The day after Election Day

For nearly three weeks in 2020, Emily Murphy was the most powerful person in America. Most Americans had never heard of the soft-spoken administrator of the General Services Administration, responsible for logistical matters like federal building contracts and the fleet of government vehicles. The country, eight months into the COVID-19 pandemic, had just survived a contentious presidential election — one that then-President Donald Trump said was to save the “American dream,” and his challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, said was over its “soul.” In the days after Election Day, a steady tick-tick of news networks called the race for Biden; by Nov. 7, Biden declared victory.

Murphy, however, was unconvinced. In most election cycles, the administrator of the GSA plays only a perfunctory role. As soon as a winner is declared, incoming administrations have access, by law, to the GSA’s suite of resources, from office space to computer systems to government salaries for incoming staff. As soon as the GSA administrator declares a winner — an “ascertainment” — that process shifts into gear, beginning the peaceful transfer of power.

But Murphy, nearly three weeks after Election Day in 2020, had yet to acknowledge Biden the winner, essentially holding the federal government’s transition efforts at a standstill. (Murphy did not respond to an interview request for this story.) Trump had not conceded his loss, and he was pressuring his allies within and without the federal government to hold onto power. Murphy, who was appointed to her position by Trump, said her decision to delay ascertainment was not made out of “favoritism,” but of extreme caution: the country had never seen a situation like the one she was in. But privately, she told friends that unless Trump conceded, she’d be “hard-pressed” to make a decision, The Washington Post reported.

Legal disputes and recounts were still underway, and Murphy claimed she did not intend to get ahead of the process. “I do not think that an agency charged with improving federal procurement and property management should place itself above the constitutionally-based election process,” she later wrote.

Others were not convinced. The nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition’s board of directors wrote an open letter, saying, “While there will be legal disputes requiring adjudication, the outcome is sufficiently clear that the transition process must now begin.” Biden’s spokesperson called on Murphy to “quickly” make a decision. Murphy said she received an onslaught of violent threats toward herself, her family and her pets; in the first 48 hours after Biden was named victor, she said she received “about 2 million emails.”

But her decision had consequences for the incoming administration, too. Until she called it, the $6.3 million in federal funds budgeted to the transition effort would not become available. Biden’s team was barred from receiving intelligence briefings. Security clearances for thousands of political appointees were stalled. The short runway between the election and the inauguration to set up the largest enterprise in the world was shortened further. During her nomination hearings in 2017, Murphy had called herself “a bit of a wonk” who was “not here to garner headlines or make a name for myself”; suddenly, Murphy found herself at the center of America’s most consequential political conflict in decades.

Eventually, Murphy relented. On Nov. 23, less than two months before Inauguration Day, Murphy sent an ascertainment letter to Biden. The peaceful transfer of power could begin.

The right answer

With less than two weeks until Election Day, the country will soon learn whether we learned our lesson. In 2022, Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act, a product of months of debate over how to avoid a repeat of 2020. It raised the threshold for members of Congress to object to electoral votes, a provision supporters hope will prevent conflict on Jan. 6. But it also changed how, and when, the formal transition of power can begin.

The GSA administrator is no longer responsible for making an ascertainment decision. Instead, if the winner is unknown five days after the election, the GSA is authorized to treat both major-party candidates as the president-elect, and unroll resources to both. In a tightly contested election, transition teams for both Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump could receive briefings, clearances and funds post-election.

“It solved a problem, and we will see in this cycle whether those requirements on federal agencies were exactly the right answer,” said Valerie Smith Boyd, the director of the Center for Presidential Transition.

During the unpredictable 2024 election cycle, nothing has gone as planned. Both campaigns got a late start: Harris faced political challenges by entering the race in mid-summer, but the consequences were even more dire for her transition team, which worked with a shortened runway. And Trump did not formalize his transition team, at least publicly, until August, far later than previous campaigns. “Typically, GSA gets to kind of pre-negotiate or pre-discuss with representatives of the candidates’ teams, and neither team had those representatives this year,” Boyd said.

