Three things a delayed federal transition moved at once

The week

On November 23, 2020, the Administrator of the General Services Administration, the agency that manages much of the federal government’s buildings, purchasing and shared services, sent a letter to President-elect Joe Biden. That letter allowed the formal transition to begin under the Presidential Transition Act, the law that sets out how an incoming administration is supported.

The Administrator at the time was Emily Murphy. Her letter came on the same day Michigan’s state canvassing board certified that state’s results, after a period of recounts and legal challenges in several states. The election had been held on November 3, and major news organizations had projected the result on November 7.

Every four years, or eight, the federal government performs one of the largest management handovers in the world. A new team arrives to run departments with millions of employees and contractors, enormous budgets and programs that cannot stop for a change of leadership. Most of that handover is invisible to the public. In November 2020, a delay made it visible.

The letter is known as ascertainment: the formal recognition of the apparent winner for transition purposes. It matters because it unlocks practical help. It released federal funding, office space and services, and opened the way for the incoming administration’s agency review teams to meet officials and receive briefings. Review teams are the groups of experts an incoming administration sends into each department to learn how it works, what is going well, what is at risk and which decisions are waiting.

Major news organizations had projected the election result more than two weeks earlier. For those two-plus weeks, the incoming team could not formally engage with agencies. The delay drew criticism from Democrats, some Republican lawmakers, national security experts and health officials, who cited the pandemic response as a reason to begin quickly. Their argument was straightforward: the country was in the middle of a public health emergency, and the people about to be responsible for it needed time to understand it.

There was one modern precedent. In 2000, ascertainment waited until the Florida dispute ended in mid-December, leaving the incoming administration roughly half the usual time. The 9/11 Commission later concluded that the shortened transition had slowed the new administration’s work to identify, clear and confirm its national security team. Congress drew on that experience in later amendments to the law. In 2020 the delay was shorter, but the pressures were different: a pandemic, a vaccine rollout about to start and agencies running largely on remote work.

Much of the transition machinery had been running well before the letter. Amendments to the Presidential Transition Act in 2010, 2015 and 2019 moved planning earlier. GSA offers office space and support to eligible candidates after the nominating conventions. A White House Transition Coordinating Council and an Agency Transition Directors Council coordinate the work. Each major agency names a senior career employee as its transition director, and agencies prepare briefing materials before Election Day. Those pre-election steps went ahead in 2020, which is one reason the delay did not do more damage.

What the letter changed was access. Before it, the incoming team could prepare on its own resources and public information. After it, review teams could meet agency officials, receive nonpublic briefings and begin the paperwork for security clearances and background checks for prospective appointees. On November 30, the President-elect received his first President’s Daily Brief, the intelligence summary prepared for the President.

Agency review teams began their work in the days that followed. But the calendar did not move. Inauguration Day was still fixed, so every task that normally fills the period from Election Day to inauguration now had less time.

The weeks that followed were crowded. Congress passed the year’s main spending and pandemic relief legislation in late December, after the government had run for months on a continuing resolution. On December 13, CISA issued an emergency directive ordering agencies to disconnect or power down SolarWinds Orion products, after a supply-chain compromise affecting federal networks came to light. Incoming review teams were learning how departments worked while those departments were investigating one of the most serious intrusions in their history.

The pandemic was accelerating at the same time. Cases and hospitalizations rose steeply through November and December, and the Food and Drug Administration authorized the first COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use on December 11. The handover would take place in the middle of the largest vaccination campaign in the country’s history.

That compression makes the week instructive for any leader, in government or not. It showed that a transition is an operational event as well as a political one. Thousands of people, accounts, devices, records and live programs change hands at once, and preparation done months in advance decides whether things go smoothly.

Political transitions are usually discussed as political events. For the people who run government technology and operations, they are something more mundane and more demanding: a large, time-boxed change in who is responsible for what. The 2020 delay compressed a handover that normally runs from Election Day to inauguration. It made visible how much of a transition is operational work, and how much depends on runbooks prepared in advance. A runbook is a written, step-by-step playbook for a recurring task.

