congress has a tendency to swing from one way of operating to another. so, i am cautiously optimistic. host: philip wallach is a senior fellow at the american enterprise institute. his book "why congress" will be out this spring from oxford university press. you can see his work online.

good evening, everyone and welcome to politics and prose. i'm brad graham, the co-owner of the bookstore, along with my wife, lissa muscatine and we're delighted to have with us this evening at david marchick here to talk about his new book the peaceful transfer of power, an oral history, america's presidential transitions. so, you know, for all the books and scholarship devoted over the years to the american presidency

the period specifically of presidential transition hasn't received much attention. as dave writes at the of his book, a number of scholarly on presidential transitions can be counted on to. and the two major academic treatments of this subject are already decades and yet a smooth and peaceful transition from one president to the next is a fundamental feature. our democracy and we all learned last year this period can prove rather vulnerable and, a rather vulnerable and precarious for the country of some of those resists to go along one group that has done some work on transition is partnership for public service, which is a nonprofit dedicated, creating a more effective, functioning federal government. and 2008 partnership for public service began gathering best practices and offering

assistance in presidential transitions and 2016. it set it set up the center for transition in the run up to 2021 transition day who had a recently retired from the carlyle group where he'd been a managing director, accepted an offer to the center. he brought to the task his own experience. a former attorney and as a former official in the clinton administration and as well as an interest in history, politics and management. and little did he, like the rest of us, realize the months ahead would one of the most complicated and contentious transition seasons in u.s. history, dave and a team put together something they call the transition lab podcast, which in 2020, collected many interviews about the peaceful transfer of from former transition team leaders, chiefs of staff,

cabinet secretaries, history agents and journalists. those interviews ended up constituting the largest and most comparable sense of oral history of presidential transition going on to write this book, dave has expanded on those interviews. adding comment terry to provide context. he also highlights some key lessons that hopefully will benefit future transitions. dave himself spent a year in the biden administration as chief operating officer of the development finance and he's now dean of the business school at american university. he'll be in conversation here this evening with someone also who has looked closely at transitions she's a presidential transition. she's she's covered two of them. nancy cook is white house correspondent for bloomberg news. and this is her sixth, sixth year reporting on the white house. previously, she's reported for politico national journal and

newsweek. so please join me in welcoming david marchick nancy cook. thanks so much for having us. i met dave during the last transition when i was reporting on it. little did we know of what would come of it. but i guess i'm just curious. start out the talk talking about what you think the future of presidential transitions are you still have a major political party. the majority of republicans who say that the election was rigged that biden did not actually win. i'm curious like what does that mean for having peaceful transition moving ahead. well, first of all, thank you for being here, nancy. brad, thank you for hosting. thank you all for coming. i want to recognize coauthors. alex is here. alex tippett and aj wilson. so we worked for a year and a half thank you for your great

work and mom is here as well as is my mom. so in the book, can burns was nice enough to write the and he starts by talking about lincoln's famous where lincoln hearkened to the angels and for most of our history actually presidential transitions did appeal to the better angels there a bipartisan affair most went fairly smoothly. there have been some bad transitions, but the modern era really carter transition things have been a bipartisan affair even in contested elections like bush v gore, clinton actually cooperated. bush he provided bush with intelligence briefings and other services and support even when the election was contested, really only up until the last election was this a contentious issue. so i'm hopeful that we can get back to the nonpartisan,

bipartisan nature of presidential transitions. if trump were to run, i think all bets are off twice. he has allowed people under him essentially to play on effectively, organize effectively, and once the election was held, basically threw everything out and impeded the. so hopefully we can get back to the nonpartisan, bipartisan of this handover of power. but we'll see what happens in the next year or two. but he still has such a grip on republican party, and we're seeing that with the midterms. you know, so many of the people are running in congressional races or grew up in a morial races, sort of hallmark for the republican in the stamp of approval is bet on this idea that you think the election that biden did not actually win the election so i guess it is a republican wide fairly wide in the republican party i guess what does that mean forget trump. i think the republican party is going a type of soul searching where trump appeals to a large

