How a little-known organization, American First, is poised to shape a second Trump administration
How a little-known organization is poised to shape a second Trump administration
New York Times reporter Ken
Bensinger says the America First Policy Institute, which has nearly 300
executive orders ready to be signed, would influence a Trump second term
more than Project 2025.
DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's blueprint for a second Trump term, has gotten a lot of attention and criticism in the last few months. But our guest, Ken Bensinger, writes that a different organization, the America First Policy Institute, is poised to be far more influential in staffing and guiding a potential second Trump administration. In a story published last week, Bensinger and The Times' David Fahrenthold described training sessions the institute held to help potential Trump staff deal with the mainstream media and overcome the resistance of, quote, "federal bureaucrats."
The story also traces the origins of the group to wealthy Texas conservatives bent on planning a second Trump term as early as 2020. Bensinger has also written about the Trump campaign's failure to commit to agreements and ethics rules required under federal law to start the process for planning a new administration. Ken Bensinger is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, who joined The New York Times in 2022. He previously reported for The Wall Street Journal, SmartMoney magazine, the Los Angeles Times and BuzzFeed News.
Well, Ken Bensinger, welcome to FRESH AIR. Let's talk about the America First Policy Institute and how it's distinct from the Heritage Foundation, which produced Project 2025, which has gotten so much attention. How do these two groups differ?
KEN BENSINGER: So these are two groups that are in some ways very similar, but they're kind of so similar that they end up being rivals rather than joining hands. Like the Heritage Foundation, which was founded in the 1970s, America First Policy Institute is a Washington - well, at least present in Washington - think tank that is dedicated to conservative policies and currently is very aligned with the former Trump administration and its policies and the policy ideas of President Trump. It's a much newer group, however, though. It was only founded in late 2020, and it differs from Heritage in that it's much smaller and far lower profile. But when you boil down to its policy ideas, it's lined up in a lot of ways exactly the way you would see Heritage and its Project 2025.
And where they differ also is sort of, you know, obviously in the personnel and their relationship with the former administration of Donald Trump. The AFPI, as it's sometimes referred to, is staffed by many former Trump administration staffers and has sort of a sole focus on satisfying the policy agenda of the former president. That's been key, in some ways, I think, to the institute's success because it is so closely aligned to president - former President Trump's ideas and so in tune with the way he thinks a government should be run.
DAVIES: OK. Now, you write that late this summer, the America First Policy Institute held training sessions in Washington to tell people how to work in a second Trump administration - people who want to work in them. What did you learn about what kind of information was offered in these trainings?
BENSINGER: Yeah, so I talked to some people who attended these trainings, and I talked to people who knew about them and was shared on some of the materials that were presented to people. And in brief, kind of around, I would say, early August, people started receiving invites to go to these sessions. And they were offered as one- or three-day sessions at the America First Policy Institute offices in Washington, which is on Pennsylvania Avenue - right? - very close to the mall. They would come and basically be in these kind of workshop roundtable settings, where they would talk to primarily former Trump administration officials about what it would be like to work in a second Trump administration.
They talked about how to effectively do their jobs, how to deal with the media, how to deal with the different kinds of regulations that are there, but particularly the emphasis was on the idea that there needed to be massive reform in the civil service. So a huge focus of this was the idea that a incoming Republican administration would from the outset be at odds with the 2.3 million people who work in the federal government as career employees, and that their job would be to kind of override the collective will of all these employees and impose the agenda of the administration on the entire sort of federal bureaucracy. The overriding message was that these are the - essentially the enemies located inside the federal government, and this is what you would - theoretically, as an appointee or other employee of a new administration - would have to do to confront these people and overcome any resistance they have to the agenda that you'd be seeking.
So all that was couched in language that we've become somewhat familiar with. This is, you know, framed as the swamp and, you know, what we might have thought - sometimes in the past, the kind of swamp that former President Trump would talk about as lobbyists and that sort of thing. In this case, it's now recentered entirely on what they think of as kind of extreme leftist, as they call it, federal bureaucrats who have an anti-conservative left-wing agenda. That's how it's framed, and that's the kind of instruction - some might call it indoctrination - that they were handing out in these sessions.
And the people who attended them got a chance to interact with these different government officials. Some of the people who attended them, by the way, are former Trump administration officials themselves. And some of them, I understand, were, in fact, authors of chapters of the well-known, perhaps notorious Project 2025 policy agenda book, which was an interesting detail that some of the people who had worked on the 2025 book actually had been invited to attend these sessions.
