How do presidential transitions happen?

In 2018, we did an episode on Presidential Transitions. Now that we have had an election, we decided to revisit it. There are nearly 4,000 positions that a president appoints after their inauguration. How do they do it? How long does it take? And why has Donald Trump repeatedly refused to sign the "memoranda of understanding" regarding the transition from the U. S. General Services Administration? Our guest is Max Stier, President and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, which runs the Center for Presidential Transition. Our show started as an explainer of governmental systems in a transition such as the one we're in now. Send us an email at [email protected] if you want us to explain any facet of how our democracy works. CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more! To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro. Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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• 1:30Nick Capodice?

  Hey, everyone. Nick here. It's like 5:22 on November 7th. I'm recording this as I'm walking around. I forgot to account for daylight savings time. It's so dark, and I'm wearing a black hoodie, so gotta be careful.

• 1:54Nick Capodice?

  I'm sure a lot of you out there know the story of how Civics 101 started. If you don't, I'll just tell you real quick. Shortly after Trump was elected as president the first time, the CPU, which is the rather unfun initialism for the people who make podcasts at NHPR, were like sitting around and talking about something that was happening involving the Secretary of State, and then somebody bravely said, "What is the Secretary of State doing again?" And the room... I'll wait for this truck to go by. Ah, it's a big truck. And the room was silent. Somebody was like, "Do any of you know what the Secretary of State does?"

• 2:37Nick Capodice?

  And then Logan Shannon, Logan Shannon, "Thank you for my job." A producer at NHPR, Logan Shannon, wrote down on a Post-it note, "Schoolhouse rock for adults?" Somebody, I don't know who, has that Post-it note in a frame somewhere. But that's how the show started. It was explaining how systems worked in an nonpartisan way after the election of somebody for whom, frankly, democratic norms, you know, were not the norm. So, you know, let's just understand how things work. Here we are.

• 3:17Nick Capodice?

  And when I say here we are, here we are again. So the election was a couple days ago. Donald Trump won. And so we're gonna ask you again, what do you want to know? What systems do you think need explaining? Now, we can't answer what's going to happen. Nobody knows for anything, anything at all. What we can do is explain systems that have existed for 250 years, or have evolved to what they are over 250 years. And we can do it by interviewing the people who understand those systems best.

• 4:03Nick Capodice?

  So I hope you'll consider sending us an email. Just send it to [email protected]. And tell us what you want to know about. And we'll get started right away. All right, here's presidential transitions. And oh, before, before we launch into it, Hannah and I recorded this on Election Day. We were in the studios here at Concord. We were all, you know, civics up. So we had no idea what was going to pan out that night. Even though the interview I did with Max Stier was last week, everything he says still holds true. All right. Drop us a line. Enjoy the episode.

• 4:50Nick Capodice?

  You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.

• 4:53Hannah McCarthy?

  I'm Hannah McCarthy.

• 4:54Nick Capodice?

  And today we are talking about what happens when one president leaves and another comes in. We're talking presidential transitions. Hannah, real quick, do you want to tell everyone when we're recording this?

• 5:07Hannah McCarthy?

  Yep, we are recording this on Election Day, on November 5th, 2024. Nick, did you vote? Because I voted.

• 5:14Nick Capodice?

  I did. I voted this morning. It was great.

• 5:16Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, so we are at the studio. There are reporters dashing all around the state. And we just talked to Vermont Public Radio about this year's election. So there's a lot going on.

• 5:28Nick Capodice?

  All this to say, we do not know anything about the election results when we're recording these words that you're hearing now. Future us does know, maybe you do too, but we are in the dark. Hannah, I'm hesitant to play this. Do you remember this?

• 5:42Speaker 07

  Both of you guys are theater. You have theater backgrounds, right?

• 5:46Hannah McCarthy?

  We do, indeed.

• 5:47Speaker 07

  So you're going to do a little song and dance thing?

• 5:49Nick Capodice?

  We're going to do a Civics 101 Christmas Carol.

• 5:52Hannah McCarthy?

  Yes, absolutely. Oh, so green.

• 5:57Hannah McCarthy?

  It's not easy being green. What is this, like six years ago?

• 6:00Nick Capodice?

  It was just about. Civics 101 did an episode on presidential transitions in 2018. And it was the episode where the former host of the show, Virginia Prescott, announced she was leaving and that, Hannah, you and I would be the new hosts. Do you remember how it felt when we made that episode?

• 6:17Hannah McCarthy?

  I remember feeling like I didn't want to disappoint anybody because Civics 101 already meant a lot to me and I already really, really believed in it. And I felt like this huge responsibility had been handed to me and I desperately wanted to get it right.

