American Presidential Transition Information

A big help to the Transition Coordinating Council and the overall transition effort. Thank you for taking the time to share your expertise. –- President George W. Bush

A wealth of information...a wonderful road map to a job –- I. Ari Fleischer, White House Press Secretary

Since 1997, the White House Transition Project has combined the efforts of scholars, universities, and policy institutions to smooth out the American presidential transition. WHTP bridges the gaps between the partisan forces engaged in settling elections and the decision processes essential to governing by providing non-partisan information about the challenges of the American presidential transition and the strategies for overcoming those challenges. It provides these and other resources to presidential campaigns, to the president-elect, and to the new administration. These resources include three separate report series providing a White House institutional memory, perspectives on past transitions, and advanced research covering special aspects of transitions and governing. The WHTP also provides unique analysis of the appointments process and a clearinghouse on other transition resources.

Permission to cite freely from these materials is granted provided the following credit is retained: Taken from the White House Transition Project archives, http://whitehousetransitionproject.org, ©1999-2009.

WHTP Resources include:

Click here for expert commentators from the White House Transition Project.

WHTP 
						Director Martha Kumar presents briefs to Bush transition directorThis series provides the essential information needed to assure a smooth transition. Reports in this series detail organization and operations in a range of offices critical to a properly functioning White House. These reports rely heavily on the extensive interviews conducted by WHTP's White House Interview Program, an innovative program that has given practitioners a useful way to pass on their experiences to those that follow, regardless of party. Pictured at left, WHTP Director, Martha Kumar reviews with Bush Transition Director Clay Johnson one of the briefing books WHTP provided for each of the offices covered by the 2001 series: Chief of Staff, Staff Secretary, Director of Personnel, White House Administration, White House Counsel, Press Secretary, and Office of Communications. Mr. Johnson had served as the Bush for President Transition planner and had worked with WHTP staff for almost two years by the time the new administration took office. He would go on to serve as Director of Presidential Personnel in the new White House.

The institutional memory series office descriptions detail basic organizational structures, as well as typical work routines, identify what those who have done the job commonly think has worked and what has not.

The series for 2009 begins with updated descriptions for each of the seven offices covered in the original and highly acclaimed 2001 series. In addition, this series includes organizational charts for many offices typically running from 1978 through 2000 at six month intervals.

Organization Charts

A shortcut to the Institutional Memory Series, The White House World gathers and digests the same material provided to the Bush White House staff in 2001.

White House World
For access to the 2001 version of these reports in the institutional memory series, along with access to organizational charts, select the WHTP - 2001 Institutional Memory Series .
To reach any of the authors of our office studies, download the WHTP Expert Registry or see the brief listings under the "News from WHTP" section.

This series details general challenges to previous transitions. The reports here come from authors and practitioners alike. Click here to jump to the General Transition Series or select one of the individual studies listed below for the specific report. This series has two sets of reports, covering past transitions and the general topic of transitions. [All in PDF Format]

General Guides


Presidential Transition Discussions
A Partnership with the Council on Excellence in Government

A Special Symposium of the Public Administration Review (reprinted here by permission PAR)

Evaluating Past Transitions


Howard Baker, Jr., 
						Terry Sullivan, and James A. Baker III (left to right)

A new series for the 2009 transition, these briefing papers concentrate on issues and resources identified in discussions with past White House staff, including those attending the WHTP and James Baker Institute's meeting of the former White House Chiefs of Staff.

The series exploits new databases developed since the 2004 transition preparations focusing on travel, the 100 days, press, the White House budget, and other matters. It also includes taking advantage of earlier databases produced for the 2001 transition plans, including information on presidential appointments.[All in PDF format]

New Institutional Data

Appointments Database and Analysis

  • The 2008 Plum Book has arrived. WHTP makes it available by download (pdf): download here.
  • The Details of Inquiry — Fixing the Presidential Appointments Process by Terry Sullivan Revised!
  • The Real Invisible Hand: Presidential Appointees in the Administration of George W. Bush by G. Calvin MacKenzie

Special Report: The View from the Nerve Center

Nerve Center jacket

In its first book in the special studies series, WHTP and its partner The James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy of Rice University focus on the specific operational problems faced by the White House Chief of Staff. The book, Nerve Center: Lessons on Governing from the White House Chiefs of Staff is published by the Texas A&M University Press.

