The General Services Administration (GSA) is an independent agency of the United States government established in 1949 to help manage and support the basic functioning of federal agencies. GSA supplies products and communications for U.S. government offices, provides transportation and office space to federal employees, and develops government-wide cost-minimizing policies and other management tasks.
Robin Colleen Carnahan is an American businesswoman, lawyer, and politician, who previously served as the Missouri Secretary of State and currently serves as the Administrator of General Services in the Biden administration. She is the daughter of Missouri politicians Mel and Jean Carnahan. In 2010, she was the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate to replace retiring Republican Senator Kit Bond. She was then a senior advisor at the global strategy firm Albright Stonebridge Group. In 2013, Carnahan was named a fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. In February 2016, she joined the General Services Administration as the director of the state and local practice at 18F, a role she held until January 2020. She then became a fellow at the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation at Georgetown University.
In the United States, a presidential transition is the process during which the president-elect of the United States prepares to take over the administration of the federal government of the United States from the incumbent president. Though planning for transition by a non-incumbent candidate can start at any time before a presidential election and in the days following, the transition formally starts when the General Services Administration (GSA) declares an “apparent winner” of the election, thereby releasing the funds appropriated by Congress for the transition, and continues until inauguration day, when the president-elect takes the oath of office, at which point the powers, immunities, and responsibilities of the presidency are legally transferred to the new president.
The president-elect of the United States is the candidate who has presumptively won the United States presidential election and is awaiting inauguration to become the president. There is no explicit indication in the U.S. Constitution as to when that person actually becomes president-elect, although the Twentieth Amendment uses the term "president-elect", thus giving the term "president-elect" constitutional justification. It is assumed the Congressional certification of votes cast by the Electoral College of the United States – occurring after the third day of January following the swearing-in of the new Congress, per provisions of the Twelfth Amendment – unambiguously confirms the successful candidate as the official "president-elect" under the U.S. Constitution. As an unofficial term, president-elect has been used by the media since at least the latter half of the 19th century, and was in use by politicians since at least the 1790s. Politicians and the media have applied the term to the projected winner, even on election night, and very few who turned out to have lost have been referred to as such.
According to the United States Office of Government Ethics, a political appointee is "any employee who is appointed by the President, the Vice President, or agency head". As of 2016, there were around 4,000 political appointment positions which an incoming administration needs to review, and fill or confirm, of which about 1,200 require Senate confirmation. The White House Presidential Personnel Office (PPO) is one of the offices most responsible for political appointees and for assessing candidates to work at or for the White House.
Sally Quillian Yates is an American lawyer. From 2010 to 2015, she was United States Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia. In 2015, she was appointed United States Deputy Attorney General by President Barack Obama. Following the inauguration of President Donald Trump and the departure of Attorney General Loretta Lynch on January 20, 2017, Yates served as Acting Attorney General for 10 days.
The 2020 United States presidential election was the 59th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 3, 2020. The Democratic ticket of former vice president Joe Biden and the junior U.S. senator from California Kamala Harris defeated the incumbent Republican president, Donald Trump, and vice president, Mike Pence. The election took place against the backdrop of the global COVID-19 pandemic and related recession. The election saw the highest voter turnout by percentage since 1900, with each of the two main tickets receiving more than 74 million votes, surpassing Barack Obama's record of 69.5 million votes from 2008. Biden received more than 81 million votes, the most votes ever cast for a candidate in a U.S. presidential election.
Seema Verma is a General Manager and Senior Vice President at Oracle Corporation. She is the former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in the Donald Trump administration. During her tenure, she was involved in efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, as well as reduce Medicaid benefits and increase restrictions on Medicaid. She was embroiled in ethics and legal controversies related to her use of taxpayer money while in office.
Dawn Wetzel Keefer is an American politician from Pennsylvania, currently representing the 92nd District in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.
During his term as president of the United States (2017–2021), Donald Trump and his administration repeatedly politicized science by pressuring or overriding health and science agencies to change their reporting and recommendations so as to conform to his policies and public comments. This was particularly true with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, but also included suppressing research on climate change and weakening or eliminating environmental regulations.
The following is a timeline of the presidency of Donald Trump during the fourth and last quarter of 2020, from October 1 to December 31, 2020. This is also during the final month of his presidency from January 1 to 20, 2021, when Trump left office. To navigate quarters, see timeline of the Donald Trump presidency.
The presidential transition of Joe Biden began on November 7, 2020, and ended on January 20, 2021. Unlike previous presidential transitions, which normally take place during the roughly 10-week period between the election in the first week of November and the inauguration on January 20, Biden's presidential transition was shortened somewhat because the General Services Administration under the outgoing Trump administration did not recognize Biden as the "apparent winner" until November 23.
Members of the United States Republican Party have reacted differently to Republican president Donald Trump's false claims about the 2020 United States presidential election, with many publicly supporting them, many remaining silent, and a few publicly denouncing them. Trump falsely claimed to have won the election, and made many false and unsubstantiated claims of election fraud. By December 11, 2020, 126 out of 196 Republican members of the House backed a lawsuit filed in the United States Supreme Court supported by nineteen Republican state attorneys general seeking to subvert the election and overturn the election results. The Trump campaign hired the Berkeley Research Group to investigate whether there had been voter fraud. The researchers found nothing, and the consultancy reported this to Trump and his chief of staff Mark Meadows on a conference call in the final days of the year, before the attack on the Capitol.
The following is a timeline of major events before, during, and after the 2020 United States presidential election, the 59th quadrennial United States presidential election, from November 2020 to January 2021. For prior events, see Timeline of the 2020 United States presidential election (2017–2019) and Timeline of the 2020 United States presidential election.
The Joe Biden administration pledged to pass government ethics reform. The Biden administration also pledged to pass legislation and enforce policies to enforce electoral reform, in response to the influence of special interests and gerrymandering in elections.
Katy Kale is an American government official, serving as the Deputy Administrator at U.S. General Services Administration; she served as the Acting Administrator of the General Services Administration in the Biden administration prior to Robin Carnahan's nomination and Senate confirmation as Administrator.