• 6:34Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, I didn't know what the show was gonna be. I didn't know what it was gonna be like with me and with you together. I was nervous. I think I was just staring at my shoes the whole time. I was terrified. But yet, here we are.

• 6:46Hannah McCarthy?

  Here we are.

• 6:48Nick Capodice?

  Well, we've got a presidential transition that is gonna happen. So I reached out to the same guy we spoke to all those years ago, and here he is.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  My name is Max Steyer. I'm the president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service. And we are a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to a better government and a stronger democracy.

• 7:11Nick Capodice?

  And Max's organization is the one that runs the Center for Presidential Transition.

• 7:16Hannah McCarthy?

  So, Nick, we have talked about the peaceful transfer of power before, actually a few times on this show, but this is the actual process of one person leaving the office and another person coming in. Does the president-elect have any powers before they're inaugurated? I mean, I'm assuming the sitting president, you know, continues to be the person with the presidential powers, but I guess I've never actually answered this question for myself.

• 7:43Speaker 00

  It's a very, very important point, and that is that after the election, we still have one president, and that one president is the incumbent who got elected four years earlier and is president until January 20th, until inauguration day. And they do their job. Their job, meaning that they keep us safe, that they are responsible- For those 450-plus departments, for our national security, for all the issues that have to be addressed. And sometimes there is confusion in people's minds, including allies and enemies abroad, as to who actually is president. But make no mistake, it's one president at a time, and it continues to be the incumbent

• 8:27Speaker 00

  until the new person is actually sworn in.

• 8:30Nick Capodice?

  So the term for an outgoing president between Election Day and Inauguration Day, that liminal space, is a so-called lame duck. That's an expression that was first used in this way in the 1920s. And it is worth adding here that the lame duck administrations used to be a heck of a lot longer. Inauguration Day used to be in March. However, the 20th Amendment ratified in 1933 moved it to January. Now, I want to make something very clear here, though. Even though a president isn't a president until the inauguration, the work for that transition happens much earlier.

• 9:08Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, what is the first step? What is the first thing that an incoming president has to do?

• 9:14Speaker 00

  Well, the first thing that has to happen when a new president comes to power is they need to be prepared to take over the most complicated, important organization, not just in our country, but on the planet and probably in history. And when I say that, that means the United States government, and the United States government is north of $6 trillion spend, 450-plus organizations, 3.5 million people when you count the uniform services and civilians, 4,000 political appointees, 1,300 of which require Senate confirmation. So it is not you walk in and you just start on day one by coming into the Oval Office and you're good to go.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  You've had to do a ton of planning to be able to actually take over our government in a considered and a capable way. And this is about our safety as a country. You know, no small beans.

• 10:11Hannah McCarthy?

  What does Max mean when he says that it's about our safety as a country?

• 10:16Nick Capodice?

  Well, picture a restaurant, right?

• 10:22Nick Capodice?

  You've got chefs, kitchen staff, front of house staff, maybe including a bartender. You've got a menu, a reservation system. You've got all that, if you were, in one night to replace every single person who worked in the restaurant. You put a new coat of paint on the walls, you design a new menu, you change out every computer, you empty and refill the walk-in, put in a new POS system.

• 10:45Hannah McCarthy?

  That is the point-of-sale system, by the way. It is what waitstaff use to send their orders to the kitchen, and learning a new one can be tricky.

• 10:52Nick Capodice?

  Thank you, Hannah. It's a dangerous initialism there. I was always, I was so terrible at the POS. I was not a good waiter, surprisingly. I was a terrible waiter.

• 11:00Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, I was a, I gotta say, I was a tremendous, tremendous server.

• 11:04Nick Capodice?

  Why am I not surprised? If you did all that, I do not think that there is a restaurant in the world that would be ready to open in 24 hours. I don't care if you're Carmi Brizotto, you can't do it, cousin. Forty-five minutes to open, chefs. But America is not a restaurant. It cannot take a few weeks to get the US Armed Forces and the Treasury Department and the rest of the 3.5 million staff of the executive branch used to new management. It has to be working smoothly the second the oath of office is taken.

• 11:41Hannah McCarthy?

  Heard. Yes, chef. Yes, chef. Say it back, please, chef. And there are 4,000 political appointees who have to be appointed when the new president takes office?

• 11:53Nick Capodice?

  Yes, and 1,200 of them have to be confirmed by the Senate. And that number's high, but it's not how it used to be. So, we used to operate under what was called the spoils system, where the president appointed almost every executive employee.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  It was, you know, President Jackson that started the spoils system in the 1820s, and it ended in the assassination of President Garfield by a disgruntled job seeker.

• 12:26Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, I remember this from another episode. Charles Gatto shot President Garfield because Gatto believed he was unfairly snubbed over an appointment as an ambassador. And, long story short, this led to the creation of the civil service where people are appointed not politically, but based on their skills and knowledge ostensibly.

