Whoever wins the presidential race on Nov. 5 will have 76 days to complete a complicated and massive effort to take over the federal government from outgoing President Joe Biden. That process has already begun for Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. While most of the attention will fall on what the president-elect is doing, some scrutiny may fall on Biden’s transition out of office, including on how his team handles classified documents. In this series, the Washington Examiner will look at the challenges ahead for all three leaders’ transitions. Part two will look at Trump’s transition effort.
Should former President Donald Trump win the 2024 election, he would be more prepared to lead the government than he was before his first victory in 2016, when he was a political novice who upended conventional norms. An outside group aligned with Trump has compiled the resumes of candidates for the thousands of political appointments needed to fill out the government, and strategists see the 2024 campaign as far more disciplined than the team that helped Trump win eight years ago.
But just weeks before Election Day, his campaign has yet to tap into federal resources available for both candidates’ transition teams.
Trump’s campaign says there haven’t been any “formal discussions” about who will be in his Cabinet during a second administration.
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However, there are plenty of highly qualified lawmakers jockeying to serve in his administration, including his former Republican presidential rivals.
“President Trump announced a Trump Vance transition leadership group to initiate the process of preparing for what comes after the election,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told the Washington Examiner in a statement. “But formal discussions of who will serve in a second Trump Administration is premature. President Trump will oversee a smooth transition and choose the best people for his Cabinet to undo all the damage dangerously liberal Kamala Harris has done to our country.”
The high number of Republicans who are willing to join a second Trump Cabinet is a clear contrast from 2016, when the GOP was struggling to accept that Trump’s takeover of the party had occurred, strategists told the Washington Examiner.
Trump would ultimately cast aside the monthslong transition efforts of former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie just days after the election that year, leaving him unprepared to staff the government.
“The transition after 2016 was a disaster,” said one Republican strategist, who requested anonymity to speak freely. “It wasn’t just that Trump wasn’t staffed up in part because he didn’t think he would win … there was an entire legion of Never Trump Republicans — many of the kind who would typically go into an administration — who made themselves persona non grata.”
The strategist also said Trump didn’t truly understand the presidency.
“He thought he would be a sort of figurehead — a head of state like the then-queen who could leave the actual machinations of governing to de facto co-prime ministers, Mitch McConnell and Paul,” the strategist continued.
But in 2024, Trump’s two campaign managers, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, are running a tight and disciplined campaign that is expected to transition into the White House if Trump wins.
“I think, obviously, both Chris LaCivita and Suzy Wiles are professionals. They’ve done a great job at keeping the campaign on message and to make sure that they’re talking to issues that matter to the American people,” said Wayne King, the president of Old North Strategies and a former chief of staff to former North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows. “I feel very certain that post-campaign, pre-inauguration, that’s going to be very important to keep doing and to focus on getting things up and running for a White House operation and (a) Cabinet agency built out.”
In August, the former president appointed billionaire Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick and former Trump Small Business Administration Administrator Linda McMahon to lead his campaign’s presidential transition team, which also includes sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.
He also added former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and former third-party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the transition team.
McMahon also serves as the chairwoman of the board at the America First Policy Institute, a group that is also poised to provide Trump with resumes of people who could fill the required 4,000 federal political appointees, with roughly 1,200 that will need Senate confirmations.
AFPI has seemingly replaced the Heritage Foundation, whose Project 2025 blueprint Democrats have denounced as extreme, as the top organization the former president is leaning on to staff a new administration.
Another GOP strategist said that AFPI has “also, in a lot of ways, rendered some of the other think tanks that are more right-leaning irrelevant, plus it also knows which experts it needs to go to on which issues.”
Lutnick previously told the Financial Times that appointees in the Trump White House would have to prove their “loyalty.”
King essentially agreed with that idea.
“A lot of these agencies need to be cleaned out more deeply, to make sure that [Trump’s] vision for America is heard and it’s heard loud and clear,” King said.
The second strategist also added that the Trump campaign “will need to find a way to clean house with bureaucrats,” referencing Schedule F, a system that would allow 50,000 federal employees to be pushed out for political appointees.
But even for most modern presidents, staffing remains daunting, with none of the last four presidents (Joe Biden included) filling or nominating over 55% of the more than 30 top national security positions by their 30th day in office, according to the Center for Presidential Transition.
Valerie Smith Boyd, the director of the Partnership for Public Service’s Center for Presidential Transition, said it was “a very important step” for Trump to name his transition co-chairs, who have the necessary experience for the job. “Plans are good,” she said, but with various organizations competing for influence, “multiple competing plans can be as problematic as not having a plan.”
Transition planning usually begins in late spring of an election year for presidential candidates, Boyd said, but those norms were upended after Harris replaced President Joe Biden in late July and Trump didn’t announce the co-chairs until August.
Despite these appointments, the Trump campaign has not yet accepted the assistance of the General Services Administration, which is the federal agency in charge of the presidential transition. The GSA is required to offer federal office space, as well as IT support and other resources, to presidential candidates under the Presidential Transition Act.
The campaign had two deadlines, one on on Sept. 1 and another on Oct. 1, to sign two separate memoranda of understanding with the GSA, and it has not signed a required ethics plan, a departure from long-held practice. In contrast, the Harris campaign has signed both MOUs and the ethics plan.
By not signing the MOU, Trump can skirt the requirement to disclose private donors and abide by the $5,000 limit from individual and organizational donors to the transition team. But it also complicates the 77-day timeline between Election Day and Inauguration Day.
In 2020, the chaos that followed the election delayed the GSA from ascertaining Biden as the winner until Nov. 23, thus delaying access to a $6.3 million budget to help with the transition process.
The Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022 was meant to prevent a repeat of the 2020 election by allowing the post-election transition process to start either after a candidate concedes the election or automatically five days after the election if no candidate concedes.
The Trump campaign said it would eventually sign the MOUs as it works with the Biden administration on a transition.
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“The Trump-Vance transition contract lawyers continue to constructively engage with the Biden-Harris administration contract lawyers toward the execution of all agreements contemplated by the Presidential Transition Act,” Trump co-chairs Lutnik and McMahon said. “Any suggestion to the contrary is false and intentionally misleading. In the meantime, all transition staff have signed a robust ethics pledge as a requirement of their participation. We expect to sign all the contemplated memoranda of understanding.”
Boyd, of the Center for Presidential Transition, stressed that signing the MOUs helps the GSA and other federal agencies to support the candidates as they prepare for the inauguration.
“There’s a lot of work that needs to be done before the election in order for things to move smoothly for the candidates after the election,” Boyd said. “And the longer it takes for the candidates to complete agreements that allow those processes to start, the more they risk their readiness.”