham to lead her transition effort, who served in the same role for Biden’s 2020 transition team and most recently held the post of ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Trump has named Howard Lutnick, who leads a financial services firm, and Linda McMahon, who headed the Small Business Administration under the former president, as his transition co-chairs. 

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, and their tasks include working on an integrated strategy for the transition, coordinating with the White House and other agencies and assisting GSA’s transition director in carrying out her duties. It has provided guidance on the briefing materials all agencies must assemble for incoming administrations and is helping them prepare career employees designated to step into non-career roles during the transition period.

The agency council is now meeting regularly and 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, the Associated Press reported. 

Valerie Boyd, who heads up the Center for Presidential Transition, said all parties deserve credit for “responsibly managing transition planning at this point in the process.” She praised the White House for getting its transition council up and running, agencies for meeting benchmarks to ensure they can brief candidate teams after the election and the campaigns for both naming transition leaders with experience.

Boyd added she is not yet panicked about the transition being behind schedule as each election cycle brings “unpredictability and new considerations”—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—and the general push toward day one readiness is more important than the precise timelines in law. 

“The more important thing is the candidate teams are prepared to work with federal agencies when the time comes,” Boyd said.