segment of the population that's reflected in their elected representatives. and there's a litmus test saying that you don't recognize outcome of the election. i have i've had a couple friends that have run for office and they refuse to say that the election was a hoax and they lost their primary. so this is it's a it's a political reality and it's affecting, i think, about half of half of the republicans in congress have said they don't recognize that in the house. so they don't recognize outcome of the election. i'm hoping that we get back to kind of a more traditional two party system where the parties debate within the bounds of reasonableness. and i mean was bragging over the weekend that the largest crowds he saw was not where on january 6th as if that was positive as opposed to a negative, i guess like in the transition world, you know, you ran the center for partnership for public service during the last transition. how have you all about trying to

make sure that the next transition is peaceful or that there talk about changing laws? do you do i mean what can you do to try to set up something for next time? so the purpose of public, which is a great organization that actually is the central organization that is focused on better, faster transitions, they've come up with a series of recommendations a number of which are in the book which do create opportunity better transitions. number one would be change in the law, which starts the formal process. as you recall in the last transition, you reported on this very. well, there's a provision in the law that allows the head of the general services administration and the gsa to quote ascertain the outcome of the election. this was seen as a ministerial task, not something that was political the the head the gsa under the trump administration, refused to recognize the outcome of election because her boss refused to recognize the outcome of the election that delayed the

transition. so one way to fix that is actually lower the the the standard to start the process to make it easier for the formal transition to start which then means the president elect's team kind of access to agencies can get briefing memos, start to get personnel in place, can start to get political appointments processed and reviewed for their security clearances. that's one thing. second is congress can move the dates up when various transition related activities start. so for example, under current after the nominating candidates president the winning candidate in each party can submit names for security clearances to the justice the fbi so they can get cleared this came out of 911 because after bush was elected because of the delayed transition because bush v gore, he didn't get all his national security people in place.

and 911 happen. so the congress could change the laws to move up and accelerate the transition process. and that would make it better as well. hmm. one of the interesting things that happened during the last transition aside from january six was that the trump administration also really stonewalled the biden people access to some very key agencies, like the office of management and budget is, you know, the budget office controls all the money, very key. but also the department of defense. there were a lot of problems. i wondering what did that mean for policy. so i think the biggest impact was probably on the covid response. so recall during the last transition, we were at the peak of the pandemic, 172,000 americans died between the election and january 20th, 172,000. that's the most any period of time. the vaccine had been developed. but a distribution plan had not been put in place. so the omb was actually critical

because they were funding the distribution plan that eventually took place. the lack of access to the officials at omb, dod and hhs meant that the biden team working on developing a distribution plan could not get access to the and the officials determined what was happening actually nothing was happening and they didn't have a distribution. so what happened is that jeff zients, who head of the transition and then head of the covid czar, was talking to a bunch of governors and elected officials around the country and he realized from them that there was no plan and that led him to work his team to say, we have to put a plan in place from scratch. so did that stall the plan? probably not. i think that they put together a very effective plan so that on january 20th memos went out and said, we're going to start these mass vaccination centers, we're going to fund distribution,

we're going to get pharmacies to cooperate. it did delayed discovery of the fact that there was no plan. and then in other agencies like the united states trade representative for the department of defense, it impeded the cooperation between outgoing and the incoming so that it just was harder for the incoming officials to start to launch, to get organized once they took office, january 20th. yeah, you have an interesting chapter in the book you interview on january 19th, 2021. chris, who is a former business executive, i think he's australian or he's from new zealand originally, but he ran the transition inside the trump white house or tried to tell me a little about what that was like working with him because he was essentially to keep the transition which takes place over a year secret from the president, astronaut ingraham is that right? those are your words on i don't

want to get chris in trouble. but chris was the deputy chief of staff in the trump administration and he was in charge of planning the second term for the trump administration. that the trump administration's view of the transition. josh bolten who was former chief of staff for, president bush, and he one of the co-chairs of, the center that i ran, and also a good friend he and i met with chris liddell in january of 2020 in the white house mess over and we talked to him about transition planning at the end of the breakfast josh chris well what are your plans if trump doesn't win and there was this kind of awkward silence, chris looked down at his plate and said, i guess we have to think about that. so that began a discussion where we with chris and the law

requires the outgoing to prepare for a potential to organize the agencies into different committees to prepare briefing materials to provide space and cell phones and computers. chris actually did a very good there was a whole effort to keep what he did out of the oval office because there was fear that trump impede it. so in the book, alex, aj and i describe the good, the bad and, the ugly, the good was actually pre-election where chris was able to do his work quietly, effectively he coordinated with chris with career officials across the government and did the law required. yeah, he had. i remember reporting on that he hit some deadlines. yes. you almost screwed it up. we can come back to that with with the story that she wrote. we all have different names and life yes the bad post election the good work and the planning

