Joe Biden’s transition team had no illusions about the chaos they were inheriting from President Donald Trump. They expected a disorganized government and mismanaged agencies, many of them hollowed out and ignored over the past four years.
Hours before they assume office, however, there is a fear among Biden’s team that the roadblocks they encountered during the chaotic transition shielded them from understanding the full scope of the problems at various agencies, and that the state of the executive branch is far worse than they understood — “the tip of the iceberg” as one senior transition aide put it.
At the National Security Council, Trump officials were reluctant to share information about who was even on the staff, and at the Department of Defense, requests for information were either ignored or only partially answered. At the Office of Management and Budget, the practice of making career officials available for the incoming administration to craft their budget was disregarded, leaving Biden officials frustrated that their budget will likely be delayed. And at the Office of the United States Trade Representative, the lack of interest in assisting the Biden transition was stated plainly.
“Transition is not a priority for USTR,” Robert Lighthizer’s chief of staff told a Biden official, according to a person briefed on the conversation.
A spokesperson for USTR did not respond to a request for comment. Officials at the Defense Department and OMB, meanwhile, have vocally defended their transition cooperation. “Our DOD political and career officials have been working with the utmost professionalism to support transition activities in a compressed time schedule,” Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller said in a Dec. 28. statement.
Complicating matters even more was the massive SolarWinds hack discovered late last year, which left open the possibility that suspected Russian operatives are still lurking inside federal computers, impacting virtually everything that Biden’s team tries to do.
The obstacles to the Biden transition’s work spanned across the government and ranged in severity. Some Trump staffers tried to be helpful, Biden officials said, but President Donald Trump’s refusal to concede to Biden stymied the handoff from the top. The feeling on Biden’s team, as they turn to governing after the exhilaration of victory and the frenzy of transition planning, is something akin to peering into a dark abyss: They don’t yet know what lurks out of view.
And as Biden and his staff move into the White House and agencies on Wednesday, administration officials recognize that some of their priorities will inevitably be sidelined by the need to fix messes from the outgoing administration that they aren’t even aware of yet.
Biden’s team has already prepared a flurry of executive action that will kick off immediately after he is sworn in, much of it aimed at undoing Trump’s signature policies on climate change, immigration and the coronavirus response. But without full visibility into the processes and procedures of the Trump administration, one senior transition official warned about delays and hiccups.
The overall lack of cooperation from a significant number of Trump administration officials was “laughable,” the senior aide said, adding that some officials tried to slow down information sharing while others were completely unresponsive.
One person close to Biden’s transition told POLITICO that even in the transition’s final days, Trump administration political appointees were limiting the landing teams’ access to data and sitting in on all of their meetings with career staff.
“Even as late as now, they’re not conveying information,” the person said. “Data about where vaccines are, their distributional analyses, data they haven’t released publicly about Covid cases. It’s shocking. I don’t remember this happening from Clinton to Bush, from Bush to Obama, or from Obama to Trump.”
Biden’s team was completely blindsided, for instance, by the Trump administration’s acknowledgment last week that, despite announcing that they planned to release all reserve doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, those reserves were already empty.
At the Office of Management and Budget, which will drive his fiscal and regulatory agenda for the next four years, Biden is set to inherit an agency that former officials say has reached its lowest point in terms of morale.