The law already treats much of a presidential transition as an operational program. It requires agencies to name career transition directors, prepare briefing materials before the election and coordinate through standing councils. That structure leaves the mechanics of access, records and continuity to each agency. Those mechanics are where a compressed timeline hurts, and where preparation pays.

Three assets move in any leadership change: people and their access, records and accounts, and programs already in flight. The same three apply to a governor’s or mayor’s transition and to leadership changes at public authorities. They also apply, with little translation, to a company after an acquisition or a new chief executive bringing in a new leadership team.

Keys, accounts and records: the machinery

A few terms come up repeatedly.

Identity and access management is the set of systems and processes that decide who can log in to what. Every employee has a digital identity, usually an account, and that identity is granted permissions: this person can read email, that person can approve payments, a third can see sensitive case files. It works as the organization’s key cabinet, and the question is always who holds which keys, and whether keys are taken back when people leave.

Onboarding and offboarding are the processes for bringing someone in and taking them out: creating or closing accounts, issuing or recovering laptops and phones, and granting or removing access. Privileged access is the most powerful kind, the master keys that let someone change systems, see everything or act on behalf of others.

Provisioning is the act of setting up that access. When it is automated, it is driven directly by the official personnel record. When human resources records that someone has left, their access is switched off without anyone filing a request. When it is manual, someone has to raise a ticket, someone else approves it and a third person carries it out.

Records management is the discipline of capturing, keeping and eventually disposing of an organization’s official information according to law. In government it is mandatory, and it is how history is preserved and how the public holds officials to account.

Where the authoritative record lives

Automation needs a trustworthy source. In federal agencies, the personnel action that records a hire or departure flows through a human resources system, often run by a shared service provider. The identity system should read from that record rather than from emails or spreadsheets. When the two disagree, the personnel record should win, and someone should own the reconciliation.

Federal staff also carry a physical credential that doubles as a digital one. The Personal Identity Verification card, required under Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 and specified in the FIPS 201 standard, opens doors and signs people in to systems. Issuing it requires identity proofing and at least an initial background check. Revoking it when someone leaves closes both kinds of door at once, provided the revocation happens promptly.

Political appointees come in several categories: officials confirmed by the Senate, non-career members of the Senior Executive Service and Schedule C staff. They arrive and leave on different timetables, through different paperwork. A runbook that treats them as one group will miss steps for some of them.

People and their access

A presidential transition is a mass offboarding and onboarding event. Thousands of political appointees leave and thousands arrive over the following months. Each departure means accounts to disable, devices to recover and privileged access to revoke. Each arrival means background investigations, accounts, devices and, where appropriate, access to classified or sensitive systems.

Identity teams run these processes at modest scale most of the year. A transition multiplies them and concentrates them around one date. A human resources team used to a handful of departures a week must suddenly process a large share of the senior leadership in a few days, while welcoming their replacements.

It also creates two unusual risks. First, departing staff hold broad access in their final weeks, sometimes while preparing to join organizations with business before the agency. An official who will soon work for a company the agency regulates should not still be able to read that company’s case file after leaving. Second, incoming review teams need some access before formal appointment, to briefing materials and sometimes to systems, without becoming employees. They need temporary access that reaches the right material and nothing else.

Access without employment

Review teams are the awkward case. Their members are not employees, may hold no clearance yet and will leave within weeks. Giving them ordinary accounts on the agency network grants far more than they need. The better pattern is a separate space: a read-only document room or a guest workspace, holding the briefing materials prepared for them, with sign-in that requires strong authentication.

Each guest account should carry an expiry date from the moment it is created, tied to the end of the review period. Access to anything beyond the prepared materials should require a named agency sponsor and be logged. Agreements signed by the transition team, including ethics and nondisclosure terms, set the rules. The access design is what makes those rules enforceable.

