Trump Ignores Transition Rules. It’s a ‘Hostile Takeover,’ Ally Says.

The Washington Post / Lisa Rein, Aaron C. Davis, Josh Dawsey

16:49 JST, November 20, 2024

A thousand miles from the austere buildings where Washington runs, Donald Trump’s transition team in his Mar-a-Lago resort has begun what a close ally calls a hostile takeover of the federal government.

Since his victory, Trump has ignored many of the rules and practices intended to guide a seamless transfer of power and handover of the oversight of 2.2 million federal employees. Instead, the president-elect, who has pledged to fire thousands of civil servants and slash billions of dollars in spending, has so far almost fully cut out the government agencies his predecessors have relied on to take charge of the federal government.

Trump has yet to collaborate with the General Services Administration, which is tasked with the complex work of handing over control of hundreds of agencies, because he has not turned in required pledges to follow ethics rules. His transition teams have yet to set foot inside a single federal office.

In calls with foreign heads of state, Trump has cut out the State Department, its secure lines and its official interpreters.

As his team considers hundreds of potential appointees for key jobs, he’s so far declined to let the Federal Bureau of Investigation check for potential red flags and security threats to guard against espionage – instead relying on private campaign lawyers for some appointees and doing no vetting at all for others. Trump’s transition team is considering moving on his first day in office to give those appointees blanket security clearances, according to people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations.

At the root of this unprecedented approach, say those close to Trump’s transition, is an abiding distrust and resentment of federal agencies that the president-elect blames for blocking his agenda in his first term, leaking his plans to the press, and later sharing his documents with investigators and bringing criminal charges against him.

For Trump, who campaigned on radically reshaping the federal government by moving entire departments out of Washington, closing others and replacing scores of civil servants with political loyalists, fulfillment of that vision begins with a privately run transition from Palm Beach and nearby offices.

“The American people rendered their verdict by putting him back in the White House,” said Mike Davis, president of the Article III Project, a nonprofit group that has defended Trump against the criminal charges brought against him. “He should not trust the politicized and weaponized intelligence and law enforcement agencies that hobbled his presidency the first time. It’s a hostile takeover on behalf of the American people.”

In choosing his Cabinet, Trump has emphasized a willingness to take on federal agencies he believes have wronged him or stymied him in the past, advisers said. That has motivated many of his controversial picks, such as Fox News host Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, former congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida for attorney general and South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security.

Brian Hughes, a transition spokesman, said in an email the president-elect might yet adopt some more traditional measures: “The Trump-Vance transition lawyers continue to constructively engage with the Biden-Harris Administration lawyers regarding all agreements contemplated by the Presidential Transition Act. We will update you once a decision is made.”

Many of the president-elect’s moves to skirt official transition policies are within the law, experts said – or at least are subject to laws that are not regularly enforced.

But his transition alarms some officials who say the president-elect is weakening transparency, eroding checks and balances and risking national security.

“The Trump team is attempting to convert the government into an instrument of his private agenda,” said Max Stier, president and chief executive officer of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Partnership for Public Service. Instead, Stier said, “We’re seeing a push to revert to the spoils system,” a reference to the 19th-century practice of rewarding supporters with government jobs without vetting and often not based on merit.

Eric Rubin, a former ambassador to Bulgaria who led the American Foreign Service Association before his retirement last year, called the approach a “massive crossing of the unwritten lines that have prevailed [in presidential transitions] for 140 years.” He acknowledged that Trump is able to take advantage of the reality that “so much in our system is not written.”

Presidential transitions are formally led by the GSA, which typically provides furnished office space and computer support to both nominees for pre-election planning.

But Trump harbors deep distrust for the agency, several allies said, which shared thousands of emails from his 2016 transition team with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III during his probe into allegations of Russian election interference. Trump claimed the correspondence was collected unlawfully and belonged to the transition team.

This time, he has so far declined to work with the GSA and spurned offers from the Biden White House to clear a path for a formal transition.

