With less than two months until his inauguration, President-elect Donald Trump will sign an overdue agreement with the Biden White House to help ease the transition between the incoming and outgoing administrations.
In a statement released Tuesday, Trump’s new chief of staff, Susie Wiles, said that the president-elect “is entering the next phase of his administration’s transition by executing a Memorandum of Understanding with President Joe Biden’s White House.” This comes after Trump chose his cabinet.
Wiles said, “This engagement lets our intended Cabinet nominees start important preparations, such as sending landing teams to every department and agency, and finish the orderly transition of power.”
The two agreements
The deal that was worked out with the White House to set up an ethics code and a presidential candidate’s access to federal agencies was due on October 1.
Also, by September 1, an agreement with the U.S. General Services Administration to use transition funds, office space, and other resources provided by the government had to be signed.
The Presidential Transition Act of 1963 and its later changes, up to and including 2019, say that these things must be brought.
Nominees must report all transition fundraising funds, which are kept separate from campaign funds. This is a condition of the agreements and the money they release. The law says that each person can only give $5,000 to transitions.
Most presidential transition funds are a mix of private donations and federally designated funds. The Center for Presidential Transition says that in 2020 and 2021, for example, Congress gave just under $20 million.
Along with Wiles’s statement on Tuesday, there were seven bullet points that summed up the agreement between the White House and the transition team.
The summary says that Trump’s team will pay for its transition entirely with private funds “to save taxpayers’ hard-earned money.” The list of donors will be made public later.
Trump’s team also said they would not use government buildings or technology that is already set up for transition operations. Instead, they said they would be a “self-sufficient organization.”
From Florida, I work
From their Florida home, Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect and his staff have been holding meetings and announcing Cabinet picks. The team’s code of ethics was posted on the GSA website on Tuesday. It is called “Trump Vance 2025 Transition, Inc.”
A press release from the president-elect on Tuesday said that the Trump-Vance transition’s ethics plan “will meet the requirements for personnel to seamlessly move into the Trump Administration.”
The ethics plan has to be made public by law and must say if any lobbyists or foreign agents are on the transition team.
It also has to list any other conflicts of interest that the people involved have and their promises to keep secret government information secret and not use insider information gained during the transition for personal gain.
When asked by States Newsroom, the Trump-Vance team did not give any more parts of the agreement with the White House.
Someone asked the transition team when the contributions to the transition would be made public, but they did not answer.
