The Trump administration’s deviation from some norms as it transitioned into the White House earlier this year is now raising questions about the future of presidential transition planning.

Reflecting on the most recent White House transition, the Partnership for Public Service’s Center for Presidential Transition argued in a new report that there is a need for bigger reforms in the transition process, particularly when it comes to transparency and security.

In its report, the Partnership, a non-profit organization that advocates for non-partisan improvements to the federal government, recommended adding more safeguards into the transition process — such as strengthening security protocols, further clarifying the transition rules, and streamlining paperwork to speed up transition planning. It also suggested amending the overarching Presidential Transition Act to incentivize transition teams to comply with standard practices.

Because transitions only occur once every four or eight years, the level of expertise around transition planning is already thin. But the Partnership said the losses to the federal workforce this year put the success of future presidential transitions at further risk.

“Such guardrails will be particularly essential to ensure a smooth transition in 2028 because of the vast amounts of expertise being lost from government as a result of this administration’s reductions of the federal workforce,” the Partnership wrote.

During the most recent presidential transition period, Trump’s approach was unlike any prior incoming administration — including his own transition into his first term in 2016.

Leading into his second term, Trump’s transition team skirted longstanding norms by refusing to sign a standard agreement with the General Services Administration, which outlines support services such as access to office space, IT equipment and federal staff. The GSA agreement also triggers reporting requirements and limits how much money transition teams can fundraise.

By subverting standard transition procedures and timelines, the Partnership said Trump’s team created security risks and caused significant planning delays.

“This inhibited the team’s ability to prepare essential staff and enabled them to avoid disclosing transition donors, agency review team members and the use of their transition funding,” the Partnership wrote in its report.

Jenny Mattingley, vice president of government affairs at the Partnership, said the Trump transition team’s divergence from the norms signals a larger shift for the future of presidential transition planning.

“The assumption had been that the candidate would want to follow these guidelines around security clearance, find their nominees for positions, bring in transition teams — but we didn’t see that as much during this transition,” Mattingley said in a recent interview with Federal News Network. “And during the course of the last 10 or 11 months, we’ve also seen some of the things that we thought were norms, and the ways of doing business, not play out.”

During the transition process, Trump’s team also delayed signing standard agreements to define how the incoming administration would access agencies after the election, and another agreement on security clearance requests for transition team members who needed to access classified information.

Mattingley said while the transparency in transition planning is critical, teams may want to use their own IT systems and office space, rather than accepting the government’s options. But because the GSA agreement is tied to other financial and reporting requirements, the public loses out on information about the transition process when it’s not signed, she explained.

“By not accepting those services, all of a sudden, those transparency mechanisms don’t happen,” Mattingley said. “We’re certainly seeing a changeover in those particular types of processes.”

A solution, according to the Partnership’s report, may involve changing the structure of the agency agreements, and adding updates to the Presidential Transition Act — the law that sets most standards for presidential transition planning.

Specifically, the Partnership recommended separating the agreements on office space, equipment and IT systems, splitting those from agreements on financial and ethical reporting requirements. The change would compel teams to provide transparency on their transition planning while not requiring their use of government resources or office space.

Technology modernization and the changing nature of the workplace are creating further questions around what types of resources transition teams truly need from agencies.

“Transition officials still say a physical location supports important collaboration, as well as communication with agency and congressional officials,” the Partnership wrote. “But as demonstrated by the significant transition work done virtually in 2020 and 2024, widespread embrace of hybrid work means that physical space matters less than it once did.”

The Partnership suggested eliminating the requirement for GSA-provided office space — which is funded by taxpayers, even if unused — and instead offering some level of funding for transition teams to use their preferred office space.

“Many things that we do in government were built up around norms, just ways of doing business that weren’t actually statutory,” Mattingley said. “But once norms are broken, my biggest concern is that it’s really hard to go back to adhering to a norm, unless we put a new statute, rule or some sort of guardrail in place.”

“I do think we’re going to have to watch out for how campaigns and candidates think about approaching the transition going forward,” she added.

The post Trump’s departure from presidential transition norms highlights need for reform first appeared on Federal News Network.

Despite the Trump administration scrapping this year’s signature survey for assessing trends in the federal workforce, a new opportunity has emerged for federal employees to make their voices heard.

The Partnership for Public Service is launching its own version of the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, which it is calling the Public Service Viewpoint Survey. The assessment seeks to fill what would otherwise be a gap in federal workforce data, after the Office of Personnel Management’s decision to cancel FEVS for 2025.

Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, said creating an alternative survey for federal employees to take this year is “not the first choice, but the necessary choice.”

“The best choice would be for the government to continue to do what the law requires and what it has done for many years in a row,” Stier said in an interview with Federal News Network.

Surveying federal employees and collecting data is especially crucial for 2025, Stier said, due to the major changes the Trump administration has made to the federal workforce.

