President Donald Trump maintains his refusal to acknowledge Joe Biden’s electoral victory. That position goes beyond rhetoric and already has practical consequences: Your Administration does not sign the letter that allows the transfer of powers to begin, as you may have known The Washington Post.
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The administrator of the General Administration Services (GSA), the agency that deals with federal buildings, is in charge of signing documentation without which resources cannot be mobilized for transition work between two governments.
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The person who holds that position in the Trump Administration, Emily Murphy, has not yet signed the letter and it is not in the next plans to do so -according to the Post- in line that the president’s team maintains to act in coherence with its decision not to recognize the electoral result and file a legal battle to challenge it.
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This refusal could delay the transfer of powers process for the first time since the elections of the year 2000, when the electoral contest reached the Supreme Court.
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A spokesperson for Biden’s transition team told the Post that he hoped “that the GSA administrator would quickly determine Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as president-elect and vice president-elect.”
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“The national security and economic interests of the United States depend on the federal government clearly and quickly indicating that the United States government will respect the will of the American people and engage in a smooth and peaceful transfer of power,” he said.
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“The GSA administrator does not select the winner in the presidential elections. According to the Presidential Transition Act of 1963 (PTA), as amended, the GSA administrator determines the apparently successful candidate once the winner is clear, according to the process established in the Constitution, “Pennington told the news channel, who also” declined to respond to CNN’s request for details on the threshold for an ‘apparently successful candidate.’
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