Who arrives, and in what order

Senate-confirmed leaders often take months to arrive. In the meantime, career officials or early appointees serve in acting roles under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act and agency succession orders. Acting officials need the authority of the role, and authority in modern agencies is encoded in systems. Approval rights in financial, grants and contracting systems are tied to positions and delegations.

Each change of acting official means re-mapping those rights. If delegations are recorded only on paper, or rights are granted to named individuals rather than roles, every handoff becomes a manual exercise. Agencies that tie system permissions to positions, and record delegations in a register the identity team can read, make these handoffs routine.

The final weeks of departing staff

Departing officials keep their access until their last day, and their work often peaks near the end as they finish projects and write handover notes. That makes unusual activity hard to tell from normal activity. Bulk downloads, forwarding to personal accounts and copying to removable media are the patterns that deserve attention. Data loss prevention tools and log review can flag them without treating every departing official as a suspect.

Post-employment ethics rules, such as the federal restrictions at 18 U.S.C. 207, limit what former officials may do on matters they handled. Those rules govern conduct after departure. They do not switch anything off. Only the access process can make sure a former official can no longer read the files those rules are meant to protect.

Delegated access, the forgotten keys

Senior officials rarely hold administrator rights, but their offices are full of delegated access. Assistants can read and send from a principal’s mailbox, manage calendars and open shared folders. Deputies hold approval rights on behalf of their principals. When the principal leaves, the account may be disabled while the delegations remain attached to other people, still pointing at sensitive material. Offboarding should list and remove delegations in both directions: those the official held over others, and those others held over the official.

Evidence an auditor will ask for

Account management is a standard control in federal security frameworks. NIST SP 800-53 includes it as AC-2, covering how accounts are created, reviewed and disabled. Inspectors general regularly test it in their annual security reviews. The evidence is simple to describe: a list of departures, the date each account was disabled, and the last login after departure. Producing it quickly is itself a sign the process works.

Agencies with automated provisioning tied to authoritative personnel records handle both well. Access ends when the personnel action posts, and temporary access for review teams expires on a set date. Agencies relying on tickets and manual approvals build backlogs. Backlogs invite shortcuts: shared accounts, lingering access and generic mailboxes that outlive their purpose. Each shortcut is understandable in the moment and a liability later, because nobody can say with confidence who used a shared account on a given day.

A measure worth tracking is the number of days between a departure date and the last successful login to each departed account. It is simple, it can be produced from existing logs, and it tells a leader directly whether the key cabinet is being managed. A departed adviser’s account used after their last day deserves a quick answer.

The 2020 delay shortened the window on the incoming side. Review teams had less time to understand agency operations. Agencies had less time to prepare briefing materials and arrange access. A compressed window is exactly when manual processes produce errors, such as access granted to the wrong system or never removed from a departed adviser.

Devices deserve their own line in the runbook. Laptops and phones issued to departing officials hold records, credentials and sometimes classified material. Recovery, records review and secure wiping need a sequence and an owner, so that a device is never wiped before its records are captured. Capture comes first, then the wipe; reverse the order and the records are gone for good.

Records and accounts

The second asset is information. At the federal level, presidential records fall under the Presidential Records Act and agency records under the Federal Records Act, with the National Archives responsible for custody and guidance. A transition is when records management either works or fails visibly.

Modern records include email, messaging platforms, shared drives, collaboration tools and official social media accounts. That list is much longer than it was a generation ago, when official records were largely paper memos and letters. Today a significant decision might be discussed in a chat thread, documented in a shared file and announced on social media, and all three can be records.

Official accounts have to be archived and handed over, which now happens routinely but depends on planning by communications and records staff. Messaging apps with disappearing messages, which delete themselves after a set time, personal devices and informal channels used for official business create gaps that are very hard to close afterward. Once a message has vanished from every device, there is usually no way to recover it.