By the Sept. 1 deadline to enter memorandums of understanding with the GSA — laying out what services will be provided — neither campaign was ready to sign. Harris had been the formal Democratic nominee for only four days; her team eventually signed on Sept. 19. The Trump team has yet to reach an agreement.

If the Trump team continues its stance and refuses aid from the GSA, as Politico reports it may, it would mark the first time in modern history a party nominee did so. By refusing federal funding, it does not have to adhere to fundraising limits, and does not have to disclose the identities of donors to the transition effort. By not signing an agreement with the White House, due Oct. 1, the Trump team bypasses signing an ethics pledge.

Transitions are often done in private, with an emphasis on secrecy and avoiding leaks. But from what is visible behind the curtains, the Harris and Trump teams are taking vastly different approaches. Harris’ team is small and skeletal, reports NOTUS, aided by overlap with the incumbent administration. Yohannes Abraham, who led Biden’s 2020 transition, is reprising in the same role for Harris.

Trump’s team, meanwhile, is coming at this fresh. The transition co-chairs are Linda McMahon, administrator of the Small Business Administration during the Trump administration, and Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street CEO. Lutnick is taking charge of finding candidates to fill the 4,000 federal political appointee positions, 1,300 of which need Senate confirmation. He told The Associated Press his goal is to find about “eight amazing candidates” for each of those Senate-confirmed positions; to Bloomberg, he said he has “5,000 people already” to choose from. Meanwhile, Donald Trump Jr., an honorary chair, is taking a Sharpie to the directory, assembling a “blacklist” of staffers banned from a potential Trump administration. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard — Trump’s one-time rivals who are now likely in line for cabinet positions — are also honorary co-chairs.

“The former president is a recent incumbent as well, and his team has relatively up-to-date knowledge about what is happening inside the federal government,” Boyd said. But it’s unclear if that equates to a wealth of top-level talent: a number of people from the first Trump administration, including half of his former Cabinet members, no longer support the former president. “He’d have no difficulty staffing his Cabinet,” Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, told NBC News last month. “The question would be whether they are people of stature or capacity and are up to the job required and whether they could be confirmed.”

If Trump wins, the effectiveness of his behind-the-scenes transition work will quickly be put to the test. If he loses, though, an entirely different transition issue arises: whether he will concede and support a peaceful transfer of power.

‘The best transition possible’

In the early years of American history, that wasn’t a question — the presidential transition just happened. There was no structure and little federal oversight, and yet the country moved on from president to president. Most times, the transition was peaceful; sometimes, like Lincoln’s 1861 transition, were hectic. (Lincoln dodged assassins en route to Washington, amid the pending threat of Southern secession.)

It wasn’t until the 1960s that Congress established outlines to guide transition efforts. The two decades prior had seen a series of rocky transitions: Franklin Roosevelt kept Harry Truman in the dark, and when Truman decided to not run for reelection in 1952, he attempted to rectify his predecessor’s mistake. His efforts hit a snag, however, when Dwight Eisenhower — the Republican nominee for president — scoffed at an invitation to visit the White House for preelection briefings. It would be “unwise,” Eisenhower wrote, to risk public suspicion with closed-door meetings. Truman, recognizing the importance of a smooth transition, shot back: “I am extremely sorry that you have allowed a bunch of screwballs to come between us. You have made a bad mistake and I’m hoping it won’t injure this great republic.”

When John F. Kennedy took office eight years later, he championed systematizing, to whatever degree possible, the logistical transfer of power. The result was the Presidential Transition Act of 1963, the first effort by Congress to lay out rules for the transition. The biggest change was allocating federal funds to the effort: in 1962, Kennedy’s transition was funded nearly exclusively by the Democratic National Committee, while the Congressional act authorized the General Services Administration to provide operational support.

