Team Trump 2.0 readies for the White House

President-elect Donald Trump has 73 days to build up his next administration and set them up in Washington. Interviews for cabinet positions will start immediately, and a team of allies have already begun to form the next tranche of government workers. In August, Trump announced the members of his transition team, which is stacked with top donors and possible cabinet appointees. Over the next two months, these leaders will be in charge of making personnel decisions and preparing the next administration’s agenda:

• Howard Lutnick: The New York billionaire is the top headhunter for the incoming Trump administration. He is the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, a global financial services company that manages trillions of dollars in U.S. government debt. In recent interviews, he has advocated for Bitcoin and Stablecoin to be classified as commodities like gold or oil. Lutnick has said this year’s transition operation is “about as different as possible” from the 2016 version, which was led by former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Vice President–elect Mike Pence. As leader of the transition team, Lutnick is the first to interview hopeful cabinet appointees.
• Linda McMahon: At an August rally, Trump established Lutnick and McMahon as co-chairs of the transition team. McMahon was the administrator of the Small Business Administration from 2017 to 2019, when she stepped down to join Trump’s reelection campaign. She is currently the chairwoman of America First Action, a pro-Trump super political action committee. In 1980, she and her husband co-founded Titan Sports, which later became World Wrestling Entertainment. McMahon is also chairwoman of the board of the America First Policy Institute, staffed largely by former Trump administration employees.
• Tulsi Gabbard: The former congresswoman from Hawaii ran for president as a Democrat in 2020. This year, she officially switched her registration to Republican from a Trump rally stage in Michigan in August. She has discussed decreasing support for Ukraine and rooting out “woke” ideologies in the government as top priorities. When Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2022, Gabbard said Biden could have avoided the war by acknowledging “Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO.”
• Elon Musk: The Tesla CEO and X owner plans to put the federal bureaucracy on the chopping block. He says the government wastes roughly $2 trillion a year on administrative spending, and he is expected to establish a Department of Government Efficiency. Musk endorsed Trump after the assassination attempt in July and appeared at the Trump campaign’s get-out-the-vote efforts across the country. In a September speech at the New York Economic Club, Trump promised to cut corporate tax rates and create a task force to eliminate federal programs and identify and stop improper payments. He said the idea originated with Musk. Musk has said he plans to gut the federal budget by reducing the workforce and finding areas where contractors are overbilling the government.
• Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: The former Democrat-turned-independent presidential candidate was added to Trump’s transition team in August. Kennedy has said in several interviews that Trump also promised him control of the public health agencies, but it is not clear what this role would be. Lutnick told CNN that Kennedy, known for his opposition to childhood vaccination, is “not getting a job for the Department of Health and Human Services.” Trump has said Kennedy, also an environmental activist, will not have a role in energy policy, particularly gas and oil. In his victory speech early Wednesday morning, Trump told Kennedy to “leave the liquid gold alone, but go have fun.” After joining forces with the Trump campaign, Kennedy rebranded his messaging to “Make America Healthy Again.” He said that he would push to remove fluoride from drinkable water sources. He’s also asked the Food and Drug Administration to make its full government data available.

So far, the Trump transition team is bucking normal procedure. Documents requiring Trump’s signature remain outstanding, leaving little communication between the current White House and the incoming administration.

“It’s really interesting that for a country known for the peaceful transfer of power, there had not been much in law guiding this process,” said Valerie Boyd, director of the Center for Presidential Transitions, a nonprofit consulting organization staffed with former transition team members.

The Presidential Transition Act of 1963 provided congressional funding for transition teams, but it did not spell out the process. Typically, the transition starts as soon as the presidential candidate concedes the race. When Vice President Kamala Harris formally did so at a speech in Washington on Wednesday, that cleared the way for the White House to start coordinating with Team Trump.

The General Service Administration (GSA) handles all the logistics for a current and incoming administration. They provide interim office space, secure IT support, and conduct onboarding. A year ago, the GSA began to make a directory of pertinent information between campaign officials and federal agencies. Then over the summer, both campaigns created transition teams to start communicating with the White House.

To access GSA services, the incoming administration must sign one memorandum of understanding by Sept. 1 and another with the White House by Oct. 1. The memorandums also allow the Justice Department to start background checks for the incoming administration.

“There had been this feeling that planning before an election what it will look like to govern was presumptuous, that it was measuring the drapes,” Boyd told WORLD. “But the federal government is so complex: a $6 trillion organization, 3.5 million employees including the military, 456 federal entities, 4,000 political appointments, 1,300 of which require Senate confirmation, that it really requires planning early in the spring of an election year.”

The GSA services are optional, however, and Trump has yet to sign the memorandums of understanding that would activate the agency’s transition services. In 2020, Trump did not concede the election and did not direct the White House to assist President Joe Biden’s election team. By the end of November 2020, the GSA independently began working with Team Biden.

“In 2020, the Biden team started early in the spring of the election year,” Boyd said. “They ran an organized, disciplined process, and they were very successful in having a record number of political appointees. On day one, they had 1,100 political appointees. On Inauguration Day, they had 18 executive actions ready to go. The Trump team in 2016 had about 500 political appointees and one executive action ready by inauguration.”

WORLD contacted Trump’s transition team to ask why the president-elect is so far declining the GSA’s assistance but did not receive a response. As it stands now, Lutnick and McMahon are in charge of the the transition vetting process, and they are not receiving federal funding to start sending new employees to Washington. In a statement released yesterday, Lutnick and McMahon said the new administration will be ready to go.

“Since the formation of President Trump’s transition organization and our announcement as co-chairs in August, we have been preparing for President Trump’s next administration,” they wrote. “The American people decisively elected President Trump in a historic victory and delivered a mandate that puts the working men and women of our nation first. As he chooses the best people to join his team and best policies to pursue, his transition team will ensure the implementation of President Trump’s common sense agenda starting on Day One.”