Congress tried to fix presidential transitions. Trump is testing the changes.

After Donald Trump refused to concede the 2020 election, Congress moved to fend off a repeat of the 20 days of chaos that had obstructed the executive branch handover to Joe Biden.

But the first test of one little-known change to the presidential transition process is now causing anxiety among government officials as Trump is potentially poised to return to power.

If there’s no apparent winner within five days of the election, every federal agency will be required on Nov. 11 to open its doors to both Trump’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaigns so they can simultaneously begin the sprint to install a new administration. Each department is already working to find office space, ideally on separate floors, for the two campaigns and preparing two sets of career staffers to brief each team.

Even if the former president again contests the election results over baseless claims of voting fraud, his campaign staff could still have access to key operations of government, including sensitive information, while courts and lawmakers battle over the final results.

Concerns about the change lawmakers approved in 2022 have only been exacerbated by the Republican nominee’s decision thus far to sit out the official federal transition process in the run-up to Election Day.

Trump’s team is working out of a Manhattan office and inside the Willard Hotel in Washington, vetting candidates for some of the roughly 4,000 political jobs he’ll need to quickly fill if he wins - including by evaluating whether the nominees will be sufficiently loyal to the president, according to campaign officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.

But Trump himself has so far yet to sign an ethics pledge and agreements on transition fundraising disclosures and limits - both of which are requirements for any candidate to be able to gain access to agencies, secure computer equipment, government email systems and about $7 million in funding, and to participate in the formal process run by the General Services Administration. Trump would be the first presidential candidate to decline to participate in the formal federal process.

His campaign is expected to eventually sign the documents, according to a senior Biden administration official involved in transition planning, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the election and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Even if that happens, his team would have a late start on applying for security clearances to receive briefings on classified and sensitive material.

Meanwhile, many career employees across the government who would be tasked with helping Trump’s campaign with a handover of power from the Biden administration could soon lose their jobs if he revives a plan to fire civil servants his administration deems resistant to his policies. Trump and his allies have railed against government workers throughout the campaign, promising to pick up where his first administration left off in eradicating the “deep state” of bureaucrats they accuse of undermining his policies.

Less than a week out from the election, with polls showing the race deadlocked, officials and outside experts worry that the federal government is on the edge of significant confusion and turmoil yet again - exactly the scenario Congress had hoped to avoid after 2020.

“We are in uncharted territory right now, and it has the potential to be complicated for everyone involved,” said Valerie Smith Boyd, director of the Center for Presidential Transition, a resource for presidential candidates within the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service.

Trump transition co-chairs Howard Lutnick and Linda McMahon said in a statement that transition lawyers “continue to constructively engage with the Biden-Harris administration lawyers regarding all agreements contemplated by the Presidential Transition Act.” They noted that transition staff have signed a “robust” ethics pledge; that pledge is looser than the federal one, transition experts said, and does not meet the requirements of the law.

The former president has avoided the official handover process because he distrusts the government and is superstitious about formalizing any steps toward a transition before winning the election, according to campaign officials.

Harris, the Democratic nominee, has signed the federal ethics pledge and other official transition agreements - a sign that her approach to bringing in a new administration would be more by-the-book. But she faces her own challenges to taking control of the bureaucracy of 2.2 million executive branch employees. After Harris abruptly became the Democratic nominee this summer when President Joe Biden dropped out, her transition team has faced a markedly condensed time frame to vet candidates. A Harris transition spokesman said in an email that the campaign is the “top priority right now ... The transition is focused on setting up the infrastructure necessary to be ready for the post-election period.”

For decades, the nonpartisan handoffs between an outgoing administration and a government-in-waiting have been mostly drama-free, and based on rules outlined in the Presidential Transition Act of 1963. Winning candidates’ first task is to learn about current agency missions, policies and ongoing projects and to begin filling political roles in the executive branch, from Cabinet secretaries to press assistants. Career leaders and appointees from the outgoing administration hand off guidance to help the new team kick off its government, provide briefings on major issues and make themselves available to answer questions. The flow of resources has long been crucial to an orderly transition.

“If you think about it for a minute, this is an awesome process, right?” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D), whose Northern Virginia district includes thousands of federal employees. “You’re talking about the most sophisticated, arguably most important government in the world literally handing over the keys to the office and everything therein to an opposing team in a peaceful manner … even though you know that’s going to usher in lots of changes in policy and regulations and even law.”

But that usually smooth process failed in 2020, when then-GSA Administrator Emily Murphy, a Trump appointee, for close to three weeks refused to “ascertain” Biden’s victory - a formal declaration that the transition process can begin - as Trump baselessly claimed that fraud had marred Biden’s win. Murphy later bowed to bipartisan pressure.