was put on hold. this decision by the head of the gsa just to not start the transition. and then the ugly was january six, which slowed down a lot, including the senate confirmation process and slowed the ability of biden to his people in office. in addition, obviously, the horrible, terrible, bad day that it was. i'm thinking about the children's section of the bookstore downstairs. so i do want to i was so struck by something and so this book is quite interesting because it has transcripts of all these interviews that you did, top transition people. and so you can really hear it in their own words. i was so struck by something that chris told you on 19th, he said he still seemed be tiptoeing around trump even then he said he was about the election results. and he says i thought this was really telling he says quote i don't want to get into ins and outs of the election. what did you make of that so it was obvious to me that chris was

a trying to do the right thing and be under great pressure. i didn't know what we know now from the january commission that there was all chaos loose in the white house. chris actually called me on january six and said i'm resigning and i, you can't resign. and he said this is too much. i stand it. josh bolten i did an event on saturday night. and he said that chris called him as well and chris was in tears and we both amped him to stay. we basically said you have an affiliation with trump you can't shed of that in 14 days you maybe can get two sentence article that says you honorably resigned, but you're the person responsible for getting the transition in place and you can help the next president. united states take office in a

smooth and peaceful away as possible. you can't resign. and he didn't. and actually, i think that a heroic act i do want to tell the story about nancy cook and almost messing this up can i tell that? sure. okay. so this whole effort to create space for chris liddell was confidential. nancy called me one day and said, i hear that chris liddell is actually doing a good job in the white house and said, and i said, does does president trump know that. and i'm going to not comment it. and i said, off the record he is. and she said, will you go on the record with that i said, let me think about that. so i called chris and i called the biden team and i said, chris, does this help you. and he said, actually, it help me with other officials around the government but if there's a story that says i'm doing an effective job and i call the biden people and they said well, chris says it's okay it's okay

with so next day nancy came out with the story and sometimes i see my my friend manuel in the back sometimes journalists may amplify piece so the story read trump the only part of the trump white house is the part that's trying to usher him out of office. so immediately my heart sunk and i thought, this is not good for chris. i didn't call nancy and tell her my heart sank. so night i was texting chris. have you been fired yet? and he finally, you know, he jokingly said, i'm just going to avoid the oval office for a few days. and luckily he wasn't fired. but nancy almost wrecked the transition. i think there are other things at play there, but also, chris, i would say just if you want to map out the power structure in the trump administration, i also think was very close to jared

trump's entire presidency. i think that that helped him at some very key moments. i want to also just you know, you have a bunch of interesting i mean, i note the trump transition we could talk about for four days, but you do have some interesting chapters, sort of just talking about transitions, the past, how they've i was really curious about chapter, about the transition from president hoover to president roosevelt because actually there were a lot of parallels that i hadn't really thought about from that time to the most recent transition. and there was also a pandemic, the economy was tanking. you know, there was really interesting things happening. can you tell me a little bit about why that was so rocky? and then and then what does that actually mean for things like the economy at that time? so at the time of the transition between and roosevelt, the recession, great depression peaked. we had bank runs and 25 states, hitler to power the reichstag burned japan out of the league

of nations starting. their march to imperialism and hoover refused to cooperate with the roosevelt he hated. they knew each other when they were actually were. they were not that far apart. but roosevelt's demeanor and smile made him look a lot younger. i think there were six years or seven years apart, but hoover despised roosevelt. he thought that he was a weak body and a weak mind. yeah. and you write at one point, i think that he set out to we wanted to see if he could embarrass who are very embarrassed roosevelt excuse me about all of his campaign promises. yes. so his view of should be done during the transition was to convince roosevelt to abandon new deal. so in the book i interview a historian named eric rauchway who actually found and he wrote a book called winter's war and i interviewed him and actually brad mentioned that there have been every aspect of the presidency has been studied. there have been 15,000 books on lincoln alone. i asked him why did you write

