ELECTION
This is what’s already missing from Trump’s transition planning
When will Trump name his agency review team?
There’s been a lot of attention since the election on the failures of the Trump transition team to sign required agreements with the General Services Administration and the White House.
There are enormous risks to public confidence in a new administration when the process begins without the transparency mandated by Congress. Unlimited donations to support the transition team, as well as non-disclosure of the names of donors, means conflicts of interests will haunt this new administration, if they already don’t.
As important is another failure thus far.
Four years ago, though the Biden-Harris transition wasn’t even officially allowed to start its work (recall the GSA refused to ascertain the results of the election, and thus the transition was delayed by three weeks), it quickly named the hundreds of members of its agency review team or ART.
This is the team charged with collecting up information about the important but often ignored issues every federal agency is facing. The Partnership for Public Service described them as “the bridge between the president-elect and the mammoth organization they will soon oversee.” This is big work, since the federal government is divided into hundreds of complex units. The Biden-Harris team divided the work accordingly, much as Trump had in 2016.
Trump named Ron Nicol, a Boston Consulting Group executive, to oversee six agency teams during that transition: defense, national security, economics, domestic issues, and management/budget issues. Trump also had someone leading an “Agency Transformation and Innovation” team, overseen by Beth Kaufman, as well as an extensive “Policy Implementation Team”, run by Ado Machida.
The 2016 Trump transition team, despite many stumbles, was able to prepare briefing books for the incoming appointees that included detailed updates on what every leader of government needs for Day 1.
This is why the Biden-Harris transition team did the same thing four years later. On November 10, it named hundred of agency review team members, including their previous employment and the source of their payment for the work. This is an important feature of the transition law that instills additional confidence in the public that those charged with collecting agency information are also not the ones who will benefit from this insider information in the future. Its a part of a sound approach to ethics.
To this day, you can still find information about that entire team online.
As important, the information gleaned from the outgoing administration and, importantly, senior careerists in government, helps to prepare the new administration for current challenges and also what’s to come next. This careful preparation, which federal officials have been busy with for over a year, is integral to being ready for what is not known, including unexpected emergencies.
The Trump transition clearly is still in its early days, but the failure to announce its agency review team is troubling. Ascertainment didn’t slow the start to its transition, so it should have been ready for this moment. Now, it could be that this team is already up and working, and we just don’t know it yet.
It also could be that the team has not been assembled yet, and will commence at some point soon. Whether such an announcement will comply with past practice to share detailed information about each member of the team, is another question.
In either case, this raises serious questions about whether the Trump team will be ready for Day 1. Also, whether on Day 1, the American public will be confident that the incoming administration is ready to govern without the specter of conflicts interests in the air.
