Even Without the January 6 Insurrection, the 2021 Presidential Transition Was Not Good. Are We Ready For 2025?

As the 2024 campaign moves ahead to the general election contest, transition planning does as well. That’s because, months before this November’s election, Congress requires the White House to prepare to leave, even while President Joe Biden campaigns to remain.

Extensive transition planning had not always been mandated by Congress, and many transitions have been marked by poor cooperation. But the well-prepared and widely praised handoff from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, in the midst of the 2008 global economic collapse, prompted Congress in 2016 and 2019 to strengthen the law that governs presidential transitions.

Remarkably, after barely accepting any offers of help from the outgoing Obama administration in 2016, Trump’s team abided by this law during the runup to the last election—cooperating with the Biden team to get ready should he lose by establishing transition councils and naming federal transition coordinators. Nevertheless, we now know these early signs of adherence to federal law and the tradition of cooperation were soon abandoned.

Recall that in 2020, it took until Saturday after the election and the counting of thousands of provisional and mail-in ballots for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to be declared victorious. Once this happened, transition leaders who’d been getting ready since the spring knew what to do next. On November 9 and 10, 2020, leaders of the Biden-Harris transition publicly released the names of hundreds of people who would serve on the transition team, including nearly all of those serving on the 39 agency review teams as well as the five transition co-chairs and 15-person Advisory Council.

While the announcement of a 12-person COVID-19 Advisory Board had little precedent in past transitions, what happened next was truly surprising, if not for the transition team leaders, at least for the public. President Donald Trump refused to concede the election, even days after the votes had been tallied. Not since 2000, when a virtual tie in Florida prompted a recount of thousands of ballots, had a losing candidate for the presidency not given an immediate concession speech and accepted the results of the election.

This meant that the General Services Administration (GSA), the agency with the authority to release post-election public funds and government office space to the transition team, waited to act. In this case, acting meant “ascertaining” the election results, typically viewed as a formality, but in 2020, that formality didn’t happen right away. A week later, the General Services Administration (GSA) administrator, Emily Murphy, still hadn’t signed the letter authorizing nearly $10 million in federal funds as well as office space and federal assistance to the Biden-Harris transition, as previous administrators had. After Trump tweeted, “Great job Emily!” President-elect Biden pinned the delay on out-going President Trump, calling his failure to concede “an embarrassment” and marking the start of two and a half months of the most difficult political and legal wrangling related to a transition of power in US history.

Nevertheless, though they recognized the need to get ready to govern, the Biden-Harris team abided by the GSA’s dictate to wait. And, while they waited to start the official work of the transition, they were busy with what they were permitted to do.

Instead of immediately interviewing members of the administration and careerists as they had imagined, they set up meetings with recently retired officials, think tankers, and leaders of interest groups. One person described the impact of delayed ascertainment as “a powerful tool,” and that the Trump administration “sort of handed us something unintentionally that proved to be very valuable and very unique, which was because they didn’t ascertain us for so long, we were forced to talk to people outside the government.” Another said: “Instead of starting with the agency and working our way out to the stakeholders, we just talked with everybody who was outside of the agency who could talk to us.” Someone else concurred that “usually what would happen in a transition like this on an agency review team is I would run into a lot of people just walking down the halls and they would all want to tell me something,” but in 2020 until ascertainment happened at the end of November, “the Biden team did not want us to do those kinds of contact.”

The long days of the transition stretched through the holidays and into the New Year. Then the unthinkable happened. Rioters attacked the Capitol at the very moment Congress would make official what the country had known since early November: Joe Biden was the next President. Congress prevailed over the insurrectionists, ultimately voting to certify the election late on January 6. Meanwhile, outgoing President Trump continued to defy convention, discouraging cooperation with the Biden transition team, especially at several key departments, including the Office of Management and Budget and the Defense Department, according to media reports.

While Trump’s intransigence drew outrage and headlines, many involved in the day-to-day work of the Biden transition interacted with Trump appointees and federal bureaucrats who fully complied with the transition law. One person working on an agency review team said that, though the agency’s secretary was “pretty checked out at that point,” the “under-secretaries and other people were very forthcoming, they arranged meetings…They were very constructive, and they were very professional.” Another person working on a different agency review team concurred: “We had heard rumors the [Trump] political appointees had instructed the career staff to not be very forthcoming with us,” yet when the meetings occurred, “[the career staff] were generally pretty collegial.”

