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.
Biden became the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party for president in April 2020, and formally accepted the nomination the following August. Biden's transition team, led by Ted Kaufman, had already been announced on June 20. Further co-chairs joined the team alongside Kaufman in September. The 2020 presidential election took place on November 3. That evening, incumbent president Donald Trump declared himself the winner, based on his initial lead in tabulated in-person votes — a situation which was widely anticipated and quickly discredited as meaningless, since the votes counted at the time were not representative of the final total and it takes several days to count all the votes. Trump continued to falsely insist that he had won, alleging without evidence that Biden's increasing lead was due to widespread fraud, corruption, and other misconduct. He challenged the results in multiple lawsuits in multiple states, none of which resulted in a substantive victory. Because of Trump's denials, there was a several-week delay before his administration began even limited cooperation with the Biden team.
After three and a half days of vote counting, on November 7, at approximately 11:30 a.m. EST, the Associated Press, along with major TV networks including CNN, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and Fox News, called the race for Joe Biden. After that, most sources described him as the president-elect. Nonetheless, GSA administrator Emily Murphy, a Trump appointee, waited until November 23 to issue the "ascertainment" letter declaring Biden the "apparent winner" on the basis that Trump still disputed the election result. The declaration marked the official start of the transition, and withholding it from the Biden team had denied them $6.3 million, office space, government website status, and access to agencies. Separately, Biden was denied daily classified national security briefings until the Trump administration approved Biden's receiving such briefings on November 24.
The Electoral College met on December 14, 2020, to formally elect Biden and Kamala Harris respectively, as president and vice president. The results were to be certified by a joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021, but due to an attempt by Trump supporters to overturn the results by storming and vandalizing the Capitol building, the certification was not completed until January 7. Biden's transition ended when he was inaugurated at 12:00 p.m. EST on January 20, 2021, at which point his presidency began.
Background issues
Preparations for potential disputed election
As early as the summer of 2020, President Donald Trump began questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election, saying that the increase of mail-in voting in the election compared to previous elections will lead to a "rigged election". For this reason, many pundits and editorial writers would insist that Biden would need to win by a landslide to prevent Trump from challenging the result. Trump's preemptive accusations of fraud led some people to consider what would happen if he should lose by a margin less than a landslide. At various points, Trump had called for his attorney general, William Barr, to investigate Biden and his son Hunter, with Trump frequently insisting that his opponent should be in prison.
Rosa Brooks, who worked in the Department of Defense during the Obama administration, co-founded the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), which in June 2020 ran a series of "wargaming" exercises to explore potential election and transition scenarios. In August 2020, TIP released a widely discussed report that outlined four 2020 election crisis scenario planning exercises for the 2020 United States presidential election. The scenarios examined by TIP included a decisive Biden win, a decisive Trump win, a narrow Biden win, and a period of extended uncertainty after the election. Other academics, such as Lawrence Douglas in his book Will He Go?: Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020, have also discussed the possibility, which later turned out to be true, of Trump refusing to concede if he lost.