'Severe disadvantage': Trump transition running 'nearly a month behind' other presidencies
President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly promised to hit the ground running from the moment he is inaugurated, planning to rapidly confirm his Cabinet and start implementing his agenda at light speed. But the slow pace of Trump's transition suggests he may have difficulty racking up many accomplishments in his first 100 days.
Politico's Alice Miranda Ollstein recently reported that the president-elect has been dragging his feet on the presidential transition process, putting him "nearly a month behind" previous administrations in coordinating with outgoing White House officials. This means that Trump's potential new Cabinet secretaries will be unable to get up to speed on complex policy issues ahead of their confirmation (also known as the "agency review process.")
Kathleen Sebelius, who was the governor of Kansas before becoming Health and Human Services Secretary under former President Barack Obama, said that a seamless transition process is all the more critical for Trump's nominees specifically, given their lack of experience overseeing large bureaucracies. HHS, for example, has a workforce of roughly 80,000 people and controls 13 different sub-agencies.
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“They’re really operating, I would say, at a severe disadvantage,” Sebelius told Ollstein. “It has been decades and decades since somebody has been in these Cabinet offices without any sort of expertise or experience. And there are lots of barriers built into the structure of a huge agency like HHS, where you really can’t just come in and wave a magic wand and say, ‘You used to do things this way, and now we’re going to do it differently.’”
Ollstein pointed out that the agency review process typically starts almost immediately after the election in mid-November. While Trump finally started sending President Joe Biden's White House names of its designated transition personnel for various agencies, Biden's transition team submitted its paperwork to the lame duck Trump White House on November 10 (though Trump's team didn't comply due to his insistence that he didn't lose the election).
Under previous administrations, the General Services Administration (GSA) provides several million dollars in funding for presidential transitions. But Trump's incoming second term transition team has declined to submit GSA paperwork and opted to run the transition entirely with private money. Valerie Smith Boyd, who is the director of the Center for Presidential Transition at the non-partisan Partnership for Public Service (which helps both parties with the transfer of power), said this could end up causing headaches for the incoming administration in the near future.
“Agencies would normally be prepared to start sharing unclassified information now,” Boyd said. “But in the absence of a GSA-secure network, individual agencies will need to rely on their best practices for sharing controlled but unclassified information — anything that might be kind of more sensitive than the norm, like law enforcement information.”
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Click here to read Politico's full report.