President Joe Biden meets with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House on Nov. 13, 2024 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — With less than two months to go until his inauguration, President-elect Donald Trump will sign an overdue agreement with the Biden White House meant to help smooth the transition between incoming and outgoing administrations.
Trump’s new Chief of Staff Susie Wiles issued a statement Tuesday saying now that Trump’s Cabinet choices are made, 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 engagement allows our intended Cabinet nominees to begin critical preparations, including the deployment of landing teams to every department and agency, and complete the orderly transition of power,” Wiles said.
Two agreements
The negotiated agreement with the White House to establish a presidential candidate’s access to federal agencies as well as an ethics code was due by Oct. 1.
Additionally, an agreement with the U.S. General Services Administration to access government-provided transition funding, office space and other resources was due by Sept. 1.
The items are required under the Presidential Transition Act of 1963, and its later amendments as recently as 2019. A condition of the agreements, and the funding they release, is that nominees must disclose all transition fundraising dollars, which are kept separate from campaign funds. The law caps individual contributions to transitions at $5,000.
Presidential transition funds are usually a combination of private funding and federally appropriated dollars. For example, in 2020 and 2021, Congress provided just under $20 million, according to the Center for Presidential Transition.
Accompanying Wiles’ statement Tuesday were seven bullet points summarizing the transition agreement with the White House. According to the summary, Trump’s team will wholly privately fund its transition “to save taxpayers’ hard-earned money” and will later disclose the list of contributions.
Trump’s team also announced it will not use government buildings or technology available for transition operations and instead will be a “self-sufficient organization.”
Working from Florida
The president-elect and his personnel have been conducting meetings and announcing Cabinet picks from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. The team’s code of ethical conduct published Tuesday on the GSA website appears under the name “Trump Vance 2025 Transition, Inc.”
The president-elect’s Tuesday press release stated that the Trump-Vance transition’s ethics plan “will meet the requirements for personnel to seamlessly move into the Trump Administration.”
By law, the ethics plan must be publicly available and must disclose whether lobbyists or foreign agents are part of the transition team and identify any other conflicts of interests by those involved, as well as commitments to keep nonpublic government information confidential and not to use insider knowledge learned during the transition for personal gain.
The Trump-Vance team did not provide any additional portions of the agreement with the White House upon request from States Newsroom.
The transition team did not respond to a request for a timeline of when transition contributions will be made public.