President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. put new pressure Wednesday on the Trump administration to authorize a presidential transition, telling a group of workers that the head of the General Services Administration could act now to give him access to federal resources to help plan his coronavirus response.
“The law says that the General Services Administration has a person who recognizes who the winner is,” Mr. Biden said. “And then they have to have access to all the data and information that the government possesses.”
“And it doesn’t require that there be an absolute winner. It says the ‘apparent’ winner. The ‘apparent’ winner,” Mr. Biden said.
Mr. Biden asked the small group gathered on a video call, which included nurses and a firefighter, to describe their experiences dealing with the virus, and he pledged to mount a major new effort to combat the pandemic. “We’re all ready to go and do an awful lot of work right now,” Mr. Biden said.
But he said his ability to plan was restricted by the delayed transition caused by President Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his victory and the refusal of Emily W. Murphy, the G.S.A. administrator, to sign the paperwork that would grant Mr. Biden’s transition team access to funds, equipment and government data.
Mr. Biden said he did not “have any budget for any of this” until he was sworn in or until Mr. Trump conceded defeat and began a transition. But he noted that he planned to work with state and local leaders on mask mandates.
Mr. Biden also complained that Senate Republicans had not agreed to the stimulus spending passed by the House earlier this year. (Senate Republicans offered their own scaled-back stimulus plan that failed to reach the 60-vote threshold necessary to advance the bill.)
“I’m hoping that the reason why my friends on the other side have not stepped up to do something is because of their fear of retribution from the president,” Mr. Biden said. “And hopefully when he’s gone, they’ll be more willing to do what they know should be done — has to be done — in order to save the communities they live in.”
“This is like going to war,” Mr. Biden added about fighting the pandemic. “You need a commander in chief.”
Mr. Biden also noted that, while deprived of access to federal experts and data, he had been immersing himself in the details of the pandemic since the spring, saying that he had been getting regular briefings for months “from some of the leading docs in the country.”
The Biden transition did not provide names and precise job descriptions of the people with whom Mr. Biden spoke.
— Michael Crowley The New York Times