President-elect Donald Trump’s transition got a late start.
Trump has declined for months to involve federal agencies and civil servants in preparations for his White House return. His team hasn’t tapped executive branch expertise for things like security clearances and cybersecurity and has waited until recent weeks to sign agreements with the White House and Justice Department to access agencies’ headquarters and sensitive information.
The result is a privately funded transition team that has been able to quickly make cabinet picks and avoid public scrutiny — but hasn’t met with the career professionals who will be tasked with helping Trump deliver his campaign promises.
Trump “landing teams” are expected to soon arrive at agencies like EPA and DOE to parlay with career officials and peruse government documents. Transition officials provided the Biden White House with names for those teams late last week, but they haven’t been made public.
But no matter who shows up at agency headquarters between now and Christmas, they’ll be getting there several weeks late. If agreements had been signed and clearances granted in summer or early fall, as is usual, Trump officials could have been at agency headquarters days after the election. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ presidential nominee, signed transition agreements Sept. 19.
“The Trump team would have benefited from five weeks so far of discussions with federal agencies about the issues facing them,” said Valerie Smith Boyd, director of the Center for Presidential Transition at the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service. “Federal agencies have been preparing for six months to brief either or both teams about org chart changes, budgetary changes, management challenges and decisions that need to be made in the early weeks of a presidency.”
Trump’s moves underscore his distrust of federal agencies like DOJ, which led several investigations against him, and the General Services Administration, which complied with orders to share information from Trump’s first transition with prosecutors.
GSA, the government’s landlord, is supposed to lead presidential transitions, providing secure internet, office space and operating funds to prep for an incoming administration. But the Trump team opted to cut GSA out and instead operate under the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a Trump-aligned nonprofit.
The transition team did not respond to inquiries for this story. But alums from the first Trump term say that his distrust is founded.
“Last time, the GSA was an active impediment,” said Mike McKenna, who briefly led Trump’s first Energy Department transition team. “Ask anyone who tried to get a clearance. Or a computer.”
Myron Ebell, who headed up the EPA transition team that year, said it made sense to sign agreements the first time around because Trump had fewer contacts in Washington.
“Now that they have AFPI, they don’t really need to create a separate structure because AFPI effectively is the transition,” he said.
Without a GSA agreement, the Trump team can’t use government servers. That’s actually part of the point — the agency provided emails from the 2017 transition to Special Counsel Robert Mueller as part of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
It means that Trump, who once suggested that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should face jail time for using a private email server for official duties, is using private email servers for his entire second presidential transition.
AFPI reported being hacked in October.
“Federal agencies want to be sharing information in a secure way and protecting information, so they want to be working with a team that is operating on a government network,” said Smith Boyd. “GSA can bring the resources of [the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and Defense intelligence Agency] and the whole federal government to bear if there’s hacking attempts on that network.”
Smith Boyd said agencies had been directed to use their own best judgment in giving Trump transition officials classified information while safeguarding national security. That might mean more in-person briefings or using IT terminals at government buildings to communicate information that can’t be transferred off-site, she said.
EPA spokesperson Andrea Drinkard told POLITICO’s E&E News in an email that the agency handles some classified national security information, for which it follows “robust protocols.”
“The agency continues to stand ready to engage with the Trump Transition Team and has not received any requests to share sensitive or classified information,” she said.
‘Impression of mistrust’
Former career officials who have participated in past transitions say the weeks between Election Day and the inauguration afford barely enough time to bring the new team up to speed and build rapport between them and professional staff at agencies.
“What you want to have happen is to start building relationships, because the career folks are going to be working for the new administration,” said Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, former acting EPA assistant administrator for research and development.
Orme-Zavaleta, a former career official who started at EPA in 1981, said Trump’s decision not to follow protocol — coming off a campaign in which he decried the “deep state” and promised drastic staff reductions — would further stoke anxiety in the civil service.
“It just further leaves the impression of mistrust and will make it that much harder to have a new administration come in and get the respect and the cooperation of the career civil servants who will be working for them,” she said. “Because it’s really the career civil servants that will make things happen.”
The transition team’s belated signing of agreements with the White House and DOJ means the FBI can now take over vetting high-level national security appointees and transition team personnel.
Until now, Trump’s team has relied on outside law firms to vet candidates for important posts, like Pete Hegseth for secretary of Defense. It has been reported that Trump officials were blindsided by sexual assault allegations about Hegseth that later came to light.
“They can’t go as deep as the FBI can, so there were things that they did not know about,” said Martha Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project. “And I think that that holds everything up.”
When it signed the memorandum with the Biden White House, the Trump team also committed to follow certain protocols in handling government documents and information.
Transition team members — many of whom hail from the private sector and will return to it in a few weeks — are now bound by ethics provisions that prevent them from exploiting privileged information they learn in the course of their transition work. That could include regulatory work or grant-making decisions under the Inflation Reduction Act or other laws that may still be in progress and of interest to private clients.
The president-elect’s decision to forgo the GSA agreement means his team won’t get funding, IT support, desk space and office supplies. But it also means that the transition will remain a private entity through 12 p.m. on Jan. 20, when Trump is sworn back in.
Instead of receiving public funding to cover staff and operations, the process of setting up the next administration will be bankrolled by unlimited private donations. Susie Wiles, Trump’s incoming chief of staff, has said donors will be publicly disclosed.
But there’s no legal requirement for the Trump team to do so or any standards about how complete those disclosures must be or whether they include actual dollar amounts. Smith Boyd of the Center for Presidential Transition said this year should prompt Congress to strengthen ethics and transparency provisions in the Presidential Transitions Act.
“There’s not a lot of consequences for them, per se, but there are consequences for the citizenry,” said Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a visiting fellow of Brookings Institution. “You and I are entitled to know who’s donating to the transition, because there could be lots of conflicts of interest.”
If a business has a vested interest in a certain regulatory outcome or government contract, it could be shelling out millions to support the transition in hopes of influencing policy.
“We’ll never know that there was a complete quid pro quo, because none of this is required to be publicly disclosed,” Tenpas said.
The transition team did not answer questions about its disclosure plans.