Nerve Center compiles the collective judgments of 12 of the 14 living former White House Chiefs of Staff who convened to discuss the challenges that present every White House trying to move the nation's agenda forward. "Some of us have tried to oust others of us from office," noted James A. Baker III in his remarks opening the conference, "but on many issues about how to do the nation's business, we are all agreed there is no partisan answer. Every new administration deserves a chance to realize the electorate's will without stumbling through the simplest mistakes. We've all been there and regardless of who steps into this job on the twentieth of January, we want the best for them."

Those involved in the conference and covered in the book include:

  • Former Congressman, Sec. of Defense, and Vice-President Richard Cheney
  • Former Sec. of Treasury and State James A. Baker III
  • Former Senate Majority Leader and Ambassador Howard Baker, Jr.
  • Former Congressman and Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
  • Former Congressman Leon Panetta
  • Former Governor John Sununu
  • Erskine Bowles
  • John Podesta
  • Jack Watson
  • Thomas "Mack" McClarty
  • Former Sec. of Transportation Samuel Skinner and
  • Kenneth Duberstein.

Their discussions in Nerve Center range over topics about staffing the White House, crisis management, political leadership, predatory partisanship in Washington, presidential decision-making, and a host of other topics associated with presidential transitions and governing from the modern White House. Two scholarly articles summing up the operational dilemmas the Chiefs face and evaluating the 2001 transition round out this useful resource from the WHTP.

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Headlines


Senate's Appointments Reform Agenda

In early July, the US Senate passed S. 679 a bill to make modest reforms to the presidential appointments process. The bill transformed around 200 PAS positions into PA positions, voluntarily giving up the Senate's consent on these appointments. In addition to surprising pundits who had predicted the Senate would never voluntarily reduce its control over even the most minor positions, the Senate also initiated a review of the inquiry process designed to streamline the appointments process.

One of WHTP's primary missions focuses on promoting better understanding of the details of the presidential appointments process, particularly the details of inquiry. "There is so much of that process that is simply myth," said Terry Sullivan, who directs the Institutional Anatomy Series. "Until WHTP got into it, no one really understood the breadth or depth of the questioning that nominees faced and which several studies have shown demoralizes them and threatens the vitality of the Executive policy making capacity."

WHTP has published research on reforming the appointments process. In particular its Details of Inquiry set out the elements of redundancy and repetitiveness that plagues nominees and the process. And the Senate Committee report accompanying S. 679 quoted several passages from that research citing a version of the WHTP study that appeared in the Public Administration Review. The WHTP report covers three problems with appointments: inexperience, the lengthening process, and its needlessly adversarial and tedious inquiry. WHTP then recommends a series of changes including changes to the inquiry process that would relieve nominees of 30% of their reporting burdens without changing any of the information provided by nominees.

S. 679 Background. In March 2011, a bipartisan leadership task force announced proposed changes to the appointments process that it hoped would lay the foundation for more extensive reforms. The recommendations, found in S. 679, called for a modest reduction in the numbers of executive positions which carry a PAS designiation (Presidential Appointee Senate confirmable). These positions typically involve operational rather than policy-making responsibilities and typically include legislative affairs and public affairs officers in the line agencies (e.g., Deputy Administrator, FAA) as well as directors of a number of standing commissions (e.g., Commissioner, Navajo and Hopi Indian Relocation Commission).

The bill also takes steps to rationalize the process associated with gathering nominee information, including development of a "Smart Form" modelled on WHTP's Nomination Forms Online, software developed for the 2000-2001 transition. "We are particularly pleased with this last part of the bill," reported Terry Sullivan, director of the WHTP NFO program, "as it takes significant steps to improve the inquiry process along the lines WHTP has advocated for more than a decade."

Access WHTP's report on rationalizing inquiry and other reports in the Institutional Anatomy Series on this site by clicking here.

Access the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Operations' report on S. 679 by clicking here.

