>The Trump transition team has yet to sign two agreements with the federal government to receive transition funding and planning assistance and to share information — a break with modern precedent. Instead, transition co-chairs Linda McMahon, who served as small business administrator in the Trump administration, and investor and GOP mega-donor Howard Lutnick are plowing ahead with their own processes for vetting potential political appointees and preparing policy plans.

>The decision not to take federal assistance allows them to raise unlimited funds without disclosing their donors, while avoiding oversight from federal bureaucrats, whom Trump and his advisers deeply distrust. But if Trump wins the election and continues to drag his feet on signing the agreement with the White House, it will limit the information he and his team can access to understand current federal operations and challenges.

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>Not working with the federal transition coordinators “adds another degree of difficulty to executing the transition because there’s so many points of interaction with the executive branch,” said Rich Bagger, former chief of staff to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former executive director for Trump’s pre-election 2016 transition. There’s all this “serious work that needs to take place that, it just seemed to me, was facilitated by being … fully integrated into the transition structure.”

>Beyond simply planning the future president’s policy agenda, a presidential transition is charged with identifying candidates to fill thousands of vacancies, readying plans to run the federal government’s voluminous agencies, and applying for security clearances for staff to receive sensitive information.