In 1963, the Kennedy administration adopted the Presidential Transition Act in order to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition of power. That piece of legislation is what prepares presidential nominees to take up the office to this day. Recent stories about president-elect Trump’s candidates for political appointments have taken the media by storm, but it is important to understand the intended framework of the presidential transition as it exists today.
The Transition Period
According to the Partnership for Public Service’s Center for Presidential Transition, a D.C.-based nonprofit dedicated to aiding government efforts, the presidential transition can start as early as the spring of the election year. “Presidents must be ready to govern on day one,” says the Center for Presidential Transition’s website. “Whoever takes the oath of office on January 20th, 2025 must be ready to respond to potential crises such as natural disasters and a host of foreign policy and security issues.” Candidates will have to gather “transitions teams,” groups of individuals that oversee the transition and are not part of the presidential campaign. Instead, the teams qualify as their own nonprofit groups and plan official policies, and transition scheduling, and personnel appointments.
Political appointments gather the most attention, as there are over 4000 appointments in total, over 1300 of which require confirmation from the Senate (Partnership for Public Service). On top of that, each appointee will need security clearance based on their position, offices with appropriate furnishings, and personalized government resources such as email accounts and systems access. All this work requires the cooperation of the sitting administration, the federal departments and agencies, and, most overlooked, the General Services Administration (GSA).
The GSA
The GSA offers two kinds of services to presidential candidates: pre-election and post-election. According to the GSA’s website, pre-election services include “suitable office space appropriately equipped with furniture, furnishings, office and IT equipment, and incidental office supplies.” After the election, those services extend to “payment of compensation for office staffs; payment of expenses for the procurement of experts or consultants and communication services; and payment of travel, subsistence, printing, postal, and other expenses as necessary and appropriate.” During the transition period (after the election but before inauguration), the GSA also provides intelligence briefings to the president-elect so that they are informed in their decision making when they assume their role on January 20th.
Recent Developments
What happens when the results of the election are unclear? After the 2020 election, the GSA’s then administrator Emily Murphy held back post-election services due to election disputes brought up by candidate Trump’s party. Murphy, a Trump appointee (the GSA head is one of the many roles chosen by the president-elect), claimed that the election results still needed to be “ascertained,” and decided to hold off on GSA services until a clear winner was announced.
In response to the delay of last election’s transition period, there has been a 2022 add-on to the Presidential Transition Act. The “Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022” decrees that if there is no clear winner announced within five days past the election, then post-election services will be provided to both candidates until one is chosen to be president.
This basic framework of the presidential transition is important to keep in mind as president-elect Trump not only makes his political appointment but also forms policies that will be put into play come January 20th.
