President Trump has made his picks for his second term cabinet more quickly and the transition is more organized and ready for Executive Branch action. Will hopes and fears of an executive reinvention be born out or will the difficulties of the first term show their face again? David Lewis finds that Trump’s first term choices did not go over well with career civil servants but that there was not as much change as sometimes implied. Heath Brown went in-depth into the last transition from Trump to Biden and foresees problems ahead from chaotic transitions and the major ambitions of Trump’s second term appointees. They are both looking ahead to more radical shifts in Trump’s second term, with more appointees at odds with the agencies they are directing.
Guests: David Lewis, Vanderbilt University; Heath Brown, John Jay College
Studies: “The Very Best People“; Roadblocked
Transcript
Matt Grossmann: What the Trump nominations and transitions foretell. This week on The Science of Politics.
For the Niskanen Center. I’m Matt Grossmann. President Trump has made his picks for his second term cabinet more quickly than last time, and the transition is more organized and ready for executive branch action. How do this year’s nominations and transition compare to the last time and what do they mean for Trump’s second term? Will hopes and fears of an executive reinvention be borne out or will the difficulties of the first term show their face again?
This week, I talked to David Lewis of Vanderbilt University about his work on executive appointments, including how bureaucrats judge Trump’s first term appointees. He finds that Trump’s first term choices did not go over that well with career civil servants, but there was not as much change as sometimes implied. He’s looking ahead to more radical shifts in Trump’s second term, with more appointees at odds with the departments and agencies they are directing.
I also talked to Heath Brown of John Jay College about his New Kansas book, Roadblocked: Joe Biden’s Rocky Transition. He went in-depth into the last transition from Trump to Biden and foresees problems ahead from chaotic transitions and the major ambitions of Trump’s second term appointees. I think you’ll enjoy my conversations with the experts on transition and appointments as we anticipate the second Trump term.
Let’s start with David Lewis on how the Trump nominations will reshape the bureaucracy. You wrote an article with Mark Richardson on President Trump’s first picks and how they went over in the bureaucracy during the first term. What’d you find?
David Lewis: Yeah, we wanted to follow up in the article on Trump’s promise to appoint the very best people and try to figure out whether that was in fact the case in the first administration. We found a couple of things. One is out of the gate in the first administration, the president was a little bit slow to select people, so that was one thing we found. A second thing was just looking at survey data of federal executives over the last three presidencies, the reception among the career civil servants was that their perception was that the group of appointees that President Trump had selected were not quite as competent as those in the George W. Bush administration or the Obama administration.
And there was a sense, I think early in the previous administration, that the president had kind of a different approach to the executive than previous presidents, namely that he didn’t feel quite so connected to it and didn’t really see himself as chief executive. He really saw, in some ways, the executive branch as something different from him and not something that he felt a tremendous amount of responsibility or loyalty to. He didn’t feel responsible for managing it or making sure it was working effectively.
Matt Grossmann: So what were some of the things that you asked or that are asked in these surveys that led to these conclusions and how were these folks evaluating Trump compared to previous presidents?
David Lewis: Yeah, so just to give you some sense, the folks that we interviewed were the very top people at the heads of the departments and agencies of the executive branch. So these are people who, on average, have 20 plus years of experience. They’ve worked a long time in federal government across different administrations. And at various points we’ve asked these folks, “Think about the people that you work with, not including yourself.” And then we give them a list of different categories of types of people, political appointees, career civil servants and so forth, and say, “How competent are they?” And it’s a scale from one to five, and we just collect the average across those administrations.
Matt Grossmann: So we know that Republican presidents have been more likely to be at odds with the civil service and think of them as inhibiting some of their agendas. So is this just partisanship or the extension of partisanship into an era when the Republican Party has become even more opposed to what it considers the deep state?
David Lewis: Yeah, I think, Matt, it’s fair to think that that could be part of it. Part of what was interesting to us was to compare the perceptions of civil servants under the Bush administration for this reason to sort of say, “Let’s compare two Republican administrations against one another and how civil servants perceive the Bush administration relative to the Trump administration to see if there was something different there.”
And it was true that the Trump administration still was, their appointees were evaluated less favorably than the Bush administration. But I think there’s something to this idea that civil servants may be affected by political polarization and this increasing narrative about the deep state and an increasing dissatisfaction with the administrative state in general. So they may also be feeling a bit more defensive in terms of their evaluation of these folks. Anytime somebody comes in and has a different idea of the mission of your agency, you’re going to be a little bit… I think your priors may be that the person doesn’t know what they’re doing or doesn’t have much expertise, but I don’t think that explains all of it.
Matt Grossmann: So you also had them rate other folks that they interact with, people that they contract with, and the civil service overall. How much was the discontent specialized to these political appointees, and how would you interpret that in terms of Trump’s ability to transform the bureaucracy?
David Lewis: Yeah, so we found in the Trump administration that their evaluation of other civil servants, both mid to high level civil servants and lower level civil servants was slightly lower than during the Bush administration, but not of the same magnitude of their evaluation of political appointees. Their perception of contractors is relatively stable across this time period.
I think that one thing to think about in terms of what’s happening in these administrations is that a new administration comes in and you expect some turnover among career civil servants. It’s a natural decision point for people in their careers. Most of the folks that are at the very high levels of the civil service are getting close to retirement age. And so we naturally see some turnover during presidential transitions. We noted, however, that the turnover with the Trump administration was much higher so that the kinds of folks that sometimes turned over, turned over at higher rates with the Trump administration coming in. And that can also affect people’s perceptions of the people who are in charge in making decisions.
So younger people are moving up, sometimes some politicization happens in the civil service so that the reasons why people get promoted may have less to do with necessarily experience or background and maybe connections to other politicals. So it may be that some of the differences we see among the perceptions about civil servants has to do with that kind of turnover. It could also be, and this is something that I think is also true, there’s been in some ways a neglect of the civil service over the last 20 years or so. And so we may also be seeing something of a trend, that is, presidents and Congress have spent less time thinking carefully and investing in making government agencies work well and in the civil service. So it’s a little hard to disentangle a Trump effect in the career civil service from the trends, but those things may be happening at the same time.