In the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, lawmakers in both parties came together to pass the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act. The law added procedures for counting electoral votes following a presidential election - and tried to ensure that an incoming president is not thwarted from planning and staffing a new administration during the fast-moving weeks between Election Day and the inauguration in January.

It also eliminated the GSA’s role in ascertaining the winning candidate’s victory: The agency now must launch transition operations within five days of Election Day - for both campaigns if neither candidate has conceded.

Federal agencies have until Friday to formalize plans to welcome the Trump and Harris transition teams, which in large departments traditionally have numbered about a dozen people.

Briefing materials will be more concise than ever to encourage incoming teams to read them, according to several officials. The new law’s top priority is equity: The campaigns must receive the same materials, be briefed in equal depth and have access to the same-size space.

“They don’t want to be in a situation where one campaign says their needs aren’t being met,” the senior Biden administration official said of government leaders.

Right now, though, the equal access required by the new law won’t be possible, since Trump hasn’t signed the required pledges.

By not submitting to a formal government ethics plan, Trump would skirt rules that for decades have banned possible conflicts of interest for political appointees. And by skipping the fundraising restrictions, he would have no limits on private contributions to his transition.

Spokespeople for the Labor Department and the Department of Health and Human Services said those agencies are preparing to receive both campaign staffs. Other agencies would not speak publicly about their transition preparations and referred questions to the White House budget office, which also declined to publicly discuss planning.

Some career leaders worry that prolonged uncertainty over the election could take time away from pressing issues. Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention privately are concerned they will lack time to address infectious-disease threats, including an H5N1 bird flu outbreak in dairy cows. “We could have an entire month where we have to talk to two transition teams and brief them” on a range of public health outbreaks, leaving less time for the CDC to address the actual threats, one agency official said.

Trump and his allies have pledged to continue a dramatic overhaul of federal hiring rules called Schedule F, which Trump started through an executive order but ran out of time to implement at the end of his first administration. Schedule F would have allowed his appointees to fire tens of thousands of federal workers and replace them with loyalists.

By briefing his campaign on ongoing projects during a possible transition, some career officials worry that they would associate themselves with policies Trump could scrap in a second term - along with their jobs.

“From a work perspective, those focused on transition are doing what they need to do, and they are nonpartisan professionals,” said Gail Lovelace, a retired personnel chief at the GSA who also led transition preparations from 2007 to 2009. “In their personal lives, a lot of people working in government are worried about what could happen with Schedule F.”

Late last week, the Biden administration reissued final details of a new rule designed to make it harder for Trump to reinstate Schedule F in a second term. If he’s reelected, Trump is likely to eliminate the rule.

Trump’s transition, led by Cantor Fitzgerald chief executive and donor Howard Lutnick and Linda McMahon, a former professional wrestling executive who headed the Small Business Administration under Trump, is operating out of Lutnick’s New York offices and the Willard Hotel, which four years ago served as a command center where some of Trump’s loyal lieutenants plotted to overturn the 2020 election.

To vet candidates, Trump’s team is relying on insiders who served in his first term and are closely affiliated with the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank where McMahon serves as chair of the board, according to campaign aides. The group has worked since soon after Trump left office to assemble policy plans and potential executive orders and legislation for a second term. It is unclear to what extent America First has a personnel database that is different from the one put together by the Heritage Foundation as part of its Project 2025, a blueprint from which Trump distanced himself as Democrats targeted many of its proposals as extreme.

By not participating in the formal transition process, Trump could delay the start of a second administration and potentially put the country at risk, experts say, by cutting his team off from security briefings and other matters. “There are a lot of things about a presidential transition that require government interaction, and they exist so things like getting your people cleared are not left to the last minute,” said Max Stier, president and chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service.

Harris’s transition is led by Yohannes Abraham, former ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, who led the Biden transition in 2020. Thanks to her late start, Harris is likely to ask some Biden appointees to continue in their roles, experts said. Harris would be the first sitting vice president to win the White House since 1989, when Republican George H.W. Bush succeeded Ronald Reagan.

If the GOP regains control of the Senate in the election, Harris could also face challenges in getting her Cabinet and other top staff confirmed. Her transition advisers have begun reviewing which existing Cabinet secretaries and other Senate-confirmed officials could stay in their positions for at least the outset of her presidency, said one person familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private deliberations.

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Josh Dawsey, Jeff Stein, Tyler Pager, Lena H. Sun, Isaac Arnsdorf, Dan Diamond and Maxine Joselow contributed to this report.