DAVIES: So did you hear stories about how federal bureaucrats had resisted the Trump agenda in the first term?
BENSINGER: When you talk to people who worked in the first Trump administration, who are Republicans who were familiar with that world, there is a general feeling that any of the policy goals that were not reached in the first term, any of the sort of difficulties had to do with personnel problems and that personnel problems sort of have two flavors. One would be personnel that were appointed by former President Trump that in their heart were not loyal enough to him and didn't do exactly what he wanted them to do. And the second category are these career federal government employees, who in the State Department or the Department of Agriculture or all the other federal agencies are not loyal to the president, they believe, but instead are loyal to their jobs or to what they believe is a left-wing agenda.
So there are stories about specific kinds of legislation that either never passed or was never successful, about executive orders that were never carried out because allegedly either some Trump appointee refused to carry out the orders or - much more frequently in the rubric of the America First Policy Institute - because people hid - sort of buried deep in the cogs of the machine kind of buried these things or threw sand in the gears and made it impossible to ever come true. It can seem like dry stuff, but the general thinking is that these people gummed up the works. And if it weren't for these two categories of opposition to the former president, not only would we have a radically different sort of country at this point, but also probably he never would have lost reelection in 2020.
DAVIES: The America First Policy Institute has a policy book called the "America First Agenda." One of the things, as I understand it, that it calls for is the elimination of civil service protection for government employees. Now, this goes back decades. It's designed to ensure that people who are experts in their field in the government are not subject to political whims, that they can't be punished for not engaging in political work and that they must do their work fairly and, you know, objectively. What exactly does the "America First Agenda" say about this? How does it accomplish it? What is it intended to do?
BENSINGER: Well, the federal government is a gigantic employer, right? I mean, it sort of has two divisions, I guess, we could think of. We have the civil service and we have the military service, and they're, I think, roughly equivalent in size. It's a total of just over 4 million people who take paychecks from the federal government. And, you know, we think of the three branches of government - we think of the executive, and we think of the legislative, and we think of judicial - by far the largest would be the executive, which encompasses not just the White House, which is what we think about, but an enormous number of agencies that touch almost all of our lives pretty much every day, right?
DAVIES: What exactly does the "America First Agenda" say about this?
BENSINGER: So the America First Policy Institute - perhaps its most aggressive idea for a policy in a new Republican administration is this concept of turning federal career employees into at-will hires. What that means is that they would lose a lot of the protections, if not all the protections that they have, that they enjoy, that are supposed to shield them from political influence, that are supposed to protect them and allow them to do their job in a way that is not political, that is supposed to be neutral and unbiased. Currently, most federal employees, of which there are several million, are unionized, and it's quite an elaborate process to discipline and dismiss them. And if the institute had its way, if it gets this through, all of these would instantly be the same as an employee, for example, at a Walmart or at a private institution, where they don't have a contract. They don't have a union to protect them, and they can be dismissed basically for any reason.
In fact, the policy book by America First Policy Institute calls for a summary dismissal, quote, "without appeal" - without the chance to appeal for it. They would simply have to give someone notice in writing that they were no longer wanted in the administration. And as long as it's for nondiscriminatory reasons - that is to say they couldn't fire them for their race or their religion or their ethnicity or their gender - as long as it doesn't fall underneath that umbrella, they could fire them for any reason. It doesn't have to be something sort of defensible in court. They could say, well, you believe, for example, in climate change. You said so, and we as an administration do not share that view, therefore we don't want you here anymore. You're gone. Or someone could have a concept about what clean air is supposed to be and how many particles of one contaminant or another should be in the air. And if that doesn't jibe with what possible Trump administration would want, then the America First Policy Institute would say that those people should be summarily fired.
DAVIES: Right. Now, this would be a huge change for career civil servants, career government employees. Can a president do that on his or her own? I mean, doesn't that require congressional action?
BENSINGER: We don't know. I mean, you would think it would require that. I think this would be the sort of thing that would be passed via executive order most likely unless - one could also imagine a situation where if President Trump not only wins office but also gains control of both Houses of Congress - we've seen the current composition of the Republican Congress is pretty ready to do what the president is asking for. And so it's not hard to imagine that situation, having laws passed that would fundamentally change the composition of the federal civil service. But I think also the president and his people - and particularly the America First Policy Institute - believe that they could do this via executive order. Almost certainly that would lead to lawsuits, and almost certainly that would very quickly - or maybe not so quickly - but would wind its way to the Supreme Court, which, as we've seen in lots of other rulings over the last couple of years, with a 6-3 Republican-leading majority tends to be extremely sympathetic to the agenda of former President Trump.