Matt Grossmann: So talk about that a little bit more for those who may not be familiar. What were the pre-existing problems in the federal workforce that Trump came into that might have already, that he may have exacerbated, but that were already there in terms of the workforce?
David Lewis: So most people who are listening, I think can remember particular episodes of government failure over the last 20 years, whether it’s Hurricane Katrina or the Gulf oil spill or the Veterans’ healthcare scandal or response to Hurricane Rita. There’s lots of reasons for concern in the public service. And so we’ve done some investigations into why this might be the case.
And what we’ve seen over time is that elected officials when they run for reelection, get credit for policies that they’ve enacted or things that they’ve done, not necessarily making things work. So the way I like to think about this is kind of like the nation’s infrastructure, which is we sort of think how is it that bridges collapse or levees don’t work when there’s a hurricane? Well, the answer is that at the same time when elected officials are making a choice. We can build a new road or a new bridge, or we can spend money maintaining the existing bridges or roads so that they don’t fail.
What they tend to do is focus on the new shiny thing rather than the unglorious maintenance to prevent something, to reduce the risk of some low probability event from happening. And elected officials are the same. So what they’d like to do is enact a policy, do something noteworthy so that voters will say, “Oh, I remember elected official so-and-so, or the president X did the following thing that I can remember.” Elected officials can’t go back to voters and say, “Hey, I prevented this problem that you didn’t even know about from happening. We invested and made sure that the workforce was qualified or that some bad thing didn’t happen.” It’s hard to take credit for the dog that didn’t bark. And so over the last 20 or 30 years with increased turnover in committee chairs and increasingly close elections, it’s very difficult to get elected officials to focus in a systematic way on the long-term health of the public service.
Matt Grossmann: So we’re gearing up for the second Trump administration, and at least one problem that you identified appears to be working better this time. That is, he has made a lot of appointments early, withdrawn one already. What do you make of the process so far?
David Lewis: I agree. I think that one thing that is different this time is that he’s naming people much more quickly than he did last time. I think it’s fair to say that he has a deeper pool this time than he had last time. So he’s got a whole administration of experience to help him identify candidates, people that he likes. There’s this great John F. Kennedy quote where he says something to the effect of, “I thought I knew a lot of people, but it turns out I only knew a bunch of politicians.” And he says that in reference to trying to staff his administration when he’s elected after the 1960 election.
And in some ways, President Trump had a similar problem when he was elected, which was one, he didn’t expect to win. And two, he didn’t have a very good transition operation, or at least he didn’t use the transition operation that he had. And so when he got in, he didn’t know a lot of people and he didn’t know how to staff his administration particularly effectively.
This go around, he’s got all of people that work for him in the first administration, plus all of the groups and think tanks that organized after his administration that have been doing some personnel work for him. So he’s a bit quicker. He’s got a broader pool to choose from. And so he’s moving much more quickly. Now, I think the issues with regard to quality remain, and that’s something that we’ll see.
Matt Grossmann: Yeah, so let’s talk about that so far. That sounded pretty rosy, but obviously some of the early appointments have been criticized for the lack of experience that the folks being appointed have in their relevant issue areas. And even though he does have that first administration of experience, a lot of the folks coming in are not from the first administration and are instead sort of the most hard charging from the outside.
David Lewis: I would say that what’s interesting about this group that he has named so far, particularly as it relates to the executive departments, is that they tend to be people that have been very vocal defenders of the president in costly ways, that is in public ways on television. And how you and I might evaluate competence, where we would sort of say, “Let’s look at somebody’s past experience. Let’s look at whether they’ve run a large organization before. Let’s look at their subject area expertise and decide whether they look competent.”
Presidents and politicians and this president in particular don’t always evaluate competence that way. And so for the president’s perspective, the way he evaluates in many cases, whether somebody is competent or not, is how they perform on television and what are they like in their interactions with him when they’ve interacted with him, if they have. And so a lot of the folks that he has chosen are very good publicly. That is, they’re good on television, good on radio, they’re good at the public facing side of things. And for Trump that both signals loyalty, but it also signals competence. And that means though that the people that he’s selected so far, many of them don’t have either the management experience or the subject area expertise that we would normally expect for people running these departments and agencies.
Matt Grossmann: So what precedents do we have for these kinds of appointments? That is, the executive branch is being asked to judge competence in your surveys, but they’re probably also judging whether the person agrees with the mission of their agency. And some presidents have at least appointed some folks that were kind of out step with the agencies they were directing before. What do we know from that experience?
David Lewis: Yeah. So it’s not uncommon for presidents of both parties to in and have a view about what an agency should do. And for Republicans, it’s generally to roll back environmental regulations or to make things easier on business. For Democrats, it may be to rein in defense spending or reverse the actions of intelligence or law enforcement.
And what we know from lots of previous surveys of both appointees and careerists is they usually come to some kind of accommodation. They start out with great suspicion, and then they generally figure out a way to work together over the course of an administration. Now, what’s different about this administration, it’s not unprecedented, but it’s different is the scale of disagreement and the frequency with which the people who are coming in want to either eliminate the departments that they’re running or completely reverse what the agency is doing, or in some ways gut the workforce in those places. And so there is going to be some natural suspicion of folks that want to do that.
Now, I’ll say what’s distinctive about this Trump administration, and sorry to go on so long about this is in the first administration, this was less common. So I think that the promise of the first administration was, “We’re going to come in, we’re going to run government like a business.” That sounds a lot like basic Republican talking points in this administration. During the last administration, they developed a narrative about the deep state, which was this is a group of people who are evil, who are trying to undercut the will of the people and pursue their own ends. And the sort of suspicion and hostility towards the administrative state in general is much stronger this second go around, partly because of the president’s experience in the first term.
Matt Grossmann: And it’s not just appointments as you know, they are planning to re-implement their Schedule F reforms to try to make a lot more of the bureaucracy more capable of being hired and fired by the president. How does that kind of correspond with these appointments and will that make these problems more severe?
