The soon-to-be-former president has executive agency heads thoroughly cowed. So long as he holds his breath until his face turns [whatever color it turns], they will postpone decisions needed to allow orderly transfer of control of the $4.5 trillion federal operation to the incoming administration:
A Trump administration appointee is refusing to sign a letter allowing President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team to formally begin its work this week, in another sign the incumbent president has not acknowledged Biden’s victory and could disrupt the transfer of power.
The administrator of the General Services Administration, the low-profile agency in charge of federal buildings, has a little-known role when a new president is elected: to sign paperwork officially turning over millions of dollars, as well as give access to government officials, office space in agencies and equipment authorized for the taxpayer-funded transition teams of the winner.
GSA Administrator Emily Murphy has no plans to formally acknowledge a transition at this time. An assortment of transition preparations from setting up government emails to occupying office space at federal agencies and completing financial disclosures is on hold. Each day lost puts the incoming administration behind schedule.
“No agency head is going to get out in front of the president on transition issues right now,” said one senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. The official predicted that agency heads will be told not to talk to the Biden team.
For its part, the Biden team has prepared for the transition since summer, reports NBC:
Having studied what worked — and what didn’t — in past transitions and using their own experience in the executive branch, Biden’s team has preemptively cleared scores of individuals who will soon fan out to take stock of a federal workforce in some cases depleted under the Trump administration. The team has also already identified 4,300 prospective appointees for the 4,000 federal jobs it must ultimately fill, putting a premium on those with responsibility for tackling the Covid-19 pandemic, and others that don’t require Senate confirmation.
Longtime Biden Senate chief of staff Ted Kaufman will oversee the team of 100 working to implement the presidential transition from a framework Biden himself wrote as senator.
The Biden transition team this morning has announced members of that Covid-19 task force:
The list includes Rick Bright, the former head of the vaccine-development agency BARDA ousted by the Trump administration in April; Atul Gawande, the surgeon, writer, and recently departed CEO of Haven, the joint JP Morgan Chase-Berkshire Hathaway-Amazon health care venture; and Luciana Borio, a former Food and Drug Administration official and biodefense specialist.
Now if only the Trump administration will acknowledge his loss and announce when it will release the transition funds. “Within two weeks,” perhaps?
Another block of votes added to Biden’s margin in Pennsylvania just moments before I wrote this.