How Donald Trump’s 75-day transition period will work

Donald Trump’s impending return to the White House means he will want to set up an entirely new administration from the one that served under Joe Biden, and his team is also pledging that the second will not look much like the first one after Mr Trump’s 2016 victory.

The president-elect has a 75-day transition period to build his team before Inauguration Day on January 20.

One top item on the to-do list is filling around 4,000 government positions with political appointees, people who are specifically tapped for their jobs by Mr Trump’s team.

That includes everyone from the secretary of state and other heads of cabinet departments to those selected to serve part time on boards and commissions.

Around 1,200 of those presidential appointments require Senate confirmation, which should be easier after the Senate shifted to Republican control.

Though the turnover in the new administration will be total, Mr Trump will be familiar with what he needs to accomplish. He built an entirely new administration for his first term and has definite ideas on what to do differently this time.

He has already floated some names.

Mr Trump said at his victory party early on Wednesday that former presidential hopeful and anti-vaccination activist Robert Kennedy Jr will “help make America healthy again”, adding that “we’re going to let him go to it”.

Before the election, Mr Trump did not reject Mr Kennedy’s calls to end fluoridated water. The president-elect has also pledged to make South African-born Elon Musk, a vocal supporter of the Trump campaign, a secretary of federal “cost-cutting”, and the Tesla chief executive has suggested he can find trillions of dollars in government spending to wipe out.

The transition is not just about filling jobs. Most presidents-elect also receive daily or near-daily intelligence briefings during the transition.

In 2008, outgoing president George W Bush personally briefed president-elect Barack Obama on US covert operations. When Mr Trump was preparing to take office in 2016, Mr Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, briefed Michael Flynn, her designated successor in the new administration.

In 2020, Mr Trump’s legal challenges to the election’s results delayed the start of the transition process for weeks, and presidential briefings with Mr Biden did not begin until November 30.

The transition is being led primarily by friends and family, including Mr Kennedy and former Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, as well as the president-elect’s adult sons, Donald Jr and Eric, and his running mate JD Vance.

Transition co-chairs are Cantor Fitzgerald chief executive Howard Lutnick and Linda McMahon, the former wrestling executive who previously led the Small Business Administration during Mr Trump’s first term.

Mr Lutnick said this year’s operation is “about as different as possible” from the 2016 effort, which was first led by Chris Christie. After he won eight years ago, Mr Trump fired Mr Christie, threw out plans the former New Jersey governor had made and gave the job of running the transition to then-vice president-elect Mike Pence.

At the start of his first term, Mr Trump assembled an original cabinet that featured some more mainstream Republicans and business leaders who ultimately disappointed, or broke publicly with him, or both.

This time, he has promised to value loyalty as much as possible — a philosophy that may ensure he makes picks that are more closely aligned to his ideological beliefs and bombastic professional style.

Unlike the campaign of Democratic vice president Kamala Harris, Mr Trump’s team did not sign any pre-Election Day transition agreements with the General Services Administration, which essentially acts as the federal government’s landlord.

He has therefore already missed deadlines to agree with the GSA on logistical matters like office space and tech support, and with the White House on access to agencies, including documents, employees and facilities.

In 2020, Mr Trump argued that widespread voter fraud — which had not actually occurred — cost him the election, delaying the start of the transition from his administration to Mr Biden’s for weeks.

Four years ago, the Trump-appointed head of the GSA, Emily Murphy, determined that she had no legal standing to determine a winner in the presidential race because Mr Trump was still challenging the results in court. That held up funding and co-operation for the transition.

It was not until Mr Trump’s efforts to subvert election results had collapsed across key states that Ms Murphy agreed to formally “ascertain a president-elect” and begin the transition process. Mr Trump eventually posted on social media that his administration would co-operate.

To prevent that kind of hold-up in future transitions, the Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022 mandates that the process begin five days after the election — even if the winner is still in dispute.

That is designed to avoid long delays and means that “an ‘affirmative ascertainment’ by the GSA is no longer a prerequisite for gaining transition support services”, according to agency guidelines.

The uncertainty stretched even longer after the 2000 election, when five weeks elapsed before the Supreme Court settled the contested election between Republican George W Bush and Democrat Al Gore.

That left Mr Bush with about half the usual amount of time to manage the transition from the outgoing Clinton administration, which ultimately led to questions about national security gaps that may have contributed to the US being underprepared for the September 11 attacks the following year.