David Lewis: Yeah, so as you kind of hinted at Matt, there’s about 4,000 political appointees that are available to a new president coming in, which is quite a large number to begin with. And one of the reasons why we’ve had concerns about performance before was because we had so many political appointees. If you think about turning over the top 4,000 executives at Walmart or at Apple or GM every four years, you might wonder about what that would mean for shareholder value or for innovation or performance. And the federal government has been doing that for a while.
The president has found that that number of political appointees is still insufficient for him to overcome what he perceives as resistance. And so what he’s advocating is for the creation of a new class of political appointments implemented through an executive order called Schedule F, which will move, by some estimates, around 50,000 positions out of the civil service and make them politically appointed positions in a way that will, in his view, make these agencies more responsive to his direction. I think that’s likely to be the case. I think it will make agencies more responsive to him. I think the question is what are the consequences for performance, both in the short run and the long run going to be if he pushes through with this reform?
Matt Grossmann: So on the one hand, we’re judging competence and we’re expecting that to be difficult, especially with a large number of additional appointments. But some of the critiques from the left are sort of the opposite, that he will be quite competent now at moving towards his policy views such that things might look closer to authoritarian governance. How should we reconcile that concern with the sort of just day-to-day incompetence concern?
David Lewis: Yeah, I think that’s a great question. So I think that you can have both things at the same time. So I think that one advantage from the president’s perspective that he has now is that he has experience from the last administration and the way that they failed. So they brought in a bunch of people without experience last time. They did poorly in getting new rules put in place and changing policies in areas that they cared about. They failed a lot in court, these kinds of things. And they didn’t know where all the levers of power were.
Over the course of the administration, they learned how to do things. And so for example, when they started moving money around to build a border wall, even though it hadn’t been appropriated, that’s a pretty sophisticated understanding of where the legal authority lies and where it does not. So there are a bunch of people coming in this time that have a pretty good understanding of where the levers of power are. So I would point you to Russ Vought, the President’s nominee to head OMB. I would sort of point you to Project 2025, which at least in the parts that I’ve read, shows a relatively sophisticated understanding of what agencies are doing and where things can be pushed.
Now, at the same time, when you have people coming in with this kind of knowledge, you do have a large number of people coming in who really literally have very little experience. So if you think about Pete Hegseth, the nominee for the Defense Department. This is somebody who’s great on television but has never run an agency with 700,000 civilian employees before and has very little experience in national security policymaking. If you think about a worldwide crisis, say a militarized conflict, this is not somebody who’s prepared to deal with that kind of a problem.
But are there people coming into government that know how to wield government power in particular kinds of ways? Absolutely, yes. So you’ll get some dramatic changes in policy because there are people coming in who can do that, but it doesn’t mean that across the government there aren’t people who are not particularly well qualified for the work that they’re being chosen to do.
Matt Grossmann: Another concern from the first Trump administration is that a lot of long time public servants would decide to leave government in response to Trump’s election. How much did that occur and how much do we now have an administration that will be more stable because it’s made it through several transitions?
David Lewis: It did happen. There was a notable increase over the norm in departures of career civil servants with the first Trump administration. One thing I want to highlight, Matt, which I think people aren’t always particularly cognizant of, is that the federal government is massive. So you’re talking about 3 million civilian employees and 85% of these folks work outside Washington, DC The vast majority of them have never seen a political appointee before, and the work that they do is relatively apolitical. They’re approving patents or they’re making decisions about social security checks or those kinds of things, giving out government contracts in a very formulaic, standardized way. Those kinds of folks are not going to experience much change.
Where you will see a bigger change is at the top, the people who are going to interface with political appointees and are responsible for public policymaking. And this go around because of the change in tone of the administration and the aggressive signals they’re sending already about undoing large parts of government, I expect that the turnover rate is going to be higher at the top level and will even reach to some of the middle level because. People say basically, “What does my future look like? It’s clearly that they don’t want me here, they don’t value what we do, and in particular, if I’m being paid less in government than I could be paid in the private sector, I might as well go take that higher private sector paycheck that I could have gotten anyway.”
Matt Grossmann: So President-elect Trump has also sort of created this outside of government council with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to propose a lot of cuts to government, including their view that lots of federal employees are not that valuable. So there’s a reason that they’re getting those signals, but should we expect those outsiders to end up being at odds with the people that Trump is appointing to run these bureaucracies? Or what can we learn from previous reinventing government attempts at how well this will go?
David Lewis: It’s a really interesting question, Matt, I’m glad that you highlighted this tension because I think it’s a real one. So if you look at someone like Vivek Ramaswamy, has publicly stated, we want to fire 75% of government employees. But the people who are being named to run these departments may have different views about how many employees are necessary to do the kinds of things that these agencies do. I think they’re likely to… The Department of Government efficiency, as it’s called, is going to realize pretty quickly a couple of things about government. One is that about 70% of government employees are involved in national security in some way. So, you have to ask yourself whether they really want to eliminate 75% of the employees that are involved in national security.
The other thing they’re going to realize pretty quickly is that a lot of what government does is popular, people like what government does. The reason why these programs exist is because majorities voted for them in the House and the Senate and previous presidents have signed these things into law, and in public opinion polling, these programs turn out to be popular. So once they start cutting out departments and agencies and people start to realize that things that government did in the past it’s no longer doing, that could be a problem. And the people who are most sensitive to that are going to be the people who are running those departments, who maybe have taken those jobs thinking, yeah, we’re going to change things around, but not necessarily stop doing them all together.
A good example will be Linda McMahon. So Linda McMahon is going to be the President’s nominee to run the Department of Education. Musk and Ramaswamy have publicly stated that they’d like to eliminate the Department of Education. Well, what does Linda McMahon think about that? As somebody who’s pro-voucher, maybe you want the Department of Education to be there to use public authority to encourage the adoption of vouchers with federal authority and federal dollars. You can’t really accomplish both goals as easily. If you eliminate the Department of Education, it’s going to be more difficult for the administration to pursue a pro-voucher policy.
And at the same time, people like the fact that the Department of Education helps poor kids go to school. They like the fact that the Department of Education protects kids with disabilities and make sure that they get treated fairly. Those kinds of policies, once you get down to it, are really difficult to eliminate. And so you can talk big about eliminating departments and agencies or cutting federal employment. But once you get down to brass tacks, it turns out to be pretty difficult.
