Commentary: A Trump victory would mean transition chaos

If a business school student had designed the U.S. presidential transition process as an assignment, they would have failed the class. Why? The current system creates a nearly impossible task for a newly elected candidate.

In fewer than 75 days, the president-elect needs to appoint hundreds of White House staffers, select a cabinet and fill more than 4,000 politically appointed positions. The new administration needs to quickly prepare a budget and engage allies. No business would ever run a changeover of chief executives like this, and no other country follows a similarly flawed process, either.

The way a candidate prepares for a presidential transition is a good indicator of how competently he or she will govern. It is therefore hugely irresponsible that former President Donald Trump has not appointed a transition director or team to prepare for his presidency should he be elected again, nor has he publicly communicated his plans to do so. By this time four years ago, the Biden-Harris ticket had not only appointed transition leaders but had several hundred people working full time on planning.

The 4,000 jobs that need filling are political positions, as opposed to civil service posts, which don’t change with each new administration. They run across every department and agency and at every level: from the secretary of state down to the person who puts together the briefing books for the secretary of state.

Believe it or not, changeover planning has actually improved since 1963, when Congress passed the Presidential Transition Act. In recent years, candidates have typically appointed transition staffers in the spring of an election year, vetted candidates for appointments, planned legislative priorities, and even obtained security clearances for national-security appointees. Federal funds, government office space and technology will be available for both candidates’ transition teams in the next few weeks.

The gold standard for presidential transitions occurred in 2008, when President George W. Bush was in his final year of office. Recall that Bush himself had experienced a very short transition after the 2000 election — only 35 days — because of the Florida recount. Months later, when terrorists struck the Twin Towers and Pentagon, he had only half of his national security team in place at key agencies.

With this searing experience, Bush in 2008 instructed his White House chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, to roll out the red carpet for the next president, regardless of party. Bolten worked closely with both the John McCain and Barack Obama teams, and instructed federal agencies on how to be ready for a new president.

Bush’s decision turned out to be prescient: By the time of the election, the US faced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Bipartisan cooperation between the outgoing administration and the incoming Obama team helped save the auto industry, secure emergency legislation and reassure financial markets that a recovery plan was underway.

Conversely, Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton had poorly planned transitions, albeit for distinct reasons. Carter was the first candidate to allocate funds and resources to transition planning, but he did not tell his campaign staffers about the preparation effort, causing a post-election clash. Clinton, meanwhile, moved too slowly because he did not want to be seen as “measuring the drapes” before he had won. Both men later admitted that poor transition planning set back their first years.

Not surprisingly, Trump’s moves in and out of office were the most chaotic in modern history. This wasn’t because of poor staffing, however, but because Trump personally impeded both processes. In May 2016, Trump appointed former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to run his transition. Christie organized a serious and effective effort, but was fired days after the election. The result was pure chaos. One year into his tenure, Trump had filled only a quarter of the 1,250 jobs needing Senate confirmation, the lowest in modern history, hampering the effective management of the government.

Trump’s outgoing transition was also marred by dysfunction — again because of his behavior. During the run-up to the 2020 election, Trump’s then-deputy chief of staff, Chris Liddell, rightly followed Josh Bolten’s 2008 playbook. Despite Liddell’s good work, Trump delayed things for weeks by preventing agency officials from cooperating with the incoming Biden team. For example, the president-elect’s staffers were precluded from talking with government health experts on the distribution of the newly developed Covid vaccine.

This time around, the fact that Trump has not organized a transition planning team could make him largely dependent on two outside groups: the America First Transition Project and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. (While Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, Heritage has said it continues to focus on personnel issues.) This runs against best practice, which dictates that a candidate has his or her own staff to review and vet potential White House and agency officials. Yes, the campaign can take input from partisan (and nonpartisan) organizations and interest groups, but transition staffers still need to make independent judgments on competing priorities. You can’t outsource personnel.

Vice President Kamala Harris, if she wins, can in part look to the experience of George H.W. Bush, the last vice president to take the White House. Bush organized a relatively small external transition-planning effort while he campaigned to succeed President Ronald Reagan. While Harris’s case is different because she was thrust into the race at such a late hour, she would still have the advantage of being able to govern with a mix of new leaders and existing Biden appointees. She has the advantage of an experienced staff and the White House personnel operation, and can and should quickly communicate that transition planning is underway.

Regardless of partisan preferences, all Americans benefit from thorough transition planning. History shows a high correlation between effective changeovers and effective presidencies — and vice versa. Trump’s lack of planning suggests that if he wins, even greater governing chaos will follow.

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David Marchick is dean of the Kogod School of Business at American University and is the co-author of The Peaceful Transfer of Power: An Oral History of Presidential Transitions.

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