WHTP Director Kumar Testifies on the Future of Presidential Libraries
Answers Questions about Funding and Political Connections

On 1 March 2011, WHTP Director Martha Kumar testified before congressional committees on the future of presidential libraries. She told a special joint sessin of full House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the full House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure that scholars valued the research resources of the presidential libraries and that citizens needed the lessons learned housed in these libraries.

To download Professor Kumar's testimony in a PDF version, click here.

To see the video of the joint Committee hearings, click here.

Director Kumar opening statement praised the presidential libraries system as essential to preserving America's records of its own government's actions. She noted that prior to the library system, presidential papers often fell victim to "the whim of relatives who sometimes gave papers as gifts and even burned them."

Martha Kumar House testimony

She quoted University of Houston Professor Brandon Rottinghouse who characterized the libraries as "invaluable because they hold history in the moment, where secondary sources may misremember or mischaracterize events or trends."

Resource for Learning How Government Works

Professor Kumar noted that the geographic distribution of the Presidential Libraries allows students from all over the country the benefit of a library visit. "Whether they are university students," she noted, "or in high school and elementary school, trips encourage young people to understand government and the history of our presidents. Teaching students is part of what presidential libraries do every day." Students also learn from the libraries through the research of their professors and teachers.

And Professor Kumar also noted that government officials regularly use the resources of the library system. For example, she pointed out that the "The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States [The 9/11 Commission] made heavy use of presidential library materials from earlier administrations in order to discover how events developed and earlier situations were handled."

Presidential Libraries Help Dispell Myths

The Presidential Libraries system, Professor Kumar noted, play an important role in invalidating common conceptions of the presidency and presidents that have no basis in fact. For example, she noted that WHTP research on the daily work routines of presidents also made it possible to discover that there were only small differences between how long each of the modern post world war presidents had work during an average day, dispelling the myth that some had relatively shorter work schedules or that some presidents invest far more attention to diplomacy and less to the economy than had their predecessors.

Openness and Politics

During committee questioning, members asked Director Kumar about the process of raising funds for the creation of libraries and whether the Congress ought to require the libraries to publish their records of donations and donors. Professor Kumar underscored the importance of transparency in carrying out every government activity. She also noted that some donors to past libraries have legally binding agreements with the libraries to remain anonymous. She suggested that whether such agreements were good policy for the future and should not be given up in favor of general transparency was a good question for congressional deliberations, but she also had seen no evidence that these anonymous donor agreements, even set out while the principal was still president, had led to any genuine political consequences.

Background. Since its beginnings in 1997, WHTP has had a productive relationship with partners at the National Archives and its Presidential Libraries System. For example, the Presidential Libraries house the WHTP's extensive collection of interviews with senior administration officials which make up the backbone of the White House Interview Program. Research leading to WHTP's collection of briefing books depends on the archival materials found in the presidential libraries. And many of the WHTP series on institutional anatomy, e.g., the research on the 100 days, uses data drawn from the library archives.
In addition and like many political scientists who study the presidency, Professor Kumar's own research on presidential communications relies heavily on the materials housed in the various presidential archives.


WHTP Helps with the Colombian
Presidential Transition

Often WHTP's primary missions has focused global attention to the details of presidential decision making, and that attention in turn brings foreign governments to WHTP for assistance as they grapple with their own work. In early December, WHTP's Executive Director Terry Sullivan began providing that assistance to the Colombian government of President Juan Santos.

Colombian President Juan Santos (second from left) stands with Terry Sullivan (on right)

"With an incredibly deep experience in governing, President Santos has developed an expansive agenda for his country," Professor Sullivan noted, "and we were glad to help with that work even just a little bit." The WHTP provided review of a new approach President Santos has proposed for restructuring the Colombian executive. In addition, and at the invitation of the UN, Professor Sullivan attended a coloquium of the President, his Executive Ministers, and his principal staff to discuss and more thoroughly examine his proposed new executive structure.



Transition Quote:

I think that there's a certain lightness that has gone out of me. My responsibilities do not compare to those that the president has, and yet, I've had some... life-and-death decisions to make.

- Eric Holder, Jr. Newsweek interview

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