Within hours of the Trump administration’s decision to stop blocking the process, representatives of the president-elect began coordinating the handover of power.
Teams from President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s transition began reaching out across Washington on Tuesday, freed for the first time to interact with their counterparts in the government after President Trump’s administration ended its two-week blockade of an orderly transfer of power. Mr. Trump authorized intelligence agencies on Tuesday to begin briefing Mr. Biden on classified information delivered in the President’s Daily Brief. Officials said the briefing would be scheduled soon, but did not provide details. Mr. Biden said he planned to be briefed “on a regular basis.” Transition officials said teams had made contact with every federal agency to begin setting up meetings. About 20 of those meetings took place on Tuesday, including at the Department of Homeland Security and the Education Department. Officials said the reception from the Trump administration was responsive and helpful. Mr. Trump had relented on Monday in his refusal to allow a formal transition to begin, while still refusing to concede defeat and vowing on Twitter on Tuesday morning that “our big lawsuit” will be filed soon and declaring “RIGGED ELECTION!” Within hours, Mr. Biden’s team moved to quickly make use of the 57 days left until the inauguration. Mr. Biden had warned that the holdup of the transition threatened national security by depriving his team of critical briefings and put the distribution of coronavirus vaccines at risk if his advisers could not work side by side with current health officials. In an interview with “NBC Nightly News” on Tuesday, Mr. Biden said he was pleased by the administration’s belated decision to let the transition proceed. “I think we’re going to not be so far behind the curve, as we thought we might be in the past,” Mr. Biden said. “And there’s a lot of immediate discussion, and I must say, the outreach has been sincere. There has not been begrudging so far. And I don’t expect it to be.” On Wall Street, the stock market surged on the news that a robust transition was set to begin, with the Dow Jones industrial average surpassing 30,000 for the first time. Investors appeared buoyed by Mr. Biden’s choice of Janet Yellen, a former chair of the Federal Reserve, to serve as Treasury secretary. Mr. Trump, in an appearance at the White House that lasted only about a minute, sought to take credit for the market’s rise. “The stock market’s just broken 30,000. Never been broken, that number,” Mr. Trump told reporters without taking questions. “That’s a sacred number,30,000. Nobody thought they’d ever see it,” he said, adding, “I just want to congratulate all the people within the administration that worked so hard.” The transition officially began on Monday evening, when Emily W.
