Inside the Presidential Transition

When a new president is elected in November, millions of American voters will have closely followed the race through election night. Many will tune in again in January when the president-elect is sworn into office. But fewer will follow what happens between those two events, a roughly 70-day period of organizing and political strategizing known as the presidential transition.

One person who will be closely scrutinizing this period is Dr. Heath Brown, Associate Professor of Public Policy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and author of the new book Roadblocked: Joe Biden’s Rocky Transition to the Presidency. For Brown, the transition is one of the most important—if underappreciated—parts of the U.S. presidential election, meant to ensure a smooth transfer of power between administrations.

“There’s this tendency to treat it as a bureaucratic and boring process, but there are so many crucial decisions that have to be made,” Brown said. “There are personnel decisions, policy decisions, organizational decisions, decisions about the structure of the White House.”

Brown’s book delves into the inner workings of the modern presidential transition, using the 2020 presidential race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden as a case study. That transition was marked by several historic events, from a global pandemic to national protests over the treatment of Black Americans by police, not to mention an unprecedented attack by Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol. “With a transition across a very large federal government, lots of things happen,” Brown said. “And in 2020, some very abnormal things happened.”

Perhaps the most abnormal aspect of the transition, Brown said, was the distinct lack of cooperation between Trump administration officials and Biden’s transition team, stoked by the outgoing president’s refusal to concede the election. In interviews with hundreds of transition team members and other government stakeholders, Brown heard stories about encounters with Trump officials unwilling to work with the incoming administration, including in critical agencies like the Department of Defense and Office of Management and Budget. “This country had a centuries-long tradition of peaceful transfers of power,” Brown said. “That came to an end on January 6th, as everyone knows. But it came to an end in much smaller ways during the transition period.”

Brown contrasts this with past presidential transitions, such as the one between George W. Bush and Barack Obama in 2008. Despite occurring during a global economic crisis, that transition was nearly seamless due to the close cooperation between the outgoing and incoming administrations. “For transitions to be truly democratic and fair, and to promote stability and safety, all important parties must be committed to that idea,” Brown said. “In 2020, not all parties were committed. And it opened the country to enormous risks.” 

And yet, beyond the obstructionists, many people Brown interviewed described their interactions with other Trump officials as “business as usual.” This included long-serving federal appointees and low-level administrators who oversee the nuts and bolts of the transition, whom he calls “the glue that sort of links everything together.” One of Brown’s motivations for writing the book was to highlight these figures, whose work often goes unappreciated. “These are not the people who end up becoming the White House chief of staff or running a federal agency,” Brown said. “These people are just involved in trying to do the right thing and get the administration ready.” Brown noted that among these officials, “on most issues, there is a great deal of agreement. And even when there is no agreement, there’s much cooperation.”

Looking ahead, Brown said that the difficulties surrounding the 2020 transition—as well as Trump’s 2016 transition, which he called “the most chaotic in history”—further underscore the need for more comprehensive planning and cooperation during future presidential elections. Among other problems, Trump’s refusal to concede the election in 2020 caused the General Service Administration, the federal agency tasked with facilitating transition-related funding and services, to delay its support, hampering the Biden team’s ability to get an administration up and running. In response, Congress in 2020 amended the 1963 Presidential Transition Act, further clarifying the GSA’s responsibilities and requiring candidates to publicly release ethics plans for their transitions before elections.

“What Congress has done is to make this a much more straightforward process,” Brown said. “What they haven’t done is to address the more serious issue, which is a spirit of cooperation in Washington. That takes a commitment, the kind George W. Bush showed in 2008, a commitment that was not compelled by federal law. It’s a commitment to doing what’s right for the country.”

“Ultimately, it’s very hard to legislate teamwork.”