So I think there's a feeling of optimism among the people advising the president on a possible next administration that this is something that's achievable. I think it's worth adding that it would be hard to imagine the degree of chaos this would cause. And people who call themselves nonpartisan, who believe, you know, truly that they just want to be patriotic and protect the country, are very concerned about what this would mean for things like national security. Because there are a lot of people in the government working in these kinds of civil service jobs who are charged with protecting the country. And there's a fear that this kind of thing could lead to a lot of people leaving or getting fired and could potentially put the country at least temporarily at risk.
DAVIES: We need to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Ken Bensinger. He's a political reporter for The New York Times. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Ken Bensinger. He is a political reporter for The New York Times, who's written recently about some little-known players making plans to influence a second term in the Trump White House should Trump win election.
I guess what's interesting about this to me is - I mean, having covered government for a while - is when a new executive has a policy agenda, and you say, we got to do this. And the staff that you tell to do this know that there's a whole raft of existing regulations that the specific initiative doesn't really conform to, and you'd have to change those regulations, and there's a process for that or that there have been court decisions which say, you can't do what you think you want to do simply by ordering it. Did you hear discussion about that, about maybe it isn't just the people; maybe we were making plans and orders that didn't conform to the existing structure and rules?
BENSINGER: What you're really talking about is sort of different philosophical understandings of how government is supposed to work and maybe a very stubborn feeling among those around President Trump that everything that he wants - or that the people close to him want - just has to happen regardless of what existing laws or judicial precedents are out there. It's the feeling that these things just have to happen because you have a will for them to happen, and never mind sort of the details. And we certainly all remember examples from the Trump administration of times when the actual facts seemed irrelevant to people speaking for the administration. Famously, when, for example, President Trump took out the Sharpie to extend the path of a hurricane to fit the version of events that he wanted to be told, I think that's a - kind of a great metaphor for that kind of thinking. You know, the NOAA - the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - says, this is where the hurricane is going to go, and Trump just takes a Sharpie and says, well, it's going to go over here, too.
And I think that kind of ethos applied also to understanding of everything down to, like, ag policy or to, you know, the administration of hydroelectric dams or whatever you can imagine that the federal government does. The feeling is that never mind sort of the rules; we're just going to do it. And when you think about what the plan, the ethos would be for a potential second administration, it basically involves bulldozing through a lot of that stuff, ignoring precedent and just sort of - to use a overused metaphor, like a bull in a China shop and letting the pieces, you know, figure themselves out later.
I think there is an additional feeling, which is that these things, these regulations, these rules - all this stuff - are unnecessary. And if you actually poked at them, you would discover that they are only getting in the way and don't actually help with the administration of the country. There's certainly plenty of people, Dave, that would very strongly disagree with that and would cover their eyes in horror at the thought that the entire government could grind to a halt. But that's not the belief at the core of those who are trying to guide a second Trump administration. They believe that there is a lot of rot and waste and intransigence, and they want that out.
DAVIES: So the America First Policy Institute gets rolling, and it does what it does, and the Heritage Foundation's been doing what it does. Has Trump embraced the America First initiative? Does he favorite over Heritage? What kind of relationship has there been?
BENSINGER: From the outset, this group makes it very clear that they want to ingratiate themselves to former President Trump. So it's notable that their very first fundraising gala in late 2021 is held at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump's private club in Florida. He's the keynote speaker at that event. And indeed, they would continue to have their galas every year since then at Mar-a-Lago, which is, among other things, a way to keep present in his mind and also, frankly, to give him some money. When - you don't get to have a gala at Mar-a-Lago for free. You pay rent.
And my colleague, David Fahrenthold, and I looked a bit into this and saw that they paid considerable amounts of money to the club for the right to have these events there. Trump responded and very early on seemed to have given his blessing to the America First Policy Institute. One of his outside fundraising groups gave a million dollars to the organization in its first year, and he has spoken at a number of events and hosted other kinds of fundraisers to raise money for them. So sort of very early on, he made it clear that he liked this group and was supportive of them.
