President-elect Donald Trump’s transition will continue to rely solely on money from private donors, a break from norms that will allow his team to raise unlimited sums.
Trump announced an agreement this week with the Biden administration that allowed his team to begin coordinating with agencies on the transition, though progressives have raised concerns over the transition’s funding stream. That’s because, so far, the president-elect has declined to accept transition resources from the General Services Administration for the likes of administrative support, office space, and equipment.
In turn, signing such an agreement with the General Services Administration would impose fundraising limits for the transition and allocate more than $7 million in federal funding. The Trump transition said its decision will “save taxpayers’s hard-earned money,” and Republicans previously argued that rejecting the federal funds was warranted, given prior reports on anti-Trump actions taken by the GSA.
To Democrats and progressive watchdog groups, the private funding nature of the transition opens the door for those seeking to curry influence with Trump to donate unlimited sums of money and influence the transition process. An aide to Trump said the transition is not accepting money from foreigners and does plan to disclose the names of donors.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the Trump transition to ask when it plans to disclose the names of donors.
“The reliance on private donors to fund the transition is nothing more than a ploy for well-connected Trump insiders to line their pockets while pretending to save taxpayers money,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said on social media this week.
“So it is troubling if there’s this weird, unregulated way that essentially anybody can just give money to the president,” Marsco told Politico.
According to the Presidential Records Act, the Trump transition must disclose its donors to the General Services Administration within 30 days of Trump being sworn into office. The transition, like others in the past, is set up as a nonprofit group registered with the IRS.
In 2020, Biden’s transition team raised over $22 million and had 450 employees on the payroll. Upon Barack Obama winning the presidency in 2008, he raised $4.5 million for his transition, which prohibited donations from political action committees, lobbyists, registered foreign agents, labor unions, and corporations.
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In 2016, the first Trump transition signed the General Services Administration agreement and raised $6.5 million. The 2016 transition had about 120 employees on the books and hauled in $2.4 million in reimbursements from the federal government. It also spent roughly $1.8 million in legal fees.
“Without the safeguards of these limits and these disclosure requirements, there’s a serious risk that the public is going to be a little bit in the dark about what’s going on,” Marsco said.