To date, he has not signed memorandums of understanding that include a robust ethics pledge from the transition staff and – in a new provision added by Congress after ethical issues dogged the first Trump administration – from the president-elect himself, who must delineate how he would avoid his own conflicts of interest.

Leaders of the Trump transition said days before the election that they planned to sign the agreements with the GSA and the White House and were negotiating details with the Biden administration. But the White House had not received them as of this week, according to an official with the Office of Management and Budget. The holdup, according to people close to the process, is the conflict of interest provision for Trump.

Trump’s team says its staffers have signed their own ethics code and conflict-of-interest pledge, although those documents do not cover Trump or meet the requirements of the Presidential Transition Act. Transition officials said they continue to “constructively engage” with the Biden administration, but have not provided details of the negotiations.

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris signed the official agreements and made them public before taking office. Trump is not required by law to do the same, but the repercussions are emerging.

Trump’s transition teams cannot participate in national security briefings, enter federal agencies or speak with employees, and can’t receive formal briefings about ongoing operations and projects. (Trump has begun receiving intelligence briefings.) The transition team cannot use secure federal email servers to communicate (a particular concern, security experts said, after the Trump campaign was hacked by Iran). Unless Trump signs the pledges, his transition team will forgo about $7 million in federal funding set aside for the inauguration, leaving the event funded by private donors who do not need to be disclosed and do not have to abide by a $5,000 cap on individual donations.

It is also unclear if Trump plans to require his nominees to submit to separate ethics reviews required by the Office of Government Ethics. If not, once his appointees are in the job, the office will be unable to ensure they divest from companies or other entities to avoid potential conflicts.

“Their conflicts of interest will leave them vulnerable to outside influences, potentially including foreign powers,” said Walter Shaub, who led the office from 2013 to 2017.

The day after Trump won the election, congratulatory calls began pouring in from world leaders from French President Emmanuel Macron to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in a traditional post-Election Day ritual.

However, Trump did not include State Department officials or U.S. government interpreters on the line, according to government and transition officials.

Trump’s mistrust of the State Department dates to early in his first presidency, when transcripts of his calls with then-Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and another with then-Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull were leaked in full to the press. Several career diplomats were subpoenaed by Congress to testify at Trump’s first impeachment hearings about their alarm at the Trump administration’s unorthodox policy toward Ukraine.

Trump is not required by law to engage the State Department on calls with foreign leaders; Biden took calls without State officials after his 2020 victory because Trump refused to concede his loss for weeks. A president-elect is prohibited by the 1799 Logan Act from negotiating foreign policy until he is sworn in, but the statute has rarely if ever been enforced.

Government officials also traditionally rely on State to help create an official record of such conversations, in case disputes arise over what was said.

Trump’s calls have raised alarms from some foreign policy experts – particularly his call with Vladimir Putin. He advised the Russian president not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe, as The Washington Post reported. The absence of an official transcript of the exchange already has created a challenge for Trump, said Daniel Fried, a retired diplomat now at the Atlantic Council think tank, because the Kremlin quickly denied that the call had taken place.

“It would be a lot easier for the Trump team if he were able to say that the Russia team was lying,” said Fried, who played key roles in designing American policy in Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. “So there’s a cost to doing it this way. People are scratching their heads and saying, ‘Somebody’s lying.’”

Trump’s transition team has also dispensed with the FBI’s role, in place since before World War II, in performing the background checks that form the backbone of security clearances for political appointees. By law these checks must be performed by federal employees, not private contractors with no agency oversight, to ensure that key decisions affecting public trust are made by “accountable government officials,” according to federal statute.

Trump bears deep animus against the FBI, according to the people familiar with his transition process. FBI agents searched Mar-a-Lago for classified materials in a case that resulted in federal charges, and he has pledged wholesale changes at the agency and at the Justice Department.

The FBI would normally have begun vetting a president-elect’s transition team before Election Day, as well as his choices for Cabinet positions and other top staff jobs. Thus far, Trump has left the job of vetting candidates to Stanley Woodward, a Palm Beach lawyer on his campaign who has represented several Jan. 6 rioters and Trump associates caught up in the classified documents case, according to transition staff who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the decision.