There is one caveat, though, which is that he, late last year, began to express some frustration with the group because he felt, as he sometimes does, that these groups were essentially taking money from him. This is a recurring theme. He feels that people - if people raise money on things that are linked to him, that that money should go to him or to his different processes, and he decided that the term America First, which the group had taken, was kind of his term and that they were - when they raised a dollar, it was dollar that was rightfully his. So that created a little bit of a tension point between the two groups because Trump somehow felt that what they did were really his efforts. They seem to have wrinkled that out though, and I think the way they've done that is to - when he said be quiet, they have been pretty quiet.
DAVIES: You're right that the America First Policy Institute has already drafted nearly 300 executive orders ready for Trump to sign. I don't know if he saw them, but their policy agenda does include some distinct policy proposals. You want to share a few with us?
BENSINGER: Yeah. So probably the most important policy proposal by the America First Policy Institute is about changing civil service and how it works. But I think in a lot of other areas, they have ideas as well. The institute is very pro-petroleum, and part of its agenda is encouraging more drilling and exploration on federal lands. They want to open up new portions of federal lands for exploration. They also want to create a fast-track system for approving existing and new permits requesting permission to drill and pump oil out of the ground and natural gas out of the ground. They also, on that point, want to continue building the Keystone pipeline, which is something that President Biden halted. So that's one area.
Another, for example, on reproductive rights and abortion - they want to change the way that women could get and seek abortions. They would want mandates requiring that every woman, by law, have supervised ultrasound before having an abortion, including what are called chemical or medication abortions. So they would require an ultrasound and a waiting period after the ultrasound before being able to seek the abortion. On that same track, they want to cut off federal funding to groups like Planned Parenthood that provide a range of health services far beyond just abortion.
Gun control's another area. They are against red flag laws. Red flag laws are laws that are designed to allow state authorities and other kinds of authorities to potentially deny or restrict gun ownership for people with certain kinds of mental health issues or legal issues that make them a high-risk candidate for owning firearms. They've also indicated they would like to see reciprocity among all 50 states for things like concealed carry laws. So even though concealed carry is, in some states, extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get. They would like to see a regime in which, if you could get it in a state where it's relatively easy to get a concealed permit license that would be all you would need to carry that weapon in a concealed manner in all 50 states.
And, you know, there's a range of other kinds of policies - it's pretty sweeping - tackling sort of all four corners of what we think of the responsibilities of government, from health care to foreign policy to economic policy to, you know, even agricultural policy. So it's a pretty thoroughly well-thought-out plan. I should add that the American First Policy Institute's policy book is kind of a slim volume compared to the much more famous one from the Heritage Foundation, the Project 2025 book, and it does not get into the granular detail. Nonetheless, it does cover a significant amount of ground.
DAVIES: Ken Bensinger is a political reporter for The New York Times. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies. And this is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. My guest is New York Times political reporter Ken Bensinger. He's written lately about the America First Policy Institute, a little-known group of Donald Trump supporters who stand to exert considerable influence over a Trump administration should he win the election. The group is distinct from the Heritage Foundation, which produced the controversial Plan 2025. Bensinger has also reported on the Trump campaign's refusal to sign agreements set in federal law to start the presidential transition process, a posture that could exempt the Trump team from ethics rules, fundraising restrictions and disclosure requirements. We recorded our conversation yesterday.
It's interesting, though, the America First Policy Institute has that phrase, America first, in its name, which was, I believe, the name of the movement championed by Charles Lindbergh back in the '30s to keep the United States out of World War II, and which was also associated, to some extent, with pro-Nazi sentiments in the United States. Do you know if the folks behind this are aware of that or feel any need to distance themselves from that movement?
BENSINGER: I think it would beggar belief to think that people involved in Trump's agenda and the people close to him are blind to that history of that phrase. We saw it, in this past week, that there was a big Trump rally in Madison Square Garden in New York. Well, there's an incredible amount of symbolism there. And that's, of course, because notoriously, there was a huge rally for fascists in New York City in 1939 in Madison Square Garden, where you saw a big crowd of people doing Nazi salutes. And you saw, on stage, a giant illuminated image of George Washington flanked by two swastikas. It doesn't seem like an accident that the Trump administration decided to do its own event at MSG. People were going to obviously draw those connections.
