Democrats fear a lame-duck Trump might thwart a Biden transition

• President Donald Trump’s critics are preparing for a scenario in which he loses to Joe Biden and deploys a scorched-earth strategy to tarnish the transition.
• Democrats are worried Trump will fire thousands of federal employees, hold up cash that the Biden team is supposed to get, destroy documents, and issue a spate of last-minute rules that would be a headache for the next administration to unravel.
• “They can wreak a lot of havoc on their way out the door,” said Beth Noveck, a professor at New York University and former US deputy chief technology officer in the Obama White House.
• To prepare, Democrats are raising cash to bolster a Biden transition, introducing legislation to thwart the Republican president, and bracing themselves to circumvent the administration if officials don’t cooperate.
• Terry McAuliffe, a former Virginia governor and ex-chairman of the Democratic National Committee, told Democrats on a recent Zoom call that if Trump doesn’t release funds for the transition, his allies will make sure that there’s enough private money to run the government handover, according to a person on the call.
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Democrats are gaming out worst-case scenarios in which President Donald Trump loses the November election and deploys a scorched-earth strategy on his way out the door that significantly harms Joe Biden’s ability to start governing immediately on Inauguration Day, Insider has learned.

They’re plowing cash into Biden’s transition effort, teeing up legislation to thwart the president’s policies, and preparing to block or unravel last-minute rules he rolls out.

They aren’t just being paranoid either.

Trump has already signed a controversial executive order that could lead to government-employee purges. He’s begun moving the regulatory machinery that would allow him to sell off oil drilling leases in Alaska wilderness. And his repeated insistence that the November election will be rigged against him has Democrats concerned he’ll withhold millions of dollars in federal funding for a Biden transition.

“Obviously the big hope is that it’s a really significant [Biden] win … so that there’s just no meaningful way that Trump can claim fraud or tie it up in the courts or something like that. That’s our perfect world,” said Rep. Don Beyer, a Virginia Democrat who worked on President-elect Barack Obama’s 2008 transition team.

Behind the scenes, Trump officials have been meeting legal deadlines for a possible Trump-to-Biden transition. They’ve been meeting to discuss their handover plans and beefing up staff to do background checks for a new president-elect’s team, according to government documents.

But Trump’s campaign-trail rhetoric and a new executive order targeting government workers has his critics worried that a lame-duck president who’s known for shattering political norms won’t be so cooperative. 

“They ask me, ‘If you lose, will there be a friendly transition?’ Well, when I won, did they give me a friendly transition? They spied on my campaign; they did all this stuff. That was not a friendly transition,” Trump said Saturday at a speech in Ohio.