How capture works, channel by channel

Each channel needs its own method. For email, many agencies use the National Archives’ Capstone approach, which keeps the email of designated senior officials permanently and applies shorter retention to others. Collaboration platforms need retention policies configured to match records schedules, including chat and meeting recordings. Text messages on government phones can be captured through mobile device management tools, but only if capture is switched on and tested.

Personal accounts are the hardest case. Since amendments in 2014, federal law has required officials who use a personal messaging account for official business to copy or forward the record to an official account within 20 days. Compliance depends on the official remembering, which is why agencies also discourage the practice outright. Official social media accounts need archiving through the platform’s export tools or a capture service, and handover of credentials to the agency.

Holds and requests that outlive the official

Open freedom of information requests and litigation holds do not end when an official leaves. A litigation hold is a legal duty to preserve information relevant to a lawsuit, and it can cover a departing official’s mailbox and devices. Clearing a device under a hold can expose the agency to sanctions, whatever the intent. The offboarding checklist should therefore check for active holds and pending requests before anything is deleted.

State and local agencies face the same issues under state public records laws. Records obligations do not pause during a transition. The weeks when staff are leaving are the weeks when records are most likely to be lost, because departing staff clear devices and inboxes. Often this is done in good faith, as tidying up before handing back a laptop, which is precisely why it is dangerous.

A records checklist built into the offboarding workflow, with the records officer’s sign-off before the account closes, catches most of it. The design principle is to make the right thing the automatic thing. If an account cannot be closed until the records officer confirms its contents have been captured, nobody has to remember.

Rules differ by level of government. State public records laws vary in what counts as a record, how long it must be kept and how text messages are treated. Some states run strong state archives programs that advise counties and cities. Others leave local governments largely on their own. A county clerk’s retention schedule, not the federal one, governs a county executive’s departure.

Programs in flight

The third asset is work already under way. In November 2020 the clearest example was COVID-19 vaccine distribution, due to begin in December, weeks before the inauguration. Programs like that cannot pause for a change of leadership. They depend on career staff, contracts, data systems and partner relationships that keep running while new leaders learn the program and decide what to change.

Continuity depends on documentation a newcomer can use: who owns which decisions, which contracts expire in the next six months, which systems are fragile and what the known risks are. Agencies that maintain this as part of normal program management can brief incoming teams within days. Agencies that write it only for transitions produce documents that are out of date or too general to help.

Technology leaders have a specific role. Major system modernizations, contract renewals and security remediation plans often straddle transitions. Briefing incoming leaders on the state of critical systems, including technical debt and open audit findings, gives them a realistic picture before they commit to new priorities. Technical debt is the accumulated cost of past shortcuts and aging technology, invisible until something breaks and more expensive the longer it waits. Such briefings also protect programs from being cancelled or reshaped on incomplete information.

Systems that are fragile, and why

A useful brief explains fragility in specific terms. Software past its vendor’s end of support, a system only one engineer understands, a data center lease ending, a backlog of security patches: each is concrete and each has a cost to fix. New leaders can weigh these against their own priorities only if they know about them early.

Federal systems also run under an authorization to operate, the formal acceptance of a system’s security risk by a designated senior official. When that official leaves, existing authorizations remain in force, but someone must take over the role for renewals and new risk decisions. A brief that lists each major system’s authorization date and authorizing official spares a new team an unwelcome surprise.

The data new leaders inherit

New leaders form early judgments from dashboards and performance reports. Those numbers carry definitions, sources and known weaknesses that rarely travel with them. A backlog figure may count cases differently from last year, or a cost figure may exclude a contractor workforce. Each key metric in a program brief should carry a short note on how it is computed and what it misses. That note prevents a new team from making its first decisions on a misread chart.

Partners need continuity too. States, grantees, contractors and other agencies depend on named contacts inside a program. When a political lead leaves, those partners need to know who now answers their calls and who can make decisions in the interim. A partner contact list in each program brief, with a career owner for each relationship, keeps outside work moving while the new team settles in. It also spares partners from guessing whose authority still counts.