Matt Grossmann: So sometimes both this new Department of Government Efficiency and Schedule F are just talked about as responsive to Trump’s personal concerns about bureaucrats in his first administration. But they also arise out of more long-running concerns about the federal bureaucracy, that it doesn’t operate as efficiently as business, that it doesn’t draw expertise from people in the private sector, that people don’t move around agencies as much as they should to get different perspectives, that it just rewards seniority rather than success. What is the government doing about the problems that these supposedly are meant to address and how well is it going?
David Lewis: Yeah, so one of the things that gets lost in the, I think, debates about the Department of Government Efficiency and Schedule F is that there’s some truth to the things that they’re complaining about. But in some ways it’s a little bit more nuanced than it’s made out to be.
So just as an example, the federal government is spending five times as much now as it was in the 1960s, but with the same number of government employees. So while government has expanded dramatically, the number of government employees has not. So we’re doing five times as much work with the same number of employees as we were in the 1950s. And one of the things that Musk and Ramaswamy have said is right, there’s bloat and we really need to get a hold of the contracting process. Well, that’s right. I think there is a lot of money wasted in the contracting process, and it’s something that we’ve recognized for a long time that it needs improvement.
I think that it’s also true, and I would say Republicans and Democrats who follow this closely believe that the civil service needs to be reformed, that there needs to be improvements in hiring. There needs to be improvement in professional development. There needs to be improvements in dealing with poor performers. And there are plans out there for serious civil service reform. But serious civil service reform doesn’t involve improving civil service by firing people and as Russ Vought has said, making people feel trauma when they come to work. That is not a recipe for improving government performance, are making it more efficient.
So there is some truth to the idea that government could work better, but I think sometimes the targets are misdirected. If we fired every civilian employee, we would save about $300 billion a year. The deficit that we’re running right now is 1.8 trillion. So you could fire every single government employee and you still would not get close to closing the deficit. And so if your concern is really about efficiency, you need to have a broader conversation about what government is doing and what we’re doing in terms of spending and in taxing.
Matt Grossmann: So another ongoing debate is about drawing from the private sector versus potential for corruption in the bureaucracy. And there’s also been concern that Trump appoints people with direct economic interests and that he himself has direct economic interests. But there’s also concern on the other side that maybe the Obama era reforms went too far in preventing nominees with experience from outside. Where are we on that and how do you expect things to go in the second Trump?
David Lewis: Yeah, this debate about the private sector versus the public sector is a longstanding one. And it’s common for people outside of government to say, we want government to run more like a business. And what they mean by that is they have a vision of the private sector, which is sort of focused on results and doing things in a cost-effective way. What I remind people is that if you go back, say, 10 years of the businesses that were started in 2013, only 35% continue to exist. When people say that they want government to work like a business, presumably they mean the ones that have been successful, not the ones that have failed. Some of the things that government does, like track loose nuclear weapons or provide national security or regulate markets, we can’t afford to have those things fail and run like a business that way.
Now, are there things that private sector can do and ideas there that can improve the public sector? Absolutely. But we have to remember as the former Comptroller General Elmer Staats once said, public and private sector management are alike in all unimportant respects, managing in the public sector is quite different than managing in the private sector. And in part because as citizens, we demand government do things differently than in the private sector. We don’t want cronyism, we don’t want contracts given out to people’s friends. We do want transparency. We do want fairness. We do want to make sure that there’s no corruption. And as a result, we put more restrictions and effectively red tape on bureaucrats to act because we demand more from government than we do from the private sector.
One of the interesting things, Matt, and I’m sorry to belabor this, but one of the interesting things that we found in surveys where we compare private sector executives with public sector executives is that if you ask executives at the same level, are people promoted on the basis of merit or personal connections? And in the public sector, there is a significantly higher percentage that say, yeah, people are promoted on the basis of merit than in the private sector. In the private sector people are more likely to believe that it’s not your merit that gets you ahead, but personal connections and those kinds of things.
And so there is a concern that if you make government work more like the private sector, that you take merit out of the equation, you make connections more important. And then as you said, you open up opportunities for grift and for funneling dollars into the pockets of people who are connected. So in previous research, when we looked at contracting, for example, it’s definitely the case that new administrations come in and dollars then begin flowing to people that they’re connected to, and it’s sort of a matter of degree. And so we’re a bit concerned about what it means moving forward.
Matt Grossmann: There’s also been rising concerns about democratic governance at the state and local level to some extent, but also at the federal level that part of the critique is about the amount of demands that we place on government, that Ezra Klein has called this everything bagel liberalism. That whenever we enact a new policy and give a new agency a mandate, we tend to stack on lots of other group demands that they have to follow. Is there a case that maybe we have been giving bureaucrats too many competing objectives and a Republican reform might focus them?
David Lewis: Yeah, I think that’s probably right. There’s this great little book by Herbert Kaufman on red tape, and he says that red tape is the product of our good intentions. So every time somebody has a good idea, they create a policy that creates more red tape. And one of the things that makes it difficult for government actors to do their jobs is the increasing number of requirements that they have to be responsive to policies that are put on them, either in response to group pressure or because somebody at some point had a good idea that ended up being a new form that had to be filled out or a new process that had to be complied with in order to get things done.
Famously, it can be easier to comply with paperwork and requirements than it is to actually accomplish the goals of the programs themselves. And I think that in that gap that I was talking about before between the increase in spending and the number of employees, part of what explains that gap is an increased reliance on privatization. And one of the reasons why privatization is attractive is that you can contract out with a firm and get something done and avoid that red tape. And that makes it attractive to managers. They can say, “Should I give this to a civil servant or should I do this through some sort of government program, or should I just hire someone to do it and avoid some of the mess associated with that?” And it’s often that they choose to privatize instead of doing it through government employees for that reason.
I think that what people don’t realize is how much being president is like being a traffic cop. It’s less that presidents sit behind the resolute desk and give orders. It’s more that decisions are brought to them. And so you’re sort of saying yes to some things and no to other things. And one of the things that characterized the first Trump administration, particularly at the beginning, was how chaotic that process was of decisions being brought to the President that weren’t vetted, decisions being brought to the President that were made but there was no process in place to make sure that they were implemented.