It’s not clear how many candidates Woodward has vetted as the incoming administration begins to consider thousands of political appointees. The transition team has discussed hiring an outside contractor to do the work, but has not disclosed how it would fund that work, or whether its standards would be identical to the FBI’s. Trump has also not said if he would allow the Defense Department to conduct a separate series of security checks on staffers once he’s in office to allow agencies to grant various levels of security clearances.

The Senate could also demand an FBI background check before considering a nominee who requires confirmation. The GOP has won back control of the Senate, however, and it’s unclear how strongly the majority will push back on Trump’s choices.

Biden White House officials have encouraged Trump to sign an agreement with the Justice Department that would allow for FBI background checks, temporary security clearances and other standard steps to begin the handoff of power at all levels of government.

A Justice spokesperson said the department was committed to an orderly transfer of power and that discussions about signing a memorandum of understanding, as past presidents-elect have done, remains “ongoing.”

“We are prepared to deliver briefings to the transition team on our operations and responsibilities, and we stand ready to process requests for security clearances for those who will need access to national security information,” the spokesperson said.

Trump advisers have begun discussing an executive order that would award clearances to Trump appointees on Day 1, without the customary checks, people familiar with the matter said. Trump resented in his first term how long it took for some people – particularly his family members – to get clearances, and what a “mess it became publicly,” a person who talked to him about it said.

In 2004, Congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which allows major party candidates to submit priority lists of names for security clearances before Election Day. Trump’s team did not provide names, and still hasn’t, according to people familiar with the transition.

Those vetting shortcuts already are dogging some of Trump’s Cabinet choices. Trump and his advisers were not aware of an allegation that Hegseth, his nominee to run the Pentagon, sexually assaulted a woman in 2017 until it emerged last week. Hegseth has denied wrongdoing and a police investigation into the allegation did not result in charges. One person familiar with the transition team’s discussions told The Post that Hegseth had “not been properly vetted.”

Some critics said the transition has skipped the FBI to get nominees clearances who would not normally pass a background checks.

Members of Congress in both parties questioned whether Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman Trump plans to nominate as director of national intelligence, and Gaetz, who was recently the subject of a federal sex-trafficking investigation and is Trump’s choice for attorney general, could survive FBI background checks. Gabbard has been widely criticized for meeting in 2017 with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and for allegedly promoting Russian propaganda, leading to allegations that she is a national security risk. Gaetz has denied wrongdoing in the sex-trafficking probe, which prosecutors dropped last year; Gabbard has denied ties to Russia.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) called the plan to outsource background checks “a dangerous and reckless thing to do” that could compromise the process by which the FBI ensures that “people who have concerning backgrounds do not come into government and compromise the country’s secrets.”

“There is a theme here,” Van Hollen said of Trump’s unfolding transition. “He is getting rid of all checks on executive power that are in the system.”

Trump could break another norm around the transition to avoid that problem, however: He has demanded that Sen. John Thune (R-South Dakota) the majority leader elected last week, support Trump’s demand to make recess appointments – a rarely used process that sidesteps confirmation hearings and Senate votes.

Recess appointees do not serve full presidential terms, and other presidents in both parties have made them on occasion. But Trump’s early line in the sand signaled that he could make these appointments regular practice, a threat that did not seem theoretical last week when some planned nominees with extreme views came under scrutiny by Senate Republicans.

Van Hollen called Trump’s rush for regular recess appointments “an indication he wants to do a complete end run around our review of his nominees.”

“It’s an end run around constitutional design,” the senator said. “We have tools in the confirmation process to make sure nominees get vetted. What he’s asking Republicans to do is make him king.”

Even before he is sworn in for a second term, Trump told House Republicans he addressed on Capitol Hill last week that he might need their help to bypass the Constitution to allow him to run for a third term. The crowd laughed, taking the remark as a joke.

The next day, one House Democrat raced to block a Trump 3.0, introducing a resolution that reaffirms support for the Constitution’s two-term limit for presidents even if the terms are not consecutive.