There's another event that comes to mind that's kind of like that, which is that one of the first rallies that Trump held in his campaign when he began this current campaign season was in Texas, at the same site of the famous standoff between federal law enforcement and the Branch Davidians. He chose to have his first rally there in Texas on, I believe, the exact same day as that ended up in disaster, where the building burned to the ground and many people were killed. It's become sort of a signal moment on the right. So the people around Trump are very sensitive to the symbolic meaning of these kinds of things, and I don't think it's an accident that they adopted that term.
America First comes to represent a very, I think, nativist kind of attitude that's at odds with what we think of as traditional conservatism. But traditional conservatism is kind of depasse these days. What's trendy on the right is this America First idea that we should not be involved in foreign things, that we shouldn't send our money overseas, that we should try to close the borders and keep America for itself, and never mind the rest of the world. So I think while Trump administration people push back at any ideas that they're fascist and hate that term - understandably - they do share a lot of the ideas that we saw so many years ago.
DAVIES: You know, it's worth remembering that when details of Project 2025, produced by the Heritage Foundation, became public and people began criticizing it, Donald Trump, you know, disowned it. You know, he said he didn't know what it was, hadn't really read it, what - didn't agree with it at all. It sounds as if this group, the America First Policy Institute, which has maybe a better connection to The Trump Organization, has a lot of the same ideas.
BENSINGER: Yeah. There's a lot of overlap. I would probably agree with people who say that Project 2025, in some areas, has an even more ambitious agenda. It's probably, in a couple points, more sweeping and more aggressive, but there is a huge amount of overlap in terms of their policy goals. And that's not a surprise, because they're both sort of modeled after what was seen as Trump's agenda in his first administration. And that's kind of the starting point and that the things that they have grew out of those ideas. But where America First Policy Institute, I think, really stands out compared to Project 2025 is in being low-profile. They made a choice well over a year ago to keep quiet, to motor along without making a lot of noise and not drawing attention to themselves. And that's been, I think, really critical to their success.
I think Project 2025 thought that it wanted the whole world to sort of know what its agenda was and draw as much attention to it as possible and hold all kinds of high-profile events to promote that. And that turned out to be a strategic mistake. President Trump - he generally likes to be the center of the show and likes to be the one seen to be driving the bus and takes not particularly kindly to groups that want a bit of that spotlight. And whether fairly or not, he began to feel, it seems, that Project 2025 was getting too much spotlight, was making too much noise and was becoming kind of an annoying sort of gnat flying in his ear and distracting him from what he wanted to do. America First Policy Institute was quieter. And as a result, it seems like they've sort of coasted into a spot that perhaps could have been occupied by Project 2025 until a few months ago.
I think it's important to note that the political season and, to some degree, the Democratic Party also played a role in that, which is that Trump's desire to have Project 2025 and other groups keep relatively quiet, you know, kind of was prescient, because when Project 2025 started making noise, the Democrats picked up on it. And they have made Project 2025 a cornerstone of their messaging about the race and have made extreme efforts, I would say, very strong efforts, to try to tie President Trump to it over and over - again, which is why he has protested that he knows nothing about it.
Well, it's bit ludicrous to imagine he knows nothing about it. There's, you know, endless numbers of ties between him and people who have worked on Project 2025 and photographs of him with the head of Heritage and all of this stuff. It makes it very clear he has a connection. But what he's really saying is, I no longer want anything to do with it. And in his kind of rhetoric, he'll say, I never heard of it, because that's kind of his way of saying, I wash my hands of this thing. And to this day, the Democratic Party continues to hammer Trump on Project 2025. If you turn on the television, whether you're in a swing state or not right now, you're going to see ads from the Democratic Party and from political action committees supporting it that tie Trump to Project 2025. Meanwhile, no one is doing ads about the America First Policy Institute. No one's talking about this group that actually is basically involved in running the transition and creating the policy agenda for next term.
DAVIES: We need to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Ken Bensinger. He is a political reporter for The New York Times. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Ken Bensinger. He is a political reporter for The New York Times who's written recently about some little-known players making plans to influence a second term in the Trump White House, should Trump win election.
Now, there's also a formal transition process described in federal law. I didn't know this. There was a Presidential Transition Act passed in 1963, amended several times. And you've written about how the Trump campaign has really not engaged in the process that's defined in federal law. First of all, just in a general sense, what do these federal laws expect campaigns to do months before the election to prepare for a transition?