While this may have characterized the work of some on the transition team, for certain issues, the lack of cooperation from the Trump administration was real and consequential. One person working on international issues said: “We’d get bits and pieces from different people, and not everyone was on ‘Team Obfuscation’: some people were just federal employees who’ve seen every transition and were just giving us the answers from what they knew best.” For others, though, the person said “it was so clear just how much they were hiding in every answer. We knew we weren’t getting honest answers.” That person had done their own research and knew the outgoing Trump appointees they were meeting with were obfuscating the truth. They concluded: “My guess is [the Trump] strategy was just wasting time…so that no progress can occur.”

Another person on the 2020 transition team explained how cooperation depended on who you talked to. “With the CIA, [cooperation] was very good because [Director] Gina Haspel, your career professional, had done what career professionals had done in prior administrations: prepare a vast number of briefing books, to make people available for discussion…the level of cooperation with CIA was very good.” Haspel had been at the CIA for 30 years when Trump appointed her director in 2018. On the contrary, others in this area were less supportive of the transition. “With the Director of National Intelligence, it was not as great…[John Ratcliffe] was making it difficult.” Unlike Haspel, Ratcliffe hadn’t been a career civil servant. Instead he had served as a Republican member of Congress for five years prior to his selection by Trump in 2020. “Still cooperation did occur…[but] it was more grudging,” said that member of the transition team.

The budget also was a high-priority area during the transition. An incoming administration is under intense pressure to prepare its first presidential budget, which is due to Congress shortly after inauguration and is typically over 2,000 pages long. This massive undertaking involving complex statistical modeling depends on financial data held by only a few people at each agency and the OMB. As a result, those involved in preparing this first budget coming out of the transition had previously relied on existing budget staff for help integrating current budget numbers with campaign promises. “The practice of helping with the budget dates back to Eisenhower,” said one person involved in the Biden-Harris transition. 2020 was different. Another person on an agency review team recalled that, unlike in the past, Trump political appointees had to approve all requests from the Biden transition team for budget information. Several times, the transition team received “push back” from Trump appointees who deemed the requests “inappropriate,” leading to what the person called a “blinking red light that they’re not going to play ball.”

The head of the OMB at the time, Russell Vought, explained as much to the Biden-Harris team in a New Year’s Eve letter to Ted Kaufman, the long-time Biden advisor and former U.S. Senator from Delaware: “Any work to develop Biden Administration policies should be done by that team…Redirecting staff and resources to draft your team’s budget proposals is not an OMB transition responsibility.” The result: Biden’s first budget was delivered much later than normal, “an acute consequence of not being able to work as closely as they would have” with federal budget staff, said one transition team official. Another person on the team concluded: “We did a lot of dialogue with the [budget] staff. It’s not like no transitioning happened…but a lot of the serious work that we would have been doing, like working together on the budget…we just couldn’t do. We couldn’t work together in the traditional way.”

The obfuscation, hiding, and time wasting were especially harmful in high priority issue areas. International economics and national security policy were such cases: high priorities for the incoming administration where cooperation was important for the safety and security of the nation. For those working on these areas on the transition, the Trump administration’s response worried many. “The administration was incredibly obstructionist, and much more so than it was ever reported in the media…they impeded the process,” said one person focused on international issues. “They had a political minder in every single meeting, and that person would interrupt and stop the government employees from saying things…those meetings ended up being a lot less forthright than they should have been.” But that person clarified, “This wasn’t because any of the political appointees themselves wanted to be obstructionist…they all cared about the mission and the Nation and what they were doing. But there was definite intervention from the White House that stifled the conversation.” One other person succinctly explained exactly why this mattered: “We were unable to provide a complete picture of the current intelligence threat environment…had there been something similar to [September 11th], we wouldn’t have had the information.”

If the past is prologue, 2020 raises serious questions about what comes next for the country. The cooperation required by federal law and accepted as a norm of the peaceful transfer of power is in doubt as the Biden White House begins to coordinate with the pre-election Trump transition team. So far, the Biden White House has been fulfilling the expectations set by federal law. Last November, it complied with the requirement to launch a public website with updated information on the transition process a year before the election. Every indication is the administration will meet the six-month requirement to form transition committees this spring.

What remains uncertain is how the Trump transition will respond. The very mixed record from 2020 suggests a smooth and collaborative planning process before the election is far from guaranteed. And, after the election, should Trump win, what happens then is even less clear.

Though the Election remains far away, and another transition is as unpredictable as the outcome of that Election, all eyes should be on this mundane yet important harbinger of what may transpire this fall. While this will get few of the headlines garnered by fiery campaign speeches and future debates, it will indicate whether future transfers of power will be cooperative or something much worse for the safety and security of the country.

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