Contracts and the people who hold authority

Much continuity rests on career staff with formal authority. Contracting officers hold warrants that let them obligate funds, and their warrants do not change with an election. Contracts continue, option periods come due and renewals need decisions. A program brief should list every option date and expiry in the coming year, with the contracting officer for each, so a new leader can see what must be decided and when.

Budget timing adds to the pressure. In 2020, agencies spent the autumn under a continuing resolution, with full-year funding settled only in late December. A new team arriving in January inherits spending plans it did not write. Programs that document their funding assumptions make that inheritance easier to manage.

Incidents that span the handover

The SolarWinds compromise, disclosed in December 2020, showed what happens when a crisis arrives mid-transition. Incident response, forensic work and remediation began under one set of leaders and continued under the next. Career security staff carried the response throughout. The agencies best placed were those whose incident playbooks named career owners for each step, so that decisions did not wait for appointees to arrive.

The same holds for any long remediation effort. Open audit findings, plans of action and milestones, and emergency directives all need owners who will still be there in six months. Writing those owners into the program brief is cheap insurance.

How the three assets interact

Access granted to an incoming team member decides which records they see and which program decisions they can take. Records not captured during departures leave gaps in the history new leaders rely on. A new program leader who cannot find the reasoning behind a contract decision, because it lived in a departed official’s deleted messages, is making choices partly blind.

Runbooks therefore work best when identity, records and program staff own them jointly. In many organizations these three groups sit in different departments, report to different executives and rarely plan together. A transition forces them into the same room, ideally before the pressure arrives.

Sequencing across the three

The three assets also have a natural order on any given day. Records capture comes first for a departing official, because it must finish before an account closes or a device is wiped. Access changes come next, closing the departing official’s keys and opening the incoming official’s. The program brief comes last, because it depends on knowing who now holds which authority. A runbook that fixes this order prevents the most common failures, such as a device wiped before capture or an approval routed to someone who has left.

Joint ownership needs a light structure to work. A small working group, with one lead each from identity, records and the program offices, can meet monthly in ordinary times and weekly in a transition. It keeps one shared tracker of open actions. It reports to a single executive, often the chief operating officer or deputy, who can settle disputes between the three.

A short exercise that walks through a new leadership team’s first day tends to reveal more gaps than any document review. Say a state transportation department is preparing for a new governor. In a two-hour walkthrough, staff play out the first morning: a new deputy secretary arrives, needs a laptop, an account, access to the budget system and a briefing on a bridge program with a contract expiring in three months. Within the first hour the team discovers that the budget system still requires a paper approval form signed by the departing deputy, and that the bridge program’s decision log lives in that person’s personal folder. Neither problem is hard to fix in advance. Both would have been painful to discover on the day.

The same walkthrough can run in reverse for departures. Pick one senior official who will leave and trace every step: which accounts close and when, who collects the laptop and phone, who confirms the records were captured, and who inherits the open decisions on their desk. Teams often find that each step has an owner but the sequence between them has none, and that unowned sequence is where keys go unreturned and records go missing. Writing it down, and assigning someone to watch it end to end, costs very little and pays off every time someone senior moves on.

More than housekeeping for IT

Transition work is more than housekeeping for the IT and records teams, for reasons that translate directly into the language of a board or a cabinet meeting.

Risk. Lingering access is one of the most common ways sensitive information leaks. An account that still works after its owner has left is a key nobody is watching. If it is misused, by the former employee or by someone who has stolen the password, the organization may not notice for months. In a government setting, the information at stake can include case files, procurement decisions and national security material. In a company, it can be customer data, pricing or deal plans.

Legal and regulatory exposure. Records laws exist because the public, courts and legislators have a right to know how decisions were made. Losing records during a handover can lead to investigations, litigation holds that cannot be satisfied and lasting questions about whether something was hidden, even when the loss was innocent. Regulated companies face parallel obligations to retain communications and to show who had access to what.