In subsequent decades, transition efforts were bolstered by Congressional aid and further changes to federal law. A 1988 update to the Presidential Transition Act allocated even more federal funding to transition teams, while installing transparency requirements for outside donations. At the turn of the century, the digital age precipitated further changes, with Congress moving in 2000 to require outgoing administrations to leave computer data for incoming transitions. As Bill Clinton left office that year, he issued an executive order that required the GSA director to organize and release planning documents to incoming administrations.

That cycle, the need for clean, effective transitions became immediately clear. The 2000 election was decided by the Supreme Court after a lengthy ballot dispute, which shortened the interregnum to 35 days. Clinton, sensing that the court cases could interfere with the transfer of power, authorized the CIA to fully engage with both the George W. Bush and Al Gore teams for security briefings, even before the recount was finished. “Obviously, we were still hopeful that Vice President Gore could prevail in the recount, but whatever the outcome we had to do as good a job as we could to prepare both sides,” recalled John Podesta, Clinton’s chief of staff, on the “Transition Lab” podcast. The message didn’t seem to reach every Clinton staffer. When the Bush administration moved into the White House complex, it found over $13,000 in damages, much of it petty anti-Bush vandalism: derogatory graffiti in the men’s room, glue smeared on desks, the “W” keys removed from computers.

The shortened runway, too, took its toll. By Bush’s 100-day mark, only two major leadership positions within the Department of Defense — the secretary and deputy secretary — had been confirmed. Months later, the Sept. 11, 2001, attack shook a federal government handicapped by a staff shortage: only 57% of Senate-confirmed political appointees within the Pentagon and the Defense and Justice departments had been installed, wrote David Marchick in “The Peaceful Transfer of Power.”

The 9/11 Commission, tasked by Congress to investigate the attack, laid out a series of transition-related suggestions, including quicker security clearances for both teams’ appointees before the election to expedite their installation after. The shortened transition period in 2000, the commission reported, had “hampered the new administration in identifying, recruiting, clearing and obtaining Senate confirmation of key appointees.”

Seven years later, when Bush prepared to leave office, he — like Truman and others before him — did not want the inefficiencies that plagued his own transition to hamper his successor. Bush instructed his chief of staff, Josh Bolton, to “make 2008 the best transition possible regardless of who was going to win the election,” Bolton recalled. Though the 2008 election marked a cross-party transfer of power, it became known as the “gold standard” for future transition teams.

The ship that never sailed

When planning a transition, a candidate’s biggest hurdle is the optics. Even late in the 2008 election, when the outgoing Bush administration engaged with both potential winners, Sen. John McCain accused Sen. Barack Obama’s transition team of “measuring the drapes” in the White House. When a transition effort is too robust, it can be accused, as McCain did, of premature confidence; if the effort is too limited, though, it can leave candidates unprepared.

In 2010, Congress worked to fix that problem. Previously, the GSA did not offer office space and administrative support to incoming administrations until Election Day; the Pre-Election Presidential Transition Act of 2010 directed the GSA to make the offer to both major-party candidates after their nominating conventions. Now, transition planning would not be presumptuous; it would be expected.

The first transition team to operate under this new law was Mitt Romney’s. In April 2012, Romney approached Mike Leavitt, the former EPA administrator and HHS secretary under Bush, and asked him to lead a possible transition. Leavitt was governor of Utah when Romney headed the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, and the two had developed a rapport over commonalities — their faith, their politics, and their left-brained obsession with details.

Leavitt’s first task was to dig up everything he could find about past transitions. He lead a study of every presidential transition since Reagan. He found books full of political intrigue, and something about their failures, but nothing of their successes. Someone involved with Reagan’s 1984 transition offered a shoebox full of papers — “a soggy box out of someone’s garage,” Leavitt told me. Beyond that, he had nothing to go off of.

Starting from scratch, Leavitt built a capable team: former executives at Deloitte, GM and Microsoft; longtime Washington civil servants; a handful of interns. He laid out two ground rules: no one would be getting a fancy title, and no one would be guaranteed a position in a hypothetical Romney administration.