And so, one thing to look for in this administration is the kind of staffing and organization around the decision process. So I’m looking there for the operations of the staff secretary and the deputy chief of staff for operations, those kinds of people that are responsible for getting people in the right meetings, getting all the paper in place, making sure that everything is vetted. The President can create lots of problems for himself by making decisions that aren’t well vetted. And in cases where even for the President to accomplish his own goals, it makes sense to discipline his process a bit. So it’ll be interesting to see whether he does that.
Matt Grossmann: Now let’s turn to Heath Brown to hear about how transitions have operated in the past and how this one may be different.
So you have a new book on the transition from the Trump administration to the Biden administration and how that set up the Biden administration. What did you learn?
Heath Brown: I learned a lot. This is the second kind of deep dive I’ve taken into transitions, and this one was much, much deeper than the previous one I did into the Obama-Biden transition. I came back to look at the Biden-Harris transition because of the enormity of what was going on during that time period, an enormity that felt like it was all rushing towards that 10, 11 week time period in the fall of 2020, I remember that, middle of the pandemic just coming off the summer of enormous social protests. And the objective here was to try to get my hands around it.
I learned a lot. A lot of it surprising. Some of it not so surprising. But all centered on understanding the planning to get ready to take office in January, 2021. I learned a lot about the groups that mattered, learned a lot about the groups that thought they mattered but didn’t matter as much during that transition period. But the most important thing I think I learned is just how incredibly comprehensive the approach was taken in 2020, learning a lot from political science research on what makes for an effective transition, as well as all sorts of other things that I think were gleaned from what we understand about the transfer of power. And then there are all the big surprises, like January 6th. So there was a lot that I learned and a lot to be learned from that time period. Even though it’s short in duration, it matters a lot.
Matt Grossmann: You also compared it to some previous transitions, including the transition to Donald Trump at the end of 2016. What stood out as the big differences?
Heath Brown: Yeah, the differences were stark. In the 2016, 2017 transition that took everyone by surprise, I think including President-elect Donald Trump and his team, which led to a transition period in 2016 that was characterized variously as chaotic, disorderly, unplanned. And this is by some of the people who were involved in doing actual planning. So they admitted this. And we know this in part because they’re saying that same thing again today about what’s going on in the planning for this administration, which we may talk about. But that was sort of what defined that time period, a very seat of the pants, ad hoc approach, kind of just get ready in time to govern.
With that said, amidst all of the disorder and chaos, there were a lot of the familiar players involved in 2016. However unpredictable or outsider Trump’s campaign was, he relied on the same set of actors in 2016 as Republican presidential transitions have in the past. The Heritage Foundation, for example, was deemed the shadow transition, providing dozens of people to the transition team, ideas, much of the same role they’re playing today and the same role they’ve played in the past. So in some ways it was surprising, but in other ways it was very consistent.
Four years later, we see something very different. We see the partisan differences in how a Republican administration prepares compared to a Democratic transition, and there are some differences, but there were also some things that happened for the very first time in 2020.
We’ve never really had a transition that was truly opposed by much of the sitting administration. It’s really never happened in US history in the same way it happened in 2020. And part of the goal of the book was to try to figure out if some of the stories that we read about in newspapers were in fact true. Was the so-called obstruction that we heard about in fact verified by talking to people involved in that transition?
And I kind of got a little bit of a mixed picture when it came to that obstruction. Some people I talked to described pretty much business as usual. In many agencies, the transitions happened pretty seamlessly. Now remember, this was in the midst of a pandemic, so nothing was normal that fall. But many of the people I talked to said that what they had experienced in the past, that is previous transitions, is what happened in 2020.
The overall pattern was something that was a little bit normal, but there were some areas that stood out as incredibly abnormal. In the area of preparation of the first budget, in the Department of Defense, in the area of intelligence, those were areas where obstruction was real and verified. And the people that I talked to that I interviewed described things that even surpassed what we read about in newspapers.
Interestingly, some of the people that were involved in that obstruction, the very people that were involved in that obstruction, today have received appointments to the incoming Trump administration. So the continuity of this is something that we see four years later. In intelligence and defense and in the area of the budget, we see those same people show up again, this time now coming into office. Last time, they were leaving office.
Matt Grossmann: So set the context for us a bit about what’s supposed to happen during this transition period. I know it’s internationally somewhat weird to have this long period, and how is it supposed to set up the incoming administration? How much does it matter and get reflected later?
Heath Brown: Yeah, I mean, historically you wouldn’t be able to say very much because there were very few guidelines. It was a very informal process historically. A skeletal staff helped the incoming administration get ready.
That changed when Congress got involved in the 1960s, formalizing a process, institutionalizing the way that it should work. Subsequent updates to the federal law have expanded funding so that the incoming administration before they take office has money to spend, that they have office space, they have help. And so what we’ve seen is the design is to take the very contentious campaign and turn it into a very cooperative transition.
And the high point of this in many ways is in 2008, held up as the moment in which an outgoing Republican administration said, “The most important thing is for a seamless transition of power,” to the incoming Democratic transition. George Bush, in many ways a high point of his administration was the moment at which he was leaving, when he signaled to his White House, no games, no obstruction, teamwork, and collaboration, cooperation is going to be the name of the game. And as a result, 2008 is often held up as this very kind of high mark gold standard of the way this is supposed to work.
That doesn’t always happen. And cooperation and teamwork, which was the name of the game in 2008, isn’t what has happened subsequent to that. This is problematic in a couple of areas, which are the core of what a transition tries to accomplish. The main thing they need to do is to make appointments. Incoming administration has in the neighborhood of 4,000 positions that they can appoint. Around a quarter of those are Senate-approved in some fashion. All of those decisions have to be made at some point in or around the fall of that transition period.
So personnel and staffing is a huge, huge responsibility. It takes a lot of time, takes a lot of staff, and is very difficult to do well. That is not just at the cabinet level, but the dozens and dozens and dozens of sub-cabinet appointments. Each one of them has to be vetted, evaluated, and a decision made.
