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Donald Trump’s team has reportedly been dragging its feet on important paperwork for transition planning in coordination with the Biden administration, potentially impeding a smooth beginning for Trump’s return to the White House.
Trump’s team has not yet signed agreements to begin the formal transition process with the Biden White House, which were due Oct. 1, according to The Associated Press. It also has not signed an agreement with the General Services Administration, originally due Sept. 1, which provides logistical services and funds for the transition.
As NPR reported:
The agreements come with ethics requirements, including safeguards against conflicts of interest and fundraising limits.
Trump’s team has blown past the deadline to sign the agreements, saying they are still negotiating the terms.
Under the Presidential Transition Act, both major-party nominees are expected to sign the agreements prior to the election in order to support a speedy transition of power. The legislation was enacted in 2022 in an effort to prevent a repeat of 2020, when Trump delayed the transition process as part of his election denial.
Trump can still be inaugurated as president in January 2025 regardless of whether his team signs those agreements. But his administration won’t be prepared to assume governance “in a way that is safe for us,” Max Stier, the executive director of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group that has supported past transitions, told NPR.
“The consequences are severe,” Stier also told The New York Times. “It would not be possible to be ready to govern on day one.”
In late October, just days before the election, Rep. Jamie Raskin urged the Trump campaign to sign the agreements, saying in a letter that without those contracts 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.”
Trump’s transition team, which is led by Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick and Trump’s former head of the Small Business Administration, Linda McMahon, said in October that they expected to sign those agreements but still have yet to do so. Lutnick told CNN last week that the contracts are a “low-grade issue.”
The White House said on Saturday that President Joe Biden and Trump are scheduled to meet in the Oval Office on Wednesday morning. It will be the first time the two men come face-to-face since the presidential debate in June that tanked Biden’s re-election bid.