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25 January 2010
The 2008-2009 Presidential Transition: Successful Cooperation
By Martha Joynt Kumar
Martha Joynt Kumar, a professor of political science at Towson University in Towson, Maryland, is an expert on the U.S. presidency. Her book, Managing the President’s Message: The White House Communications Operation (2007), won the 2008 Richard E. Neustadt Award. Also among her many publications is Portraying the President: The White House and the News Media (1981). She is currently the director of the nonpartisan White House Transition Project.
Long months of preparation on the part of the outgoing and incoming administrations made the handover from George W. Bush to Barack Obama among the smoothest of U.S. presidential transitions.
Incumbent U.S. presidents have gathered and provided executive branch information to their successors since 1952. The practice began because a U.S. system requires that a president-elect make many important decisions before taking office, particularly with regard to appointments. The 2008-2009 transition from George W. Bush to Barack Obama proved one of the smoothest and most effective. Even before the election, both sides had focused on achieving a productive transition. One measure of the transition’s effectiveness was the Obama Administration’s ability to achieve a number of its objectives during its first days in office.
In the approximately 75 days between his election and inauguration, the new president establishes his policy priorities. Before he can act on his planned initiatives, he needs to have in place:
• The information he requires to make informed presidential decisions;
• Senior White House staff members with their assignments;
• A plan for prioritizing and selecting personnel for his White House and top level officials in 15 executive branch departments.
With these ingredients in place, in his first 10 days in office President Barack Obama signed nine executive orders and nine presidential memoranda covering a broad range of subjects. Soon after, he signed legislation relating to equal pay, children’s health insurance, and an economic stimulus program, thus delivering on significant campaign promises early in his administration.
Three developments empowered President Obama’s fast start. First, President Bush made an early and personal commitment to a successful transition. In late 2007, long before the election, Bush instructed White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten to assure the transition’s effectiveness. Second, early in 2008 and again long before the election, candidate Barack Obama assigned knowledgeable and appropriate people to plan for a change of power. Finally, following the September 11, 2001, attacks, all parts of the federal government had become very sensitive to threats on government operations and prepared to make the next change in executive power a smooth one. President Bush recommended and Congress passed legislation addressing the national security information needs of an incoming president.
Early Transition Planning by Bush Administration Officials
While most incumbent presidents only turn to transition preparations in their administration’s final months, George W. Bush began over a year in advance.
Joshua Bolten recalled how President Bush in 2007 instructed him to “go all-out to make sure that the transition is as effective as it possibly can be, especially in the national security area.” That early start gave the administration the opportunity to communicate with representatives of the presidential campaigns after the primary season and well before the election.
With 15 departments and around 7,000 positions to ultimately fill — including the most important 1,200 posts that require Senate confirmation — a president-elect needs a great deal of information about the jobs, how the various executive branch departments operate, and the status of specific policy initiatives. By mid-spring 2008 Bush administration officials had begun to gather and correlate this information for whoever would win the presidency.
Coordination among executive branch agencies and officials is a key component of an effective transition. At a spring meeting of the President’s Management Council (PMC), a collection of 22 key agencies, PMC Chair Clay Johnson talked to agency representatives about the transition. The agencies worked together to establish common agency priorities and templates for their work. Johnson instructed the agency staff to focus on priorities, “not hot and spicy items, but the high priority items or the items, the trend, the specific transactions that the new leadership group will have to deal with …”
In the national security area, President Bush personally reviewed a series of 40 memoranda prepared under the direction of National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley to help the incoming president and his team understand significant issues and situations around the world. Hadley also prepared a series of 17 contingency plans. “If the worst happens, here are some responses,” he explained. While the contingency plans were an ongoing operation, Joshua Bolten commented that “impending departure … really helped focus our minds on making sure those things were right before we left.”
President -Elect Barack Obama ’s Transition Operation
Barack Obama brought in an experienced Washington hand, John Podesta, to manage his transition organization. Podesta had served in the Clinton administration as White House chief of staff. While he knew Obama well, Podesta was not personally close to Obama and he did not want a job in an Obama administration. Those aspects were important because everyone knew Podesta was not spending time trying to get a job for himself. Chris Lu, executive director of the Obama transition, indicated that the Obama transition officials were mindful of the need to rely upon people who were not angling for a job in the coming administration. “You don’t want them jockeying for their future jobs,” Lu said — a lesson learned through the experiences of those serving in earlier transitions and administrations.
Podesta elaborated on how the agency review teams supplied practical, easily digestible information for new administration officials: “You could take a program, an agency, the budget, [and say] ‘these are the challenges, how do you move forward and produce the results Obama had promised, both during the campaign and then fleshed out in the transition and into the early parts of governing?’ Cabinet secretaries and White House staff “got [a] strategic product that was more digestible,” Podesta continued. “In my conversations with the incoming cabinet secretaries, they very much appreciated that they, were getting focused, well-written, reviewed, third-draft, 30-page memos, not 5,000 pages of junk [as] had been practiced in the past.” That is the type of information and assessment that incoming officials need as they assume government positions.
Anticipating a Post-September 11th Transition
A third factor shaping the 2008-2009 transition was a broad consensus that national security required a smooth transition. The government adopted recommendations of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the 9-11 Commission) to improve the national security clearance process and to gather and provide information on security threats so that a new administration could handle an early crisis if one were to arise. The slow pace of the clearance process, many believed, had caused previous administrations undue delay getting all their appointees into office.
To speed up the nomination process for executive branch personnel, Congress provided for an early clearance process, and the Bush team facilitated the early national security investigations for key transition personnel. In order to get President-elect Obama up to speed on crisis preparation, President Bush and his officials organized a crisis-training event on the White House grounds on January 13, 2009, a week before the Obama inauguration. This proved a valuable opportunity for incoming officials to discuss responses to possible emergency situations firsthand with their predecessors.
Conclusion
The 2008-2009 transition illustrates the benefit when a president orders early and thorough transition preparations. At the direction of President Bush, Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten guided a government-wide effort to define and then meet the needs of the new administration. Barack Obama contributed to the process by establishing early on a mechanism for defining and managing a possible transition, and then wisely naming a disinterested figure to head his transition team. Post-9/11 security challenges focused all involved on the need for an orderly and efficient transfer of power. Today’s American presidents cannot afford to let preparations wait until after the elections. Through legislation, executive direction, and individual effort, the Congress, President Bush, and career and political officials in the departments and agencies all worked hard at preparing the next president and his team for the responsibilities of governing.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)