While all that personnel work is going on, the incoming transition team is also focused on policy, that is taking all of the campaign promises and turning them into some sort of agenda for the incoming administration. Most practically that has to do with writing executive orders. And so, the transition team spends a lot of time writing executive orders, reviewing them, making sure that they’re going to pass legal muster, showing them to interested groups to make sure that the promise is fulfilled in the executive order. And so, policy is the second bucket of what goes on during the transition period.
And the final one, also an enormous enterprise, is what’s typically called agency review, which is an audit of government in ways to make sure the incoming administration knows exactly what the problems are that the outgoing administration was facing. These are the minute issues that every agency deals with that from the outside you might not know about, but the incoming cabinet and sub-cabinet needs to understand what the Department of Commerce is working on, an issue the EPA is dealing with that it might not be more widely known.
And so, this exchange of information happens in often meetings where the senior bureaucrats meet with the incoming transition team, some of whom are going to be appointed to the administration, many of whom are going to help brief the cabinet official who’s going to go up for Senate approval.
And so, personnel, policy, and agency work are the three things that should be going on in every transition. If they’re done so in a thorough way, the transition succeeds. If they’re done so in a sporadic way, inconsistent way, without cooperation from the outgoing administration, they’re done in a much more difficult way.
Matt Grossmann: Since the election, there’s been an intra-party feud between the left and the center. And part of it deals with the perception that the “groups” controlled the Biden administration policy from the early going or that he kind of capitulated to the Bernie and Warren factions in the early stages in setting up the administration, and of course counter charges. What can we say about that from the earliest stages?
Heath Brown: So the people that I talked to, and again, the focus of the research involved some quantitative work, but also extensive interviews, interviews with about 80 members of the Biden-Harris transition team. And that is people all the way up the top, the people who were meeting with the president elect and vice president elect, all the way down to volunteers, people who were working a couple of hours a week. And so, I tried to get everybody involved and ask them questions about what went on.
And so, what I discovered was, I think, quite apropos to this question we’re looking at four years later. And when I talked to people, a lot of them pointed to something that happened before the transition. That was the Unity Task Force that had been pulled together in let’s call it spring of 2020. This was the moment at which Senator Bernie Sanders left the race.
And basically the deal that was made was for a task force to be put together, in some ways a pre-convention task force, to hash out differences within the party. Joe Biden appointed somewhere in the neighborhoods of half of the task force and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren or thereabouts appointed the other half.
And the group came together and kind of miraculously reached a consensus set of documents, recommendations, that tried to deal with the very same kinds of conflicts about the agenda, but also about priorities. People I talked to involved in the transition often referred to that as an important factor in what they were looking at. It sort of set the tone for the transition.
But also what people talked about is taking that kind of policy discussion and turning it into a personnel discussion. And I think often lost in some of the debates right now about priorities within the Democratic party and what should or should not be part of the policy agenda is the importance of people. During the transition period, people are what matter most. And what I heard people talk about was a process that actually, a personnel process that dealt with these conflicts within the party.
And so, I interviewed one person who talked about the people who would be brought together as the final candidates for any given position. And the person talked about they’d often get one person who was kind of labeled as progressive, another that was labeled as something else. And part of the process was them coming together to figure out who the best person was.
One of the people I talked to also talked about the sort of side deals that happened quite secretively, where people involved in the transition would hear that somebody unfavorable to them and they were part of the coalition would hear about a name that might get chosen. And they would then kind of cobble together all of the incriminating evidence that would knock them out of contention. And they would do this and share it across the transition team in a way to sort of stave off the possibility of somebody they didn’t want.
And so, the process was sort of built into the transition in a way. And a lot of those conflicts, though maybe not resolved, were not forgotten. There was a particular issue that I spent a lot of time focused on, which was what came out of the summer of protests after the murder of George Floyd and the claims that the so-called groups were making about what the incoming administration should do.
And there was a series of groups that got together. In fact, they had been getting together for nearly 30, 40 years, the so-called HR 40 Coalition. This is the set of groups originally started in Michigan and Detroit calling for a commission to study slavery reparations. And they’d been pursuing this for 30 odd years, starting with John Conyers, Congressman John Conyers, in the late 1980s.
This is a group that thought that they had a window of opportunity during the transition period. And they pushed and they pushed, and they set up meetings with the incoming administration. They were told that they were considering it.
There was another set of groups that was also pushing something that sounded a lot like this, but was focused not just on slavery reparations, but on racial justice more broadly. These groups sometimes were working in coalition, sometimes they were working at counter-purpose. But the second of those groups ended up getting much more influence with the incoming administration. They held more meetings. They were asked for information. They sort of had a role to play.
Both of those groups thought that they had won the transition period. And on day one after the inauguration, they both waited to see whether President Joe Biden would sign an executive order to either move forward with a slavery reparations commission or to move forward with a racial justice commission, thinking that they had both had enormous influence with the incoming administration. Neither one of them got their way. Neither one of them got the commission that they had hoped for. And four years later, neither one of them have gotten that.
What I tried to do is sort of study up close the way these coalitional differences are resolved, and often they’re resolved in a way that results in great disappointment among the so-called groups. So coming out of the 2020 transition, you get more disappointment than excitement. An incoming administration is just bound to disappoint. So many promises are made, and so many of those promises are nearly impossible to actually fulfill.
And so, I think four years later, as we see nearly the same conversation going on, it’s a conversation that’s unresolvable. I think, and based on talking to people involved in the Biden-Harris transition, they felt like they had a process that was pretty good at having a lot of players involved in the conversation.
That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s resolved in the way in which everyone would like, but the process at least, I think, in 2020 was pretty open to lots of people around the table that may not have had a voice in the past.
Matt Grossmann: We’re, of course, speaking at a time of another presidential transition. And there’s at least one big change in that Trump is taking a lot less time to announce appointments, and it seems to have been more ready to go this time than in 2016. What are you noticing as the biggest differences and points of continuity with the last Trump transition?
