Following his resounding win on November 5, one of the knocks on President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration by those on the left has been Trump’s “delay” in signing transition agreements with the Biden administration.
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) even went so far as to claim the Trump transition team was “breaking the law” by not signing the ethics agreement and emphasizing that she would know “because I wrote the law.”
There’s one problem with Warren’s assertion: She’s wrong. The law to which she’s referring is the Presidential Transition Enhancement Act of 2019, which amends the Presidential Transition Act of 1963 and sets out the framework for agreements to be entered into between the General Services Administration and an incoming presidential administration to facilitate the presidential transition process. There is no mandatory timeframe or deadline within which the incoming administration is obligated to sign such agreements or memorandums of understanding. The provision regarding an ethics agreement provides that it should “guide the conduct of the transition beginning on the date on which the eligible candidate becomes the President-elect” — not that it must be signed on/by that date. Moreover, the article Warren links to in the above tweet notes that the details were still being worked out between the transition team and the Biden administration.