Money. Programs in flight carry contracts, and contracts carry deadlines. A renewal that slips because the person who understood it has gone, and the new leader has no brief, can mean a lapse in service or an expensive emergency extension. Modernization projects that are paused while new leaders get up to speed burn budget without producing results.

Trust and reputation. Citizens and customers rarely notice a smooth handover. They notice a broken one: a benefit payment that is late, a website that goes dark, a public health program that loses momentum. The incoming leaders take the blame, often for gaps created long before they arrived.

Security exposure. High turnover suits social engineering. New staff do not yet know whom to trust, and messages claiming to come from the incoming team, human resources or the help desk are plausible. Password resets and access requests surge, and an attacker can hide among them. Help desks need verification steps that hold up under volume, especially for privileged accounts.

Staff. Career employees carry the organization through every change at the top. Giving them clear runbooks, and the authority to follow them, is one of the most practical ways to respect their role. Asking them to improvise under a compressed timeline, with manual processes and missing documentation, is a reliable way to burn them out.

Transition readiness is therefore a governance topic more than a technical one. It belongs in the same conversation as business continuity and succession planning.

The case against heavy pre-planning

There are reasonable objections. Incoming leaders want room to set their own priorities, and briefings prepared by the outgoing team can carry its framing. Career staff may worry that detailed transition plans look like positioning for one side. Those concerns argue for neutral, factual briefs: what exists, who owns it and what is due. They do not argue against preparation.

Automation has its own failure modes. A personnel record that lags behind reality can cut off an official who is still serving, or leave on an account that should be closed. Holdover officials asked to stay a few weeks may lose access on a date set months earlier. Good designs include a short, logged grace process: a named approver can extend access for a defined period, and every extension shows up in a report. That keeps the automation honest without making it brittle.

Some argue that transitions are rare enough to manage by surge rather than standing process. The 2020 delay, the 2024 delays and the departures of 2025 all point the other way. The same processes handle every departure, every acting appointment and every reorganization. A transition only tests them at volume.

Handovers that run on habit

Organizations that handle transitions well tie access to the authoritative personnel record, so departures and arrivals flow through automatically. Temporary access for review teams or advisers is time-limited by default and expires on a set date. Records capture is enforced across email, chat, shared drives and official social media. Each major program keeps a short, current brief covering who decides what, which contracts expire soon and which systems are fragile. And identity, records and program staff rehearse the handover together.

The organizations that struggle do the reverse. They treat the transition as purely a political or human resources matter. They rely on manual tickets that pile up. They allow informal channels for official business and hope to reconstruct records afterward. They write transition documents once every four years, in a hurry, rather than maintaining them as normal management. And they assume a fixed calendar means a fixed amount of preparation time, when 2020 showed that the usable window can shrink with little warning.

Measures of a standing capability

A capability that is not measured decays between transitions. A small set of measures keeps it alive. Track days from departure to disabled account, and the share of temporary accounts that carry an expiry date. Track the share of program briefs updated in the last quarter, and the share of departures with a records sign-off. Add the date of the last exercise and the number of findings still open from it. Each can be reported to the deputy secretary or chief operating officer twice a year without new tools.

How the playbook changes by organization

A federal department has statutory transition directors, standing councils and the National Archives behind it. A state agency has a governor’s transition office, which varies widely in staffing, and a state records law. A county or city often has neither, and its transition may consist of a new mayor arriving with a handful of staff and the same small IT department. For local governments, the playbook needs to be shorter and more concrete: the ten accounts that matter, the five contracts expiring, the three fragile systems.

Public authorities, such as transit or port agencies, sit between those models. They answer to appointed boards that change with elected leadership, while running operations that never stop. Their transitions tend to be partial: a new board chair and chief executive, with most of the management team in place.

Regulated companies face the same pattern on different triggers. A bank absorbing an acquired firm has a legal close date, a systems conversion date and regulators watching both. Identity federation, records retention under its own rules, and continuity of customer-facing programs map closely to the three assets here. A broker-dealer must also keep required communications under SEC recordkeeping rules through the change. The vocabulary differs; the runbook looks much the same.

