According to reporting by the Washington Post, the White House budget office has told federal agencies to continue preparing the Trump administration’s budget proposals through the next fiscal year, which extends to at least two weeks after President Donald Trump is scheduled to leave the White House.
Although Trump has refused to concede his loss to former vice president Joe Biden on November 3, Biden is set to be sworn into office as the 46th president on January 20 -- all of which is fueling a possible legal war.
“They’re pretending nothing happened,” one government official involved in the federal budget process told the Post. “We’re all supposed to pretend this is normal, and do all this work, while we know we’re just going to have to throw it away.”
The decision to proceed with Trump’s budget for the 2022 fiscal year has shocked even the most seasoned staffers. The Biden transition team is already in place, and will submit its proposed budget to Congress at the start of the new year.
General Services Administrator Emily Murphy, a Trump administration appointee, has so far refused to sign the paperwork handing over millions of dollars and access to office space and equipment to begin the latter stages of the transition.
"We believe that the time has come for the GSA administrator to promptly ascertain Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as president-elect and vice president-elect," an unidentified Biden-Harris transition official said Monday night on a telephone briefing with reporters.