Heath Brown: Yeah. Well, we can compare what’s going on here in 2024, 2025 to 2020 or to 2016. In some ways, what’s going on right now is different than both. In 2016, the incoming Trump administration, for however chaotic and disorderly they were, they basically followed the rules. They signed the required agreements with the various federal agencies. They abided by the rules that are established by Congress about this process. They abided by fundraising rules. They abided by public disclosure rules. They abided by the rules of who was going to do background checks on all the appointees.
So in 2016, despite what we look back to and think of as just this disorderly mess, actually kind of stuck to the rules. Eight years later, the second Trump transition has largely disregarded many of those rules. It’s taken a long time to sign the agreements with the various federal agencies, and some remain agreements remain unsigned.
It’s not abiding by the disclosure rules or the fundraising rules that are established by federal law, again, because they haven’t essentially signed on to those agreements. This makes this a very different process.
It’s different another way, the one that you allude to, which is the speed at which they’ve announced these cabinet positions. That clearly was an objective to lead with cabinet positions, but that speed may have come at the cost of quality. And the loss of several nominees already and possibly more over the next couple of weeks, if not as we’re speaking, suggests that the vetting process that this transition team is using is incomplete.
And I don’t think that’s all that surprising. My suspicion is that they don’t have nearly the size of a staff doing the work of the transition as the Biden-Harris team had in 2020. I collected up the names of people who were involved in 2020, names that were not made public, but you can sort of find them in other ways.
And I counted up over a hundred people that were involved in personnel process in some way, vetting attorneys, HR researchers, dozens and dozens of people all working from home with stacks of resumes, and they would go through vets just 10, 15 a day. And I talked to people who would stay up until 3:00 in the morning because they would just get more applications that they’d have to go through. And it was just a rigorous, rigorous process. And the consequence in 2020 was that there were very few problems that came up in the personnel process, especially compared to what we see today.
Now, it’s too early to know exactly the full size of the Trump-Vance transition team. But based on what I’ve seen, their focus is limited and they may not be doing some of the day-to-day work vetting the backgrounds of those candidates. Now, if you have cabinet appointees whose backgrounds haven’t been fully vetted, and that seems pretty obvious has been the case with some of the nominees so far, what’s the case that the sub-cabinet nominees have been fully vetted? Have their backgrounds really been gone through?
My suspicion is that’s probably not going on, and that’s ultimately going to come back to get them. I don’t think this is stuff that will remain a secret once the names of hundreds of additional people come forward. I think this is going to be a problem for the incoming administration. I think it’s going to trip up their greatest ambitions for large scale policy change, large scale change in the federal government. If people matter as much as we think they do, and they certainly have mattered to incoming Republican administrations. The mantra of people is policy has become such a celebrated phrase in Republican circles. If that’s the case, it’s surprising to me that they haven’t put more time into more people into the personnel process. I think that’s something that’s going to really be problematic for this administration over the next couple of weeks and months.
Matt Grossmann: Because Project 2025 became a campaign issue, there was more attention than usual to the role of the Heritage Foundation in potentially setting up the new Republican administration and conflicts between IT and the America First Policy Institute as kind of an alternative starting point for a new Trump administration. But as you’ve alluded to, this isn’t all that different from the role of these kinds of groups in past transition. So what should we make so far of the role of these administrations in waiting and the planning that took place outside compared to what’s happening now?
Heath Brown: I think the simple answer is that AFPI has won the transition. So that would just be the top line. You’d say, “Well look at the cabinet.” Maybe not the full cabinet, but of the appointees, the major appointees, eight or nine were AFPI chairs and not nearly as many Heritage affiliated experts and scholars have been appointed so far. So in that way, you’d say AFPI has won. More than anything else, a president doesn’t want to hear about anyone involved in planning for their administration other than themselves, which doesn’t mean extensive planning isn’t going on. That’s always the case, but it’s the publicness of it that often rubs a candidate the wrong way.
And that’s what happened this fall with the rejection of Heritage and Project 2025 by Donald Trump and some of his allies. Now to publicly reject Project 2025 was not the same thing as rejecting the ideas and the recommendations. I think it was the style and tone of Heritage that ultimately meant that it kind of lost the game. I don’t think its ideas have been lost. And so that’s a long way of saying I think that to distinguish these two is to oversell the differences and the importance of the organizational structures for the ideas and power that both of them possess. I think in some ways they both won. They both won because they’ve gotten people into the administration.
They’ve gotten people to the administration with very extensive agendas to change federal policy and I think once all of the different appointments are made, we’re going to see dozens and dozens of Heritage-affiliated experts and dozens and dozens of AFPI-affiliated experts across the government and we will reach the conclusion that they both won this period because ultimately Donald Trump won the election.
Matt Grossmann: Republican administrations often have the issue that they are appointing people to agencies they want to rein in or even eliminate. It’s taken a more virulent form so far this time in that some of the people who are proposed appointees have been the most vocal critics of the places that they are selected to oversee. And of course we have this parallel outside infrastructure being developed by Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk to propose everything from eliminating vast swaths of the bureaucracy to making major cuts. What should we make of that? Both the precedent of that difficulty of having people oversee departments that they want to rein in or that they are critics of, and then the particular form it’s taken this time.
Heath Brown: To take them literally is one would be staggered by the extent of change in a vast array of federal programs. If you take them literally and take the number of federal officials who will be fired, will be let go. If you take seriously the size of the budget cuts that they’re proposing, programs that Americans have come to rely on would be gone, but I don’t think we should take them quite so literally. I think that the ability of them to actually enact this agenda is far from obvious, and a lot of this comes down to the differences between two related objectives.
One of those objectives is sort of built into this so-called new office of government efficiency, which is sort of a repackaged reduction in force infrastructure. Which is to shrink the size of federal government in lots of different ways that they probably haven’t even figured out yet. And on the other hand is the so-called Schedule F strategy. The Schedule F strategy, which is to take senior federal officials, senior bureaucrats and to reclassify them as political appointees and therefore make them eligible for dismissal by the new president, by any president.
