How Trump is destroying the presidential transition process

Having lost the election, as well as dozens of post-election challenges, Donald Trump’s ongoing refusal to admit defeat is still doing damage Joe Biden’s transition to power.

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The formal process has finally begun, but it is weeks late and spent a long time starved of funds as Republican officials stonewalled usual procedures.

But beyond the inconvenience and cost of a deferred start to his administration, what does the president-elect lose from the president’s refusal to acknowledge the inevitable?

The answer goes far beyond Trump’s hurt feelings, or the desire among Biden supporters for some form of concession. Even the smoothest of transitions can be painfully slow for the world’s largest economy and most powerful military.

Presidential transitions are, at the best of times, impossibly unwieldy and inefficient. The federal government has more than 2 million full-time civil servants, but in fact employs another 9 million active duty military, postal workers, contractors and grantees.

That workforce of more than 11 million is about to lose as many as 800 executives, among the more than 4,100 presidential appointments that need to be filled as soon as possible.

In 2008, the incoming Obama administration enjoyed the full cooperation of the outgoing Bush presidency as well as control of both sides of Congress. It took Barack Obama one month to fill half of the 60 priority positions that require Senate confirmation. But it took another year to fill the other half.

That pace is already unimaginable given Trump’s obstruction of the transition and the promise by some Republican senators to block Biden’s nominees.

Since the Bush-Obama handover, Congress has passed two laws to improve the 1963 law that governs presidential transitions: in each case, to start the massive switch in management earlier than the election.

The most recent update in 2015, led by Ted Kaufman – Biden’s former chief of staff who now runs the Biden transition – pushed the start of the handover to six months before the election.

In practice, campaigns are reluctant to begin the detailed work of planning for power because they fear that it will look like they are arrogantly assuming victory and taking the voters for granted.

Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a non-partisan government reform group, says Trump has exposed new flaws in an already flawed system.

“This is a massive undertaking in an ordinary time. It’s an extraordinarily hard task, and this makes it that much harder,” Stier says.

“What’s been exposed here is a real problem and the challenge of the existing system. I think a lot of people have been appalled that cooperation isn’t occurring and I do think that there needs to be a specific legislative fix to ensure that the ascertainment decision is made with much more dispatch.”

Delays in transitions can lead to serious national security challenges. The 9/11 Commission found that the delayed transition, following the extended recount of the 2000 election, prevented the incoming Bush administration from being fully prepared for the threat to American security.

“The risks are those right in front of our faces: the need to respond to the pandemic and the economic crisis and racial equity issues,” says Stier. “And then there’s what Rumsfeld called the known unknowns. We live in an uncertain world and there are curveballs thrown at the country. We need to have a government that is ready for that as soon as they are in charge.”

In the last Democratic transition, speed was critical. Melody Barnes was part of the Obama transition in 2008 before leading the White House domestic policy council. “We probably had people going into departments and agencies within two or three days of the election,” Barnes says.

“As I remember it, there was election day and the very next day by noon I had to be in meetings that would allow for the kick-off process that would allow teams to go in. When you walk in the door, you have to hit the ground running.”

In the early days, agency review teams seek critical information about policy, personnel, litigation and new regulations. That intelligence is relayed back to transition headquarters and may influence the new appointments under consideration.

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“When you walk in the door and you are the Biden administration versus the Trump administration, you are still also the government of the United States,” says Barnes. “And the government is in court in lots of different places and there’s regulation that was started in September, October, November, and it’s moving through the process that continues in January and February. You’ve got to know what’s going on and where it stands.”

For the Obama team, that included seeking the advice of career officials at the White House Office of Management and Budget to help shape the urgent need for stimulus spending after the financial crisis of 2008. Today, for the Biden team, that advice would focus on both stimulus spending and vaccine distribution.

However, even when the transition begins in full, the early Republican roadblock suggests a long and fraught path to confirmation for Biden’s nominees.

“You have Lindsey Graham saying that the Georgia election wasn’t legitimate and ballots need to be thrown out,” says Barnes. “He’s also holding the hearings in the Senate potentially, managing the confirmation hearing for the attorney general.

“Janet Napolitano talks about inauguration day in 2008 and sitting in the viewing stand with the other nominees. They were getting tapped on the shoulder as they were getting confirmed by the Senate. You know there won’t be a lot of shoulder tapping happening this time.”

That points to the far bigger problem with American political appointments: the “spoils system” that last underwent reform in 1883, after James Garfield was assassinated by a disgruntled and deranged supporter who believed he was owed a high-profile job.

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The alternative – a larger civil service – would lead to less political patronage and more policy professionalism. But at a time when Trump supporters claim they are opposed by something called “the deep state”, it may be hard to win broad backing for reforms.

“My hope is that you see more senior career leaders like Tony Fauci responsible for things, and fewer political appointees who are chosen on the basis of their political affiliation,” says Stier.

“There’s a big distance between where the US stands and pretty much any other democracy. The spoils system in the US isn’t represented at the scale it is in Britain or any other major democracy.”