Leavitt was clear there would be no policy-generating operation on his team; that would be left to the campaign, headquartered in Boston. Leavitt set up shop in a GSA-allotted office in Washington, offering both symbolic and literal space between the transition and the campaign. He spent one day a week in Boston, interfacing with the campaign staff, updating Romney on their progress and quelling suspicions about their work. Otherwise, his team worked in the capital, where they hoped Romney would join them in January.

“I made it very clear that we’re not making campaign decisions, we’re not making policy decisions,” Leavitt emphasized. Nor would Leavitt staff the Romney administration with his transition team: “Toward the end, I started saying (to the campaign staff), ‘there’s going to be a place for all of you.’”

Leavitt’s team quickly built a “shadow government” in their Washington office, modeling a potential Romney administration. Their office space was structured like the federal government, with each agency assigned its own space: the “Treasury Department” down the hall, the “State Department” in a corner suite. Each office was staffed with a small group of veterans from previous administrations who had worked for or closely with those departments. They would host Oval Office meetings, with Leavitt acting as Romney, and operated in full response to the developments of the campaign: When Romney made a policy-related promise on the trail, the corresponding team sketched out exactly how to implement it.

In true Romney fashion, Leavitt led a team that was ambitious, to a fault. They fleshed out a “one-page project manager,” describing — down to the day — what actions Romney should take, day by day, starting on the morning after Election Day. Instead of planning for Romney’s first 100 days in office, they planned for 200. The sitting record for Senate-confirmed political appointees in the first 100 days, Leavitt found, was Obama’s 67; they set a goal to nearly triple that. They began greasing the skids with key figures in Congress to get their appointees through, and they took advantage of opportunities for advanced security clearances for potential appointees. “We built a great ship that never sailed,” Leavitt said.

Bad karma

The “Romney Readiness Project,” as it came to be called, is widely viewed as the most cohesive transition plan that never took effect. After Romney lost, Leavitt and his team donated their carefully maintained documents to the Center for Presidential Transition. A group of staffers wrote a book detailing their work, focused on giving future transition efforts a head-start. When Congress updated the Presidential Transition Act in 2015, largely based off suggestions made by Leavitt’s team, they named the bill in Leavitt’s honor.

The candidates in 2016 were teed up for the most effective transitions in history. Never before had as many government resources been at their disposal. Thanks to Leavitt, they had a trove of information and guidance. But one of the candidates seemed uninterested in planning a transition. Donald Trump believed preparing for the presidency before winning the election was “bad karma,” The New York Times reported. When his campaign called in Chris Christie, the pugnacious former New Jersey governor, to head the transition, Trump put up no opposition, but he likewise offered no support. “Chris,” he repeatedly told the governor, “you’re wasting a lot of time on this. You and I are both so smart that if we win this thing, we can do the entire transition if we just leave the victory party two hours early.”

To Christie, Trump was simply naive. “It was clear that the president had no real appreciation at that time for just how difficult putting together a government was going to be,” Christie recalled. To Christie, it was no surprise — Christie knew Trump well, dating back to his time as a U.S. attorney in New Jersey, where Trump owned a slate of casinos. The two ran against each other for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Midway through the cycle, Christie unexpectedly dropped out and offered his endorsement to Trump, sparking both shock and backlash from the Trump-averse wing of the party. First in line was Romney, who’d known Christie for years; Romney invited Christie to keynote the 2012 Republican convention, where Romney accepted the nomination.

Romney fired off a curt email shortly after Christie’s endorsement. “I believe your endorsement of him severely diminishes you morally — though probably not politically — and that you must withdraw that support to preserve your integrity and character,” Romney wrote, according to McKay Coppins’ “Romney: A Reckoning.”

Three months later, when Trump pegged Christie to lead the transition, Christie’s first call was to Romney’s team. He reached out to Chris Liddell, who worked on the Romney transition team under Leavitt, asking about their planning and their goals. He quickly hired Bill Hagerty, who oversaw personnel on the Romney transition, to fill the same role on Trump’s team.