Matt Grossmann: During the first Trump administration, especially at the beginning, there were a lot of stories about Trump officials, especially lawyers either telling Trump he could not do something or slow walking his decisions. There have been fears expressed this time somewhat related to the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, but somewhat related to just Trump wanting more yes people appointed to his administration that there will be less of that this time. What can we say about that? How different was it in the first Trump administration compared to difficulties that all presidents would face and does it look like it’ll be different this time?
Heath Brown: We don’t know really. I think the characterization of the first four years is probably right, but it’s probably also been exaggerated. I think it’s been exaggerated by those that serve to benefit from it. I think the claims about a deep state are exaggerated to a great extent, but there’s probably some grain of truth. I think the grain of truth is that federal officials, including lawyers, ultimately understand what the law is and they seek to enforce and implement that law and they try to keep political appointees out of trouble. And when they try to keep them out of trouble, they try to make sure that they’re making decisions that are consistent with the law, and that’s frustrating to political appointees who want to do what they want to do.
A lot of this is going to come down to people like the new White House chief of staff. In the first Trump administration, those chiefs of staff, of which there were many, ultimately made the biggest difference on what President Trump was or was not able to do. The chief of staff is an incredibly important position. In this case, Susie Wiles is not somebody who has a great deal of public exposure. It’s probably a good thing, but I think a lot of this is going to come down to her and her ability to communicate with the president, her ability to maintain control over the White House, her ability to remain control over the White House lawyers, some of whom have been appointed specifically for their allegiances to President Trump.
And so I think if you were to revisit this in six months, the question will be is she still in her job? If she’s still in her job, if she still has the job of White House chief of staff, come next spring, summer, that’s probably a good sign for the controls working. If she’s been replaced by that point, I think we’d have a strong signal that something else is happening. I think we’re going to know this very quickly. Obviously much of this is going to end up in the courts. There’s already lots of planning for that. But if I was to look for one signal, one person I’d want to pay a lot of attention to, I think it would be her and her ability to remain control over the White House and over the various people that have all sorts of objectives for what this administration is going to do.
Some pushing the legal boundaries, but she’s the one I’d want to pay a lot of attention to.
Matt Grossmann: As you mentioned, part of the transition is policy planning, and part of that is our expanding day one agenda where the… Especially when there’s a partisan transition, we have a flurry of executive actions, most of which reverse the decisions made by the previous administration. But it does appear that Trump has a bigger plan this year than the first time, and that Biden had expanded those as well. What can we learn about the planning for that day one agenda under Biden and under Trump this time?
Heath Brown: The writing of executive orders and all the different forms that they take dominates a lot of the work of the transition team. There are some teams involved that focus on a single executive order, the entirety of the transition. And their job is to write and rewrite and vet the details of those executive orders. From what we’ve learned about what happened in 2016, the writing and rewriting and vetting of those executive orders that the first Trump administration wrote was incomplete, which is why many of those ultimately got thrown out. It was one of the glaring missteps in the early days of the first Trump administration was their inability to convert promises into action that stuck.
And in many cases it didn’t stick because they hadn’t put in the time to write executive orders well. The incoming Biden Harris administration spent a lot of time, I think they learned from 2016 to take this very seriously. And the people that I talked to described grueling and rigorous processes that go down to the very last moment, nearly to inauguration day with final edits and changes being made going up the chain of the transition team and back down so that on day one or day two, all of those executive orders can be signed by the president. And I think they were pretty effective. Very few of them were thrown out. I think they reflected their agenda, but they weren’t satisfying. As I mentioned earlier, they weren’t satisfying to everyone. In many cases, they were compromised positions.
They weren’t nearly as bold as the so-called groups wanted. They were a moderate approach to many issues, but they were quick and they were immediate. As is the case, we see policy strategy learning across administrations and for however much the incoming Trump-Vance transition might deny it. I think that they have learned a lot from the Biden-Harris administration and learned a lot from that transition team. I think there is information sharing about how to do this well. And executive action is one of the clearest cases where they have taken this incredibly seriously. I think ultimately this is what Heritage has been working on for the last four years. I think Project 2025, this extensive document with lots of chapters on lots of different issues has ultimately been a publicity stunt.
I think the real work going on at AFPI, at Heritage, at all of the different conservative and Republican-affiliated think tanks and research centers has been the writing of executive orders. And I think what the objective has been is to hit this transition without a blank page, but actually something that has already been worked out. And I think for that reason, there’s reason to believe that the executive action taken in the first days of this administration is going to be much more successful. I think it’s much more… Much less likely it’s going to be thrown out by the courts. I think it’s going to be much more extensive.
I think for example, in this area of Schedule F, which was an executive order signed in the fall of 2020 by the Trump administration, overturned with executive action and some additional work on the part of the Biden-Harris administration. I think it’s pretty clear that one of those first executive orders is going to be to reinstate Schedule F and make it stronger than the original version. I think one of the reasons for that is that Schedule F, which again is this proposal to reclassify many federal officials as political appointees. I think one of the reasons why we can be sure that’s going to happen is that it’s a executive action that can be implemented or not implemented with almost no cost and almost no consequence.
It could be enacted, it could be signed by the president and never used and be just as effective as if it’s signed by the president and used frequently. And that’s because one of the effects of it will be to intimidate federal officials into complying with the wishes of the incoming administration. So you can reclassify someone and accomplish the goal of getting them in line, or you can simply have the possibility that they will be reclassified and accomplish the exact same thing. If you don’t have to reclassify them, it’s going to be a lot easier. If you don’t have to replace them, it’s going to be a lot easier. And so my guess in the area of this personnel kind of nuts and bolts issue is that they will sign an executive order.
They’re going to use it very infrequently, but that the impact of it will be quite consequential. And that’s just in one issue. And the same thing may play out in others, but I think they’re going to do this much better because of what they’ve learned from the last two transitions.
Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available bi-weekly from the Niskanen Center. I’m your host, Matt Grossman. If you like this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next, all linked on our website. How bureaucrats deal with political chaos above, how much did Trump undermine US democracy, how bureaucrats make good policy, how presidential appointments reveal policy goals and elite interests, and how the left and right undermine trust in government. Thanks to David Lewis and Heath Brown for joining me. Please check out Roadblocked and then listen in next time.