BENSINGER: The Presidential Transition Act, or sometimes in really wonky circles called the PTA, is a law that was originally created in the '60s, as you mentioned, because it dawned on people that this transition thing was very complicated and hard to do and needed people to be working on it ahead of time. And the goal was to set deadlines for doing certain things and, ultimately, to provide resources to transition teams so they could make it possible. And as the law stands now, the government offers all kinds of services to incoming administrations and to, actually, candidates before the election as well to try to guide that transition. And in exchange for that, it sets certain deadlines that they have to meet to get those services.
So the government will offer campaign's transition team office space, tech support, email servers, letterhead, that sort of thing, as well as money. And all they have to do to get that is to sign these memorandum of understanding to show that they're on board with the plan. And there are deadlines to sign these memoranda of - I believe, September 1 and October 1 are the two primary ones. And once you sign those, you get all this access. It's really important also that you sign them because you need to be able to begin communicating with the different agencies, getting national security briefings, that sort of thing. And all that is contingent upon signing these memoranda.
The Kamala Harris transition has duly signed all the necessary paperwork and has shown itself ready to comply with the law, even though, of course, it's sort of a hybrid situation because the - Kamala Harris is currently a part of the administration, so she's already sort of half - at least got one foot in that game. But she has signed it and is playing along. The Trump transition has taken a completely different tack. They have refused to sign either of the memoranda of understanding they're supposed to, and they have blown past both deadlines.
DAVIES: Now, I gather that doing that would require the campaign to adhere to certain ethical restrictions and fundraising limits, right?
BENSINGER: Yeah, that's right. When you sign these documents, you're agreeing to comply with certain things. And so one of them, for example, is you have to agree to disclose how much money you raise for the transition project and who is giving you the money. And you have to agree to a limit of no more than $5,000 of donations per donor. Transition fundraising is just kind of a funny little place in the world of fund raising. It is not - unlike campaign contributions or presidential inauguration fundraising, it is not regulated by the Federal Elections Commission. In fact, the only place that regulates it is the General Services Administration, which puts these limits on it if you sign the document.
But in a way that no one anticipated, the Trump transition is refusing to sign the document that would require it to comply with that. And what that means and what people close to the transition have told me is that they feel they can raise as much money as they want from individuals and that they never have to share who gave them money. And I should add that, really, I misspoke when I said individuals because it could also be from organization, institutions, private companies and, in fact, foreign entities. It is truly a dark pool of money that if the incoming Trump administration doesn't sign it, no one will ever - basically ever know how much money came in and who it came from. So that's one piece.
The other piece is the ethics code. In order to get access to government agencies and to get national security clearance and all that sort of thing, incoming transition teams are required to create an ethics code that they write and that they sign and they show to the current White House to make sure it conforms with federal law about what the ethics code should say. And that's supposed to prevent conflicts of interest. It's supposed to make sure that when people are getting access to these federal agencies, they don't trade off the information they're being shown; they don't use that for personal gain; they don't, you know, share that with lobbyists or use that for lobbying purposes of their own. You can sort of imagine what it would be like if someone opens all the secret books of every federal agency and all the secret information and protected information they contain, how people who are not scrupulous could trade off that information.
Well, Trump transition has actually developed its own ethics code, but it has not been accepted or not been submitted in a way that is acceptable to the current administration and has not been posted as law online, as law requires. Ethics experts I've talked to have said that, in part, that might be because it doesn't comply with the law. The ethics code proposed by Trump's transition simply falls short of what is required in terms of ethical safeguards and that it is very inadequate in terms of protecting against conflicts of interest.
DAVIES: Wow. So what does the Trump campaign have to say about this?
BENSINGER: So the Trump transition has issued a statement. They gave me a statement. I think they gave it to others as well. But they fully intend to sign the memorandums of understanding and that they intend to get the ethics code through and that they intend to get access to all the agencies and to do what's necessary to make sure there's a smooth transition. But that was weeks and weeks ago, and they still haven't signed anything. Sources inside the federal government tell me that they have really tried hard to come to an agreement with the Trump transition to get them to sign what's required and that it's basically gotten them almost nowhere.