Even as Trump kept an arm’s length distance from the transition team, Christie assembled an effective team. Christie met weekly with a hodgepodge group of advisers from the campaign, usually led by Trump’s children Ivanka, Don Jr. and Eric. Following the Romney team’s example, Christie meticulously prepared a detailed roadmap for the early days of a Trump administration, from “proposed hour-by-hour schedules for the president-elect,” to “week-by-week transition messaging themes,” to drafts of executive orders and lists of proposed political appointees, The Washington Post reported. On Election Day, Christie’s team presented the campaign with 30 binders full of the important material.

After Trump won, Christie soon realized the transition would not go as planned. One day after Election Day, Christie ran his first formal transition meeting with the campaign’s top brass. As Christie offered a list of the foreign leaders Trump should call and in what order, Jared Kushner — the president-elect’s son-in-law and a chief adviser — scoffed. “We’re not going to pay much attention to this,” Christie recalled him saying. Christie rebutted that the order is quite important and is a longstanding tradition. “Well, Donald was an unconventional candidate,” Kushner replied. “He’s going to be an unconventional president.” Before long, the national press was reporting on Trump’s erratic post-election calls to Ireland before the U.K. and to Taiwan before China.

Christie wasn’t there to stop it. Days after the election, Christie was informed his services would no longer be needed. The transition, from that point on, would be led by Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Christie would be shown the door, and the binders full of his carefully planned roadmap were ceremoniously tossed into trash bins. (Christie later suggested his ouster was due to longstanding animus between him and Kushner; Christie had been involved in the prosecution of Kushner’s father years earlier.)

The transition, now operating on a whim, soon hit roadblocks. Many of Trump’s early executive orders, hastily assembled after Christie’s drafts were tossed, were held up by courts. Without Christie’s lists of carefully vetted political appointees, the Trump team attempted to push through its own candidates. Many withdrew as questions about their qualifications or history arose during confirmation hearings; others stuck through slow, elongated deliberations. By Trump’s 100-day mark, only 28 of his Senate-confirmed appointees were in office, less than half the figure Obama had at that mark.

Duty to see the transition through

Will America see a peaceful transfer of power this year? The safeguards are in place, thanks to the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022, to severely limit the chances of members of Congress holding up electoral certification, and transition will no longer be held up by ascertainment from the GSA administrator.

But the impetus is still on both campaigns to play fair. In 2020, Trump’s refusal to concede led to a significant delay in essential transition actions. Then, when Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, a number of Trump administration officials — including some working on the transition — resigned immediately. Chris Liddell, the Romney Readiness Project alum who led Trump’s 2020 transition team, stayed on. “To walk away when the very most important time was coming up — and then at a time where obviously tensions had gone through the roof — I just didn’t feel like that was my duty,” he later said. “In the most difficult circumstances that are humanly possible, the institution of the United States government and the transition associated with it were successful.”

Whether Trump has the same caliber of officials guiding his team this cycle — ones who would put loyalty to the country over their candidate — is an open question. Trump is no longer the incumbent, so his refusal to concede will not as directly interfere with official transition proceedings. If he loses, though, casting widespread distrust of the election’s result could again trigger chaos. And if he wins, the transition team is already working to staff his administration with loyal footsoldiers. “My role will be to make sure that those bad actors are not getting into the administration to subvert my father and his policies,” Donald Trump Jr., a Trump transition honorary co-chair, told The Wall Street Journal. “Now we know who those people are. In ‘16, we had no idea.”

As with any transition period, the U.S. enters an incredibly frought period after the 2024 election. Leavitt, Romney’s transition chair, calls the transition the “most sensitive process within a democracy.” It’s a time when bad actors are best poised to sow discord, when the lines of command are being shifted and the country’s leadership is in transition. The next U.S. president, whoever it is, will enter the Oval Office with wars abroad and distrust at home. A peaceful transfer of power is essential. “It is always important and critical,” Leavitt said, “but it has never been more so than it will be in 2024.”