• 12:45Nick Capodice?

  Very well done, Anna.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  And there was a progressive movement where Americans appreciated that their government needed to be apolitical and professional, but the political appointments still continued. People have just accepted a, what I would say, an unhealthy level of political appointees for quite some time. They really haven't appreciated why that is a problem. And the counterargument is that you want a government that is actually responsive to the democratically elected leaders. The reality is you don't need 4,000 people to make that occur, and it is counterproductive, both because it's super difficult to get them in place and because they are not as

• 13:31Speaker 00

  expert in understanding how to actually run the system.

• 13:34Hannah McCarthy?

  How long does it typically take for these 4,000 appointments to happen?

• 13:38Nick Capodice?

  I am going to get to that right after a quick break.

• 13:41Hannah McCarthy?

  But before that break, if you are someone who wants to know the story of the folk song about Charlie Gatto, that is the sort of thing that we put in our newsletter, extra credit. It's fun, it's free, it comes out every two weeks, and you can sign up at our website, civics101podcast.org.

• 14:01Nick Capodice?

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• 14:43Nick Capodice?

  set it up once and they keep working in the background. You can even track the progress on a dashboard. And for our listeners, we have an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Just go to incogni.com/civics or use the code civics at checkout. There's a link in the episode description. Remember, they can't harm you if they can't find you.

• 15:06Nick Capodice?

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• 16:28Speaker 03

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• 16:56Hannah McCarthy?

  We're back. We're talking about presidential transitions and Nick, you were about to tell me how long it takes for the 4,000 political appointees to be appointed.

• 17:08Nick Capodice?

  I was, and I got to start by saying it depends on the job, but more importantly, whether that job needs to be confirmed by the Senate. Here again is Max Stier.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  If it's one of those positions that requires Senate confirmation, the top jobs in government, if you're the Cabinet Secretary, or the Deputy Secretary, or the Agency Head, you then have to have the United States Senate agree that you are the right person. And that requires you to be vetted, to go through a security clearance, to have your financial holdings examined by the Office of Government Ethics, for you to have a hearing before the Committee of Jurisdiction in the Senate, and then ultimately for you to have a vote by the entire Senate, which you have to get a majority of the senators to support you. So it can be a very lengthy process. Unfortunately, it has become an even more onerous process, so that the time it takes on average to get confirmed in one of these

• 18:03Speaker 00

  jobs is now over 191 days.

• 18:06Hannah McCarthy?

  191 days?

• 18:08Nick Capodice?

  Yeah. And that is a number that has increased over the last few decades, Hannah. It is double the amount of time that it took during the George W. Bush administration.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  That means that there are some people, like the Cabinet Secretaries, that often get in very quickly. And then there are a lot of people for whom it can take more than a year. And again, imagine what that means for the individual, where they are in purgatory, wondering what's going to happen, very difficult for them to even continue. Their prior job because they can't create any conflicts for themselves. And the institutions that need running are waiting for someone that isn't there. And they have an acting official who is the, you know, proverbial substitute teacher. And a substitute teacher that's around for a very long period of time.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  So it is a broken system and it is getting more broken.

• 19:04Hannah McCarthy?

  Did Max have an example of a political appointment that he feels maybe should not be political?

• 19:12Nick Capodice?

  He certainly did.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  And this is particularly true for the kinds of organizations that are operational as opposed to policy and emphasis. So an example of this would be the Veterans Health Administration. It's a hospital system, the largest one in our country and probably in the world. And you need a hospital administrator running it. That should not be a political job because it's a political and Senate confirmed job. There are large gaps in time and between leaders and the leaders that get appointed, who eventually get in place, don't last very long. So they can't actually get the job done well.

• 19:52Hannah McCarthy?

  I'm assuming a lot of these people who are hired after the transition need security clearance, right?

• 19:58Nick Capodice?

  Right, many of them do. And we have a whole episode on the process and the many levels of clearance.

• 20:04Hannah McCarthy?

  What about the president themselves? Do they just get access to all of the top secret stuff when they take office?

• 20:13Nick Capodice?

