Presidential Transition: Coming Soon to the FDA
When Americans vote on November 5th, the incumbent President will not be on the ballot. As a result, someone new will be inaugurated on January 20, 2025, and serve as President of the United States for the next four years.
The intervening 70 or so days go by the inelegant term “transition.” During that period, “transition teams” appointed by the incoming President will be briefed by their assigned agency. The teams will then make recommendations to the incoming Administration’s leadership that will help guide them in their early days in office.
In preparation, incumbent agency officials have created detailed transition briefing books. Both major presidential campaigns are, behind the scenes, evaluating job candidates and preparing action plans for the early days of their hoped-for administration.
The transition teams are composed of a mix of campaign advisors, think tanks, and “lawyers from around town,” all of whom share knowledge of the agency’s responsibilities and activities and a personal or ideological tie with the incoming Administration.
Big donors are often part of the big-picture transition: less likely to be part of the ground-level agency transition teams because they either lack the subject matter expertise or lack the willingness to devote so many hours in such a short period of time to detailed work.
Typically (but not always), transition team members are not seeking appointments and are content for their hard work to be rewarded by the tangible sign of favor (“I am an insider”) that comes from being on a transition team. In most cases, the transition teams are not involved in the recruitment and vetting of appointees. Rather, the incoming Administration will set up an “Office of White House Personnel.”
Most of the political appointees from the previous (Biden) administration can be expected to “voluntarily resign” from their posts.
The transition is likely to be dramatic if there is a second Trump Administration. All but a handful (if that) of political appointees will vacate their posts by noon on January 20 (when the swearing-in takes place). Senior career officials are typically designated as caretakers pending the appointment of political candidates. Political appointees to non-confirmable posts will likely assume certain jobs quickly and become “acting” for confirmable positions above them.
In a Harris Administration, the process will occur less urgently but is likely to be nearly as thorough. In the Reagan-to-Bush transition (the last in which a same-party transfer occurred on Inauguration Day), about 10% of HHS appointees ultimately retained their jobs. Most people did not receive letters (i.e., “the President thanks you for your service and accepts your resignation”) in January, but by April almost everyone was gone.
Using this example, there may be a perception among the general public that many Biden (Reagan) staffers will be retained by the incoming Harris (Bush) Administration. On the contrary, Harris will want to pick her own team and may not even continue with some people with whom she has worked closely as Vice President.
Even within the same transition, teams will vary greatly. In some cases, the team leader will be told who is on the team; in others, the team leader will have called around to see who is willing to take a ten-week leave of absence from their day job. Some teams will be more ideologically driven in their work, while others will be more focused on the nuts and bolts of transfer of power.
In the Carter-to-Reagan transition (the first I remember), the leaders were mostly veterans of Reagan’s two terms as Governor of California. Not surprisingly, they had a strong sense of how the government operates.
Transition for a second Trump Administration may be more of the opposite. It is hard to imagine RFK, Jr. has a good grasp of the breadth and life-impact of HHS and USDA programs and how difficult it is to change course if you are thinking in terms of days and weeks (rather than months and years). Similarly, if Elon Musk is assigned to make government smaller, he will have to learn that trimming $2 trillion from the federal government’s $6.75 trillion FY 24 budget is not possible if discretionary spending amounts to only $1.6 trillion ($842 billion for defense programs and $758 billion for nondefense activities).
Presidential transitions are always uncomfortable. That’s the universal experience of the transfer of government authority.
Editorial Note:
The Analysis and Commentary section is written by Steven Grossman, Executive Director of the Alliance for a Stronger FDA.