The Transition
Delay Is Going to Cost Lives
Biden’s transition to the presidency
may finally begin, but the ramifications of Trump’s lame-duck sabotage will
linger well beyond Inauguration Day
By
Emily Murphy, the administrator of the General
Services Agency, testifies before Congress in Washington on March 13, 2019. Her
tenure at the GSA, which she has run since December 2017, has not been without
controversy.
The 9/11
Commission, in its report on how the United States
failed to stop the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, cited the Bush administration’s
shortened transition period, the result of a 36-day dispute over the results of
the 2000 election. “Given that a presidential election in the United States
brings wholesale change in personnel,” the 9/11 Commission’s report noted,
“this loss of time hampered the new administration in identifying, recruiting,
clearing, and obtaining Senate confirmation of key appointees.” That should
have been all the warning Emily Murphy needed.
She
didn’t heed it. Instead, the administrator of the General Services
Administration — effectively the real estate and office manager of the federal
government — waited nearly two weeks to release the funding the next
administration required to start its transition in earnest. Joe
Biden is going to be its newest employee, so to speak, and
that was obvious as of the morning of November 7th. It was as clear then as it
is now that it was safe for Murphy to exercise her power under the Presidential
Transition Act of 1963, and release the federal funds and resources available
to the victor of an election.
For 16
days, though, the Trump appointee didn’t do it. That likely made her Employee
of the Month over at the White House. But even a president who tweets Randy Quaid videos had to know
that such indolence had a short shelf life.
On Monday
afternoon, Murphy submitted a letter to
President-elect Biden (even though for some odd reason, she went out of her way
to avoid addressing him as such). Murphy also used a letter about the transfer
of power between presidents to fret about the harassment she, her family, her
staff, and even her pets had received for delaying her authorization for 16
days.
No one
should face intimidation for their work, but this may not have been the time
and place to voice this particular complaint — particularly when the
widespread, public danger of her delay was so evident. The consequences were
established not merely by the precedent of the September 11th attacks, but also
by the present circumstances.
We know
just how many lives we may lose because of poor or lackadaisical governance. In
May, an analysis from Columbia University reported that nearly 56,000 American
lives could have been saved had social distancing begun just two weeks earlier.
How may those 16 days Murphy held resources back from the Biden administration
have an effect on the eventual pandemic response?
Keep in
mind that what Murphy authorized wasn’t merely a matter of some offices,
chairs, and a few staplers and Post-Its. Biden’s campaign isn’t primarily
worried about booking a moving truck. Background checks need to be done.
Security clearances need to be obtained. And they have to find out how and
where Trump is deliberately acting to
make Biden’s job more difficult. Concluding his statement responding to
Murphy’s letter, the Biden-Harris Transition Director, Yohannes Abraham, wrote, “In the days
ahead, transition officials will begin meeting with federal officials to
discuss the pandemic response, have a full accounting of our national security
interests, and gain complete understanding of the Trump administration’s
efforts to hollow out government agencies.”
This is a
very real concern. As Trump has blocked Biden from transition activities, he
filled the federal bureaucracy with fellow charlatans like Anthony Tata, who thinks Barack Obama
is a terrorist. He has rushed to auction off Arctic drilling rights to
Big Oil and canceled treaties like Open Skies,
complicating matters for the incoming Biden administration. These steps all make
us even less secure — and yet Trump excels at this type of government
expediency, all while ignoring the more essential duties of
his job. The presidency has never been a job he has wanted to do
so much as it has been one that he sought to exploit, and he is rushing to
protect a legacy of grift while continuing to behave without concern for the
proper function of government.
Murphy’s
belated, begrudging letter is the final postscript on a presidency to which the
proverbial “adults in the room” never arrived. At least her decision
effectively ended the charade Trump has been perpetrating upon the American
public for the last two weeks or so, but Trump and his band of legal vultures
have succeeded in establishing a new standard for nullifying black
votes. Given how central bigotry is to Republican political
strategy, will there ever be another member of their party who behaves as if a
vote from a city like Detroit or Philadelphia or Atlanta is not automatically
fraudulent — as if our melanin somehow stains our ballots and invalidates them?
Trump’s
delusion was enabled by the vast majority of Republican officials, who defended
Trump’s efforts to overturn a legitimate election and undercut the democracy
they are all tasked with defending. It’s evidence of how deep the rot goes
within the GOP, and how inseparable Trump’s particular brand of insanity is
from the grand old party line. We already see Republican candidates in
Congressional and state races, from Michigan to California, employing the same
tactic Trump is using.
It is
good, then, that Sherrilyn Ifill and the nonpartisan NAACP Legal Defense and
Educational Fund are suing Trump and his campaign over
his efforts to disenfranchise Michigan voters, because what they’ve done may
very well be against the law.
The
Department of Justice, once Biden is inaugurated, should follow Ifill’s lead
and investigate Trump and his campaign for illegality. But even if Murphy is
innocent of any criminal wrongdoing, it is clear that her actions have helped
give Trump the necessary real estate to stage his circus. In doing so, she,
along with those Republicans who enabled this lame duck through their
complicity and silence, have possibly injured the next administration’s ability
to respond to national security crises, foreign and domestic.
The tragedy
is only deepened by how avoidable this all was. In the Trump administration,
not even the one small part of the government that has literally one job at
election time could do that right. Murphy wasn’t wrestling with a legitimate
debate or over a close election. The outgoing president didn’t and still
doesn’t want to deal with the most conspicuous public failure of his life. He
has chosen instead to exact revenge on the predominantly black districts who
sealed his fate. In accordance with the way racism works, we will all suffer
the consequences.