“If the data were important in prior years, it’s even more vital today when so much disruption and turmoil is occurring,” Stier said, adding that without the data, “it’s not just flying blind — it’s flying blind in a hurricane.”

An OPM spokesperson declined to comment.

It’s the first time that the Partnership for Public Service, which advocates for non-partisan improvements to the federal government, has taken on this type of project. Though the non-profit hopes its survey will reach federal employees broadly across agencies, there will be some limitations in the survey’s distribution since it is external rather than government-run.

“We are not going to in any way, shape or form completely replicate or replace what the federal government has way more resources and access to be able to do,” Stier said.

When conducting FEVS each year, OPM can reach federal employees across all agencies in the executive branch more directly. That makes it easier to administer a governmentwide survey — and by extension, receive a stronger level of response from employees across virtually all agencies and subcomponents.

Without that same level of reach, the Partnership is instead working with various federal unions and employee organizations, who will promote the survey to their members on the Partnership’s behalf. Michelle Amante, the Partnership’s senior vice president of government programs, said the organization is trying to be intentional in its partnerships to get as wide a reach as possible, and to try to avoid gaps in the data.

“We’ll be looking at responses as they come in,” Amante told Federal News Network. “We’ll continue to work with our partners to try to get the word out where we see any big voids.”

Earlier in the year, OPM initially delayed the FEVS timeline due to what it said were more “urgent” changes for the federal workforce from the Trump administration. The subsequent decision in August to fully cancel the survey, first reported by Federal News Network, marks the first time that OPM will not run the FEVS since the annual survey began over 20 years ago.

OPM said agencies could still choose to survey their employees on their own this year, but any plans to do so would have to be run by OPM first. So far, most agencies do not appear to be moving forward with survey plans, raising questions about a legal obligation to survey federal employees.

In 2004, Congress began requiring all executive branch agencies to begin surveying their employees annually. Federal regulations mandate that agencies ask 16 specific questions to their employees, once per year, on agency leadership, employee satisfaction, the federal workplace, opportunities for professional development, contributions to agency mission and recognition of employees.

OPM is not required by statute to administer a governmentwide survey, but back in 2004, the agency opted to move forward with creating FEVS. Over time, agencies began to rely more heavily on FEVS, with relatively few conducting their own employee surveys and the vast majority simply using FEVS to fulfill the legal obligations. Despite the requirements, there are no clear repercussions for agencies that don’t conduct a survey.

“It’s really important to have those years of data to evaluate trends,” said Rob Shriver, managing director of the Civil Service Strong program at Democracy Forward, and former acting director of OPM. “I just can’t imagine, as somebody who’s led a federal agency, not having that information from my workforce.”

The Partnership’s survey will pull many of its questions from past years of FEVS. There will be several added questions, including some on artificial intelligence, as well as comparing year-to-year employee performance and service delivery.

But overall, the survey’s length will be considerably shorter than FEVS. While OPM’s 2024 survey had 90 core questions, the Partnership’s “Public Service Viewpoint Survey” will have just 23. The choice to run a shorter survey was intentional.

“In the past, the survey was just too long,” Amante said. “It’s been a barrier for many federal employees.”

The Partnership is also putting several precautions in place to protect federal employees’ identities and keep their responses anonymous. Federal employees will only receive an invitation to take the survey through their personal emails, rather than their government emails. The Partnership will also not send the survey directly to employees — instead, it’s collaborating with unions and employee organizations to distribute the survey to their members.

“We are doing everything we can to make it safe for federal employees to participate — we understand this is a difficult environment,” Stier said. “We have lots of safety protocols to make sure that federal employees can aggregate their voice, so that leaders can make better choices and the public can have a better understanding about what’s happening in our government.”

The American Federation of Government employees is one of several unions collaborating with the Partnership on the effort.

“We hope this can fill in a real gap and give folks information they need to make good decisions that will be beneficial to federal employees,” Andrew Huddleston, AFGE’s advocacy department director, said in an interview. “We’ve been keeping track of this data for many years. Interruptions to that dataset are deleterious to understanding how different workplace policies, different government policies, impact the federal workforce.”

In addition to filling a data void, the Partnership also plans to use the results of its survey to help determine the next round of the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings. The annual series is one of the Partnership’s most popular programs, and one of the first initiatives the non-profit launched after it was founded in 2001.

The survey opens on Monday and will be out in the field until Dec. 19 at midnight. The topline results are expected to be released in early 2026. Once the results are in, the Partnership plans to share its findings and analysis with OPM, as well as leaders and managers across all agencies.

“It’s an opportunity for us to hear their voice — and to use that data and hopefully make data-driven public policy decisions,” Amante said. “We are very hopeful that federal agencies will partner with us when we have the data, and that we can help inform better decisions when it comes to managing the federal workforce.”

The post Amid data gap, an alternative to FEVS emerges for federal employees first appeared on Federal News Network.