President Donald Trump’s administration has not publicly released any accounting of who funded the transition efforts after he won the 2024 election, blowing past the timeline in which previous administrations have disclosed transition donors, despite pledging last year to release the names.
Unlike other transition efforts, Trump’s most recent transition was not subject to the disclosure requirements or donation limits laid out in federal law. That's because it chose not to accept public funds for the effort. Otherwise, it would have been required to make those disclosures 30 days after taking office and cap donations at $5,000.
Still, the Trump transition team said in a November statement that “donors to the transition will be disclosed to the public,” and those disclosures have not yet been made. The White House did not reply to multiple questions from NBC News about when the transition team would release a list of its donors. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, was the spokesperson for the president’s transition.
Rules regarding presidential transition funding are governed by the Presidential Transition Act of 1963. Most of the law outlines how nominees and presidents-elect are able to get a jump start on the massive change from campaigning to governing a federal bureaucracy, laying out topics like what can be done before or after the election, how the transition team can work with the outgoing administration and what should be spelled out in a transition team’s ethics plan.
But the act also includes guardrails for how these efforts are funded, both publicly and privately.
The federal government allows presidents-elect to tap into a pool of millions of dollars for transitions, including for securing office space and hiring staff. It also allows for private donations, capped at $5,000 per donor.
But the donation cap and the requirement to lay out the transition team’s donors are contingent on accepting the public funding in the first place. If a transition doesn’t take public dollars, then it doesn't need to follow those rules.
That’s what the Trump transition decided to do, in a break with tradition. In a November news release announcing that it had signed a memorandum of understanding with the outgoing administration, the Trump transition team disclosed it would “utilize private funding ... providing cost savings to the American taxpayers.”
Left unsaid was that the decision unshackled the Trump team from those disclosure requirements and fundraising limits. But the Trump transition did add that “donors to the Transition will be disclosed to the public” and “the Transition will not accept foreign donations.”
The novel decision by the Trump transition to eschew public funding, placing it outside the purview of disclosure law and donation caps, prompted some experts to question whether the law needs to be strengthened to mandate disclosure in more cases.
“The Presidential Transition Act assumes that candidates want to accept the services of government agencies before the election, before inauguration,” Valerie Smith Boyd told NBC News in February when she was the director of the Center for Presidential Transition at the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service. She’s no longer with the organization.
“The transparency requirements are tied to accepting those services. There is a new question as to whether that is the right recipe in the law,” she added.
Trump’s transition ahead of his first term agreed to accept public funding and raised an additional $6.5 million and spent almost $4.7 million, according to a report filed with the General Services Administration in February 2017. While donations have to be specifically itemized, the only information typically disclosed about spending is how much was spent in certain categories, such as payroll, travel and legal expenses.
