Trump Transition Signs White House Agreement

The Trump transition has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Biden White House, incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles announced on Tuesday — a move that clears the way for coordination with the federal agencies they will soon take over.

The Trump team’s unprecedented delay in signing these agreements, weeks after being declared the winner of the election, had alarmed former officials and ethics experts who warned it could lead to conflicts of interest and leave the new government unprepared to govern on Day One.

In the Tuesday announcement, Wiles suggested the Trump transition will not sign a separate agreement with the General Services Administration, which would have allowed them to receive federal funding, cybersecurity support and government office space, pledging instead to fund the transition with private dollars, run it out of private facilities, and deploy their own “existing security and information protections” for sensitive data.

The transition, Wiles said, “will operate as a self-sufficient organization, adding that declining government funding will “save taxpayers' hard-earned money.”

And while Wiles also pledged in the Tuesday statement to publicly disclose the private donors to the transition and “not accept foreign donations,” there will be no legal mechanism to enforce those promises of transparency.

The lack of federal cybersecurity support could also make the Trump transition a softer target for foreign hackers — who already successfully penetrated the campaign earlier this year.

“That's something that in 2020 was maybe the single most important worry of the [Biden] transition team — that they would be hacked, and all of this information, including intelligence information, personal information about job applicants, would be threatened,” said Heath Brown, an associate professor of public policy at CUNY’s John Jay College who wrote a book about Biden’s transition. “It’s imperative that the Trump Transition Team has installed the proper procedures to protect itself.”  

White House spokesperson Saloni Sharma said the Biden administration is concerned about the ramifications of their successors forgoing GSA support, but remains “committed to an orderly transition.”

“While we do not agree with the Trump transition team’s decision to forgo signing the GSA MOU, we will follow the purpose of the Presidential Transition Act which clearly states that ‘any disruption occasioned by the transfer of the executive power could produce results detrimental to the safety and wellbeing of the United States and its people,’” she said.

In the White House memo, Sharma added, the Trump transition “agreed to important safeguards to protect non-public information and prevent conflicts of interest, including who has access to the information and how the information is shared,” and also agreed to publicly share the ethics agreements it is imposing on its own employees.

The Trump transition will also have to give the White House the names and current employers of the people who will be serving on their “landing teams” — the groups who typically enter federal agencies shortly after the election to begin familiarizing incoming Cabinet members with their budgets, staff and work in progress.

People in both parties who previously led federal agencies told POLITICO that the weeks-long delay in signing the agreements and beginning the transfer of power could slow down or even scuttle the new administration’s ambitions, particularly because many of Trump’s nominees lack experience working in federal government or managing a big bureaucracy.

“You come in with a thin layer of very inexperienced leaders and really already have a big barrier between them and the people who actually know what's going on, who know how the agencies work — that's not a great formula for success,” warned Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of Health and Human Services under President Barack Obama. “If you come in with no knowledge, and if you don't have any interest in briefing from the outgoing folks, I think you really are starting in a very deep hole.”

The Trump transition did not respond to a question about whether they plan to sign a third agreement with the Justice Department, which would allow the FBI to conduct background checks on the president-elect’s Cabinet nominees and start processing their security clearances ahead of Inauguration Day.

White House officials, speaking on background to discuss the sensitive negotiations, told POLITICO that while Trump’s officials have yet to sign the DOJ memo, “progress has been made towards an agreement.”

In the meantime, they stressed that classified information can only be shared with transition team members who already have security clearances, and they must demonstrate to the agency providing the information that it’s “necessary to have access to that information.”

Both Democratic and Republican members of Congress have expressed concern that the Trump transition has not been conducting FBI background checks of Cabinet nominees, warning it could ultimately hurt their chances of getting confirmed.