Trump Holds Up Transition Process, Skirting Ethics and Fund-Raising Rules
"Donald J. Trump has so far opted out of the official planning for a government handover, a move that allows him to avoid disclosing his donors to his transition effort.
Less than a month before Election Day, Donald J. Trump’s campaign has not yet participated in the government’s official presidential transition process, a significant break from past practice that could threaten the seamless transfer of power should the Republican nominee win election.
Mr. Trump’s team has missed two key deadlines to sign agreements with the administration that are set by federal law and has also failed to sign an ethics plan that is required to jump-start the process of planning for a new administration. Mr. Trump’s representatives did attend a meeting at the White House last month, but they otherwise have had little communication with the Biden administration about the handoff and have skipped the opportunity to receive national security briefings.
Mr. Trump’s approach is a clear, although not wholly unexpected, departure from how previous presidential candidates prepared to take control of the vast federal bureaucracy. It appears to be guided, at least in part, by the candidate’s deep suspicion and mistrust of the government he is running to lead.
Experts note Mr. Trump may also have other incentives. His refusal to sign the documents allows him to circumvent fund-raising rules that put limits on private contributions to the transition effort, as well as ethics rules meant to avoid possible conflicts of interest for the incoming administration.
Representatives of Mr. Trump’s transition team, formally known as Trump Vance 2025 Transition Inc., said its lawyers were still negotiating with the Biden administration over terms of the agreements.
Lawyers for both parties “continue to constructively engage” in talks, Howard Lutnick and Linda McMahon, the Trump transition co-chairs, said in a statement to The New York Times. “Any suggestion to the contrary is false and intentionally misleading.”
The transition team for the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, has signed all three documents, according to White House officials.
The formal transition process, which is dictated by the Presidential Transition Act, has traditionally been viewed as nonpartisan. Candidates typically begin setting up teams as early as six months before Election Day in order to begin the time-consuming work of vetting and hiring thousands of political appointees and creating policy agendas, while coordinating directly with the current administration to ensure that agencies run smoothly during the turnover.
By delaying that process, Mr. Trump’s team has cut itself off from some government services and, potentially, millions of dollars in funding. It has also, at least for now, prevented aides from getting security clearances required before they can review federal records.
“An effective transition leads to an effective administration. It leads to better staffing, better organization and leads to the country being safer and more secure,” said Heath Brown, a public policy professor at John Jay College who wrote a book on the Biden administration’s transition. “I think the Trump transition team is unsure of how much they want to play by the rules.”
Mr. Trump has broken convention on this front before. In 2016, his campaign organized what appeared to be a standard transition process. But after Election Day, Mr. Trump sharply changed course, firing the leadership of his transition team and cutting off communications with the Obama administration.
Four years later, the Trump administration stuck closely to the standard transition script until immediately after the election, when the General Services Administration — which oversees much of the process — followed President Trump’s lead in refusing to recognize his defeat. For nearly three weeks, his administration froze money meant for the winning candidate and impeded communications between the Biden transition team and the federal agencies.
Given that rocky recent history, the Center for Presidential Transition, a nonpartisan nonprofit, published an open letter in March urging both parties to begin planning early, noting that “the stakes of the next transition are extremely high.”
Mr. Trump did not name the leadership of his transition team until mid-August, months after leading candidates typically do so. Less than a week later, he told the British tabloid The Daily Mail that he would refuse national security briefings, saying he didn’t trust the Biden administration.
“I don’t need that briefing,” Mr. Trump said. “They come in, they give you a briefing, and then two days later, they leak it, and then they say, ‘You leaked it.’”
In 2017, Mr. Trump’s lawyers accused the General Services Administration of improperly handing over thousands of emails from the 2016 Trump transition to the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III as part of his investigation into allegations of foreign interference in the election. To address such concerns, the agency this year added new language to its proposed agreements stating that it would not share records from the transition teams with third parties without written consent.
Although the deadline to sign that document, referred to as a memorandum of understanding, was Sept. 1., the Trump team has not signed it. Under its terms, the General Services Administration offers office space, technology support and a variety of other services to both candidates, as well as up to $7.2 million in funding to the president-elect to help cover staffing, travel and other costs.
That assistance comes with a significant string attached: To receive it, each transition team must agree to disclose its private donors and impose a $5,000 limit on contributions from individuals or organizations.
After the 2016 election, Mr. Trump’s team disclosed $6.5 million in outside contributions to support its transition. Four years later, the Biden transition revealed that it had raised $22.1 million from private donors.
If a campaign does not sign the General Services Administration agreement, it is not subject to the fund-raising limits or disclosure requirements. And unlike campaign contributions, money donated to the transition is not regulated by the Federal Election Commission.
“They are allowed to raise whatever money they want and they don’t have to say where they got it,” said Martha Joynt Kumar, an emeritus professor of political science at Towson University who has studied presidential transitions.
Last week, the Trump transition team missed a second deadline, this time to sign an agreement with the White House on access to government information. That document determines how classified information can be shared and how transition aides can communicate with government agencies, and it requires security clearances for anyone receiving classified and nonpublic records. The agreement is contingent on the campaigns’ signing an ethics plan, also provided by the White House.
Without those agreements, Ms. Kumar said, it is virtually impossible for the Trump transition to prepare for a transfer of power or, critically, to receive important national security information before the election. “National security is the most worrisome,” she said. “They would be missing a great deal.”
The Trump transition team said its staff was required to sign its own ethics code and conflict of interest statement. It provided copies of those documents to The Times.
The Trump ethics code appears more lenient than the White House version. For example, the White House code requires the transition team to get federal approval before hiring anyone who has represented a foreign government in the past year and prohibits aides from working for a foreign government for one year after leaving the transition. Under the Trump ethics code, staff members are barred from representing a foreign government only during the time they are working for the transition.
The White House plan also prohibits staff members from trying to influence or lobby the agencies that they dealt with on the transition for a full year after their work ends; the Trump code’s cooling-off period is six months.
The Trump transition officials suggested they might still enter an agreement with the Biden administration. Both Ms. Kumar and Mr. Brown said it was possible the Trump transition team could sign the White House proposal on information sharing and ethics, but not the General Services Administration agreement, a move that would allow the transition to move ahead with the most critical aspects of a power transfer without having to limit its fund-raising.
Saloni Sharma, a White House spokeswoman, said the administration was “actively working with the Trump transition team to complete” the agreements. Channing Grate, a spokeswoman for the General Services Administration, said in a statement that it “is prepared to provide services to the Trump transition team” once a signed agreement is submitted."
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