  They pretty much do.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  So a president is a little special in multiple ways. And that includes with security clearance. And the president has the right to access to everything. And they also, the security clearance process is really defined by executive action rather than legislative action. So the president has full control over that entire architecture of classified information and how and who is ultimately is available to. There are lots of rules and regulations that have been created over time. That are quite important. There are certainly places that it can be improved. But it is really important to respect the process itself and the professionals who are

• 20:58Speaker 00

  responsible for overseeing it. So the transition support that the federal government gives is extremely important. It provides candidates with access to cyber protection, to office space, and ultimately to information about what is happening in the government that a president-elect and his or her team will need to know in order to be able to be ready on day one to run those agencies. And think about it, the world is complicated, there's a lot going on. You would want to, and if you're flying the airplane, you need to know not only how to fly an airplane, but what the weather is there, where you're going,

• 21:41Speaker 00

  all sorts of information. And that's effectively what we hope to have with new leaders inside government agencies. So in this cycle, I think one of the big questions that has been raised that the law does not really account for is the fact that as of now, the Trump transition team has not entered into the agreements with the governmental entities that run transitions that it needs to do in order to have access to the critical information that will allow a potential, you know, future Trump team to be ready to govern on day one.

• 22:20Hannah McCarthy?

  Just want to make sure I have this right. The Harris-Wallz campaign agreed to work with the Center for Presidential Transitions, but the Trump Vance campaign did not.

• 22:31Nick Capodice?

  Correct.

• 22:32Hannah McCarthy?

  I don't actually know why. Why is that?

• 22:34Speaker 00

  It appears as if some of the reasons include that they do not want to limit the amount of money that they can solicit from individuals for paying for their transition operation. Which would be limited to $5,000 if they sign that agreement, and they have to disclose who those donors are.

• 22:54Nick Capodice?

  Secondly, Donald Trump signed an executive order in 2020 that re-designated 20,000 civil servants to, quote, "at-will employees." This meant they could be fired. Now, President Biden reversed that order, but Donald Trump has vowed to reinstitute and expand it to 50,000 if elected.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  First, I will immediately reissue my 2020 executive order restoring the president's authority to remove rogue bureaucrats, and I will wield that power very aggressively.

• 23:28Speaker 00

  There are other requirements that appear to be problematic for them, including that they would need to have an ethics plan that would include a description of how the president, him or herself, would avoid conflicts of interest, financial conflicts of interest. But be that as it may, whatever the ultimate reasons, they have not yet entered into those agreements that were, the target dates were September 1 and October 1, so we are well past the dates in which that should have happened. And the closer we get to the post-election period, the more and more damaging this can become. We are in uncharted territory here, and scary uncharted territory.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  So it is not the way the transition process was designed to run, and it's not the way to maximize the best handoff of power, if indeed former President Trump wins again.

• 24:28Hannah McCarthy?

  Regardless of the winner of the election happening right this very second, this is something that will continue to be a struggle every four or eight years. You have to turn over that restaurant, no matter what, and you have got to do it fast.

• 24:45Nick Capodice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:46Hannah McCarthy?

  I'm wondering, you know, is there any way to make transitions? Simpler, easier?

• 24:52Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, Max had some suggestions, and unsurprisingly, it was his view that we are a healthier democracy if we do not use the spoil system.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  First and foremost, we should have many, many, many, many, many fewer Senate-confirmed positions. 1,300 is crazy. We also frankly should have many fewer political appointees. If you look at other democracies, they count their political appointees at most in the 10s. You know, maybe you get to 100. And we are unique amongst democracies and certainly our peers in having 4,000 or even, you know, counting in thousands. It is a vestige of the spoil system, and it's not a good one. And it means that we delay getting leaders

• 25:42Speaker 00

  in place. It also means that we have fewer people who are concerned about the long-term health of the institutions that they're responsible for. And it means that frankly, we typically have people who are less qualified in these leadership positions than we could have if we actually had more apolitical, professional choices for those folks.

• 26:14Nick Capodice?

  That's it for the episode on presidential transitions. It's not it for presidential transitions, though. This episode is made by Mina Capodice with Hannah McCarthy. Christina Phillips is Civics 101's senior producer. Rebecca LaVoy is our executive producer. Music in this episode from Chris Sabriski, Blue Dot Sessions, and Epidemic Sound. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio. And again, we're going back to our roots. If you want to know anything, send us an email, [email protected]. And I hope you're well. Really do. All right.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  This is Phil Bredesen, former Democratic governor of the state of Tennessee. If you love digging into how history shapes U.S. policy, check out the new season of You Might Be Right. And this is Bill Haslam, former Republican governor. This season, we're asking the questions that have defined every pivotal moment in American political history. Is democracy really under threat, or is that just a story as old as the republic itself? We're tackling the biggest questions shaping the 2026 midterms, so join us. Follow You Might Be Right wherever you get your podcasts. I don't know what I'm doing. Need a break. Forget it, I quit. Escape to Pluto TV. This is objectively fantastic. Relax into the movies and shows you already know and love, all for free. Shwing! Even our news is uplifting.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  You stay classy, San Diego.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Watch Tommy Boy, Crazy Ex Girlfriend, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The Ex Files, Wayne's World, and so much more. We're not worthy! The best things on TV really are free. You just have to know where to look. Escape to Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.