And some people think that the - what the strategy might be from the Trump transition is to do nothing until after the election. If they lose, well, perhaps it's moot. And if they win their leverage over the Biden administration, which would be outgoing at that point, would be huge because, essentially, you can imagine, a giant game of chicken, where the incoming Trump administration would say, look, if you care about national security and you care about a smooth transition so that the country is safe, you're going to find a way to play ball with us, and dare them to refuse to accept whatever terms that the incoming Trump administration desires. Essentially, we're going to give you a watered-down ethics code, and you can take it or leave it.
DAVIES: From what you're saying, it sounds as if this agreement is not set, then the Trump team could raise money in any amounts from large donors, from corporations, even foreign entities, and not have to report it. I mean, that's certainly very different from campaign finance rules. What was the experience when Trump won the first time? The federal law was in place then, too. What happened then?
BENSINGER: So in 2016, the Trump campaign hired Chris Christie to run its transition, the former governor of New Jersey. And by all accounts, it was a very well-run transition up until Election Day of 2016, when Trump won. And almost immediately, Trump fired Chris Christie and brought in a new transition regime. And that transition regime had a very different concept of what transition was supposed to be and immediately began sort of discarding all the work that had been done by Christie and the people working with him. And interestingly, that was a point of tension. It was another one of those moments where Donald Trump thought that someone was raising money in his name and - which he often called stealing his money - and one of the reasons he was angry at Christie running the transition. Of course, Christie was raising the money because transitions are hard and complicated and do require a lot of staffing and travel and all that sort of expensive stuff and said that money was needed. But Trump saw it as his money and wanted Christie's hands off it.
One of the things that's important to know about transitions is that it's somewhat hard to raise money for a transition before the election, because who wants to give money for an uncertain bet? But it's quite easy to raise money for a transition after election because everyone wants to curry favor with the incoming administration - just the same way we see with inauguration funds. But inauguration funds require a lot more disclosure. And this stuff, even when they comply with the law, only requires a notation of how much money the individual is donating in and has that $5,000 cap. You can imagine - if there's no cap and no disclosure, instead of a $5,000 donation, you could imagine a lobbyist, for example, giving $20 million. Why not, if that'll buy you access and favor with the president?
And there is very little guidance on how the money is supposed to be spent. In theory, it's supposed to be spent on the transition, but no one really knows if there's any limits on how the money can be spent or where it could go. The transition is set up as a 501(c)(4) charity, which is a politically oriented nonprofit organization under IRS rules. And for example, that money instead could be spent on advocating for other candidates. It could be spent to pay off debts of campaigns. There's all kinds of other ways that money could be spent that have nothing to do with presidential transition.
DAVIES: One other thing that was an issue in the Trump administration from time to time were background checks. That's part of the transition process - right? - to vet people that are going to have access to important information. How's that working with the Trump campaign?
BENSINGER: Well, the Trump transition, of course, is not participating in the formal transition process yet. At some point, they're going to have to do something. They're going to have to get access to government agencies and to get national security briefings, and to do that, they need to get security clearance. And traditionally, the way that's done is with FBI investigations of each person. The FBI vets candidates and makes sure they don't have conflicts of interest or other problems that should prevent them from getting security clearance.
But my colleagues, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, recently discovered that people in - close to Trump are proposing a new system that would essentially cut the FBI out of the process and instead have sort of private firms, law firms or security firms do the vetting for them and allow that process to be sufficient to gain national security clearance. And this might reflect some of the problems that we saw in the first Trump administration, where people close to the president had problems getting security clearance because of potential conflicts or because of their past behavior. And it slowed things down and got in the way of what President Trump wanted.
And under this system, essentially the Trump team would call the shots on who gets national security clearance. And people who observe that are extremely worried about that, because they think it could set the table for really malign actors or people with real conflicts and problems to get access to the most closely guarded secrets in the government and truly could put the country at risk and, you know, even essentially sell those positions to the highest bidder through kind of quid pro quo arrangements. So it is a very concerning thing. I want to be clear. This has not been approved. This has not been formally proposed by the Trump transition or by Donald Trump. But it is clear that people close to him are whispering in his ear that this would be a good idea.
DAVIES: Well, Ken Bensinger, thanks so much for speaking with us.
BENSINGER: Oh, thank you so much for having me, Dave.
DAVIES: Ken Bensinger is a political reporter for The New York Times. Coming up, John Powers reviews the new film "A Real Pain," a comic drama starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF DJANGO REINHARDT'S "I'LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS")
https://www.npr.org/2024/10/30/g-s1-30917/how-a-little-known-organization-is-poised-to-shape-a-second-trump-administration
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