What a ready organization can show

A ready organization can answer these without launching a project:

1. When someone leaves, how many days pass before their accounts stop working, and can you show me the number for last quarter?
2. How do we give temporary access to advisers or incoming leaders, and what makes it expire?
3. Before a departing official’s laptop or phone is wiped, who confirms that its records have been captured?
4. For each major program, could a new leader read a single page and know who decides what, which contracts expire soon and which systems are fragile?
5. When did we last walk through a new leadership team’s first day, and what did we find?

The calendar for an elected government is known years ahead, which makes a schedule easy to set. About a year before an election, refresh program briefs and check that delegation registers are current. Six months out, run the first-day exercise and fix what it finds. In the final weeks before the election, confirm guest access designs, records checklists and help desk procedures. After inauguration, run a short review of what worked. The same rhythm works for a governor’s or mayor’s term, and for a planned change of chief executive in a company.

The questions are operational rather than political, and the answers decide whether a change of leadership is a smooth handover or a scramble. The 2020 delay was a reminder that the calendar does not wait, and that the best time to prepare is long before the date arrives.

With hindsight

The 2020 experience prompted Congress to amend the transition law. The Presidential Transition Improvement Act was enacted in December 2022 as part of a broader electoral reform package. It clarified when transition support begins and allowed more than one candidate to receive support when the outcome is unclear. That reduced the chance that a dispute over the result could again hold up the practical help an incoming team needs, by allowing support to flow while the question is settled.

The change came in the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act, folded into the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023, signed at the end of December 2022. If no single winner has been ascertained five days after the election, eligible candidates can receive support in parallel until the outcome is clear. The fix addressed the 2020 failure directly. It cannot compel an incoming team to use the help on offer.

The 2024 transition showed that limit. The incoming Trump team took weeks to sign its agreements with the outgoing administration. It signed a memorandum with the White House in late November and an agreement with the Justice Department on FBI background checks in early December, and it declined GSA’s office space and funding. The operational effect was similar to 2020 from the other side: agencies had a shorter window to brief and to arrange access for incoming staff.

Federal records practices also drew steady scrutiny, especially the use of messaging apps for official business by officials of both parties. The channels people actually use have multiplied faster than the systems designed to capture them, and the gap shows up most clearly when people leave.

In 2025, the use of a commercial messaging app with disappearing messages by senior national security officials became a public controversy, and records lawsuits followed. The same year, deferred resignation offers and reductions in force produced federal departures at a pace agencies rarely face, testing offboarding at scale. Questions about which new teams could reach which sensitive systems, including Treasury payment systems, ended up in court.

The identity side of federal policy moved in the same direction as the operational lessons here. OMB’s zero trust strategy, issued in January 2022, put identity at the center: phishing-resistant sign-in, centralized identity systems and access decisions that consider the person, the device and the request. Agencies that made progress on that strategy were better placed for any large movement of people, planned or not.

Records policy tightened on a separate track. A 2019 memorandum from OMB and the National Archives directed agencies to manage their permanent records electronically. An update issued in December 2022 set June 30, 2024 as the date after which the Archives would generally stop accepting new paper records transfers. Electronic capture is a precondition for the records discipline described here.

The operational points apply well beyond Washington. State and local governments, public authorities and regulated enterprises all go through leadership changes that move people, records and programs at once. A bank absorbing an acquired firm, a hospital system welcoming a new executive team and a city hall after an election all face the same three questions: who holds which keys, where the institutional memory lives, and who keeps the work running in the meantime.

Organizations that treat these as planned continuity events, with automated identity lifecycle processes, records capture enforced across channels and current program documentation, handle them as routine. Those that treat them only as political or personnel events tend to find the operational gaps after the new team has arrived, when the cost of fixing them is highest and the people who knew the answers have already gone.

Transition readiness is a standing capability rather than a project. It is built in ordinary months, through ordinary disciplines, so that it is available on the day it is needed, however much warning that day gives.