Obscure federal official faces heat while stalling transition
WASHINGTON — The head of an obscure federal agency that is holding up the presidential transition knew well before Election Day that she might soon have a messy situation on her hands.
Before Nov. 3, Emily Murphy, head of the General Services Administration, held a Zoom call with Dave Barram, the man who was in her shoes 20 years earlier.
The conversation, set up by mutual friends, was a chance for Barram, 77, to tell Murphy a little about his torturous experience with “ascertainment” — the task of determining the expected winner of the presidential election, which launches the official transition process.
Barram led the GSA during the 2000 White House race between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore, which was decided by a few hundred votes in Florida after the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in more than a month after Election Day.
“I told her, ‘I’m looking at you and I can tell you want to do the right thing,’ ” recalled Barram, who declined to reveal any details of what Murphy told him. “I’ll tell you what my mother told me: ‘If you do the right thing, then all you have to do is live with the consequences of it.’ ”
It’s been 11 days since President-elect Joe Biden crossed the 270 electoral vote mark to defeat President Donald Trump and win the presidency. Unlike 2000, when the winner of the election was truly unknown for weeks, this time it is clear that Biden won, although Trump is refusing to concede.
But Murphy has yet to certify Biden as the winner, stalling the launch of the official transition process. When she does ascertain that Biden won, it will free up money for the transition and clear the way for Biden’s team to begin placing transition personnel at federal agencies.
Trump administration officials also say they will not give Biden the classified presidential daily briefing on intelligence matters until the GSA makes the ascertainment official.
Murphy declined to be interviewed for this article.
The White House has not said whether there have been conversations about ascertainment between officials there and at GSA.
On social media and cable, Murphy is being castigated by those on the left who say she is thwarting the democratic transfer of power. Some Trump backers, for their part, say she’s doing right by the Republican president, who has filed a barrage of lawsuits making baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.
Murphy, 47, leads a 12,000person agency tasked with managing the government’s real estate portfolio and serving as its global supply chain manager. Before last week, she was hardly a household name in politics.
The University of Virginia-trained lawyer and self-described wonk had spent most of the last 20 years honing a specialized knowledge of government procurement through a series of jobs as a Republican congressional staffer and in senior roles at the GSA and the Small Business Administration.
Murphy took the reins of GSA in late 2017 and soon found herself entangled in a congressional battle over the future of the FBI’s crumbling headquarters in downtown Washington. Trump scrapped a decade-old plan to raze the building and move the agency outside the capital.
Some House Democrats believed that Trump, who operates a hotel on federally leased property nearby, was worried about competition moving into the FBI site should it be torn down and that he nixed the plan out of personal interest. Murphy seemed to give a less than precise answer to a lawmaker who asked about conversations with Trump and his team about the FBI headquarters.
The GSA inspector general found that Murphy in a 2018 congressional hearing gave answers that were “incomplete and may have left the misleading impression that she had no discussions with the President or senior White House officials in the decision-making process about the project.”