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Transitions are a huge management challenge
There are some 4,000 political positions to fill in any new administration, approximately 1,200 of them requiring Senate confirmation.
That makes transitions a huge management challenge, said Clay Johnson, who led George W. Bush’s transition in 2000. That transition was delayed by the Florida recount.
“It was just so hard and unbelievable. People were crying and were losing sleep and so forth and so on,” said Johnson. “An incredible amount has to happen in a short period of time.”
During a transition, people are angling for jobs, working connections to get in. “The most important thing to pick the right people is to figure out what is the picture of success that you want to realize on behalf of the country,” said Johnson.
A campaign adviser said the jockeying for jobs in the second Trump administration has already been intense. Loyalty to Trump and a desire to disrupt Washington are top qualifications this time.
Trump’s transition team has downplayed the agreements
Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnick has downplayed the importance of the documents.
“We’ll probably get them signed,” Lutnick said in an interview with CNN a week before the election. “These are not important issues. This is sort of a low-grade issue.”
Stier said he’s worried Trump is about to repeat the history of what is widely seen as one of the worst transitions of modern times: Trump’s last transition.
In 2016, Trump’s team signed versions of the same documents and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who was charged with leading the transition, spent months crafting plans, vetting potential staff and working cooperatively with the outgoing Obama administration to make sure Trump would have what he needed on day one.
And then, two days after the election, Christie was fired by Trump adviser Steve Bannon. Not only was Christie out, but he said, so were all the plans.
“They had won a race that most people didn’t think they could win,” Christie told the Transition Lab podcast. “And now they thought, and now we’re going to run a transition in an unconventional way and watch everybody react to that.”