another book on roosevelt? and he said, well, actually, i wrote about transition because i felt that the 100 days before the election, the inauguration, were as important, if not more important than 100 days after. and i said, so what was impact of hoover's lack of cooperation? and he said, well, banks failed. more people had their houses foreclosed. we not get advance planning on the war with germany. it was a time where farms were failing and, people were starving. so more people died and shows the importance of this smooth transition of power and we can get into this but that contrasts with the collaboration between obama and bush during great recession, where their collaboration actually eased to the end of the great and in a faster recovery. let's talk about that a little bit because i thought another

interesting part of the book was about sort of the how, you know, from bush to obama they were dealing with the economic issues, but also that was the first president to sort take over post-9-11 and. there were also very big national security that sort of came to play that, hadn't been there before. talk a little bit about that played into sort of sharing information between incoming administration and the bush administration. so let's create the context for bush. so bush takes office in 2000. he has a shortened transition. the average transition period is 75 days. he has 35 days because of bush v gore. i think the supreme court ruling was december 12th or so. so it's clear that he well, he's declared the winner december 13th. he has a harder time. his people in place. and eight months later, 911 happens at the of 911, bush had just over 50% of his senior

national people in place. and witkowsky here, she's a senior official. she to get confirmed it took her nine months. how long? nine months. so nine, 11 happened. bush has just over 50% of his national security people in place, more than half of those in place had only been there for two months. so the 911 commission, when they their autopsy of 911, one of the things they found was that the shortened transition imperiled bush's ability to get his people in place and therefore undermined national security preparedness. this stuck with bush through his whole presidency. so in 2008, he's the first president in years that does not have a sitting vice president running. and he tells george bolton as chief of staff, i want to make sure that the next president has longer period of time, a smoother transition i had. so, josh actually started organizing government agencies,

creating requiring each cabinet to prepare briefing books and set in process a set of standards processes that later were enumerated into law it's now required at time of the election, we were we had two wars and a financial and bush's outgoing team collaborated with obama's incoming team and ben bernanke actually ben bernanke won the nobel prize today for economics and his whole thesis is about flooding the zone and having government intervention during the financial crisis in order to take confidence in the banks and. in the book, bush's team and obama's, including stephanie cutter, who was then the communications director for the transition that bush and obama worked together to try to create confidence the country because we are in a financial and confidence was so important for the banks to be stable to not

fail and for people to keep savings in banks and. so compared to hoover and roosevelt, actually bush and obama, which is considered gold standard of transitions shortened our recession and eased recovery, safe more people from losing their houses and helped the country and also i think that under that transition there was a sense of like giving people, national security officials, briefings earlier or doing sort of like table top through, isn't that right? so josh bolten and steve hadley was the national security advisor, carried this idea of doing tabletop exercise. what does that mean? it's kind of a a role play exercise where the outgoing national security and the incoming national security take a couple of issues and play. and the issue took was a terrorist attack on the united states. so that gave the outgoing national security team, steve hadley, condoleezza rice, the ability to work with the incoming team, which was jim johnson i'm sorry, general jones

and clinton. and they worked together. it actually prescient because on january 19th there was a credible threat of a terrorist attack on the mall during the inauguration and the outgoing and the incoming worked together to try to figure out how do we result, how do we react to this how do we prevent it and what happens if it happens? and it actually was a great service to our country. what the outgoing bush did to ease the incoming administration on national security issues. i want to go backwards little bit, because i learned to fund presidential fact in your chapter on president carter. yes. that when he first came in, he not to appoint a white house chief staff and like just sort of could have carried during the transition about white house staff in general, which is so because i feel like as a reporter with transitions you spend like tons time trying to figure out, you know, who biden is going to pick to be the treasury secretary or the chief of staff. like these are huge

consequential picks. what did what did sort of carter's decision just to up his hands about the white house chief of staff and the rest of the white house staff? what that mean? so let me start with the positive. carter gets credit being the first modern president to actually devote resources and staff to presidential transition planning. he did that. he had a team of 50 people work on the transition. the only downside, he didn't tell campaign that there was this transition effort and there was a big clash. so when he came into office, he came from georgia. in georgia and small states, clinton the same mistake the cabinet is much important than the staff in the governor's office. and he to focus almost exclusively the cabinet actually, trent, the experts on treasury's transition say focus on the white house staff first appoint your chief of staff the day after the election and let that person staff the white house. reagan did that well with jim baker. biden did it with ron klain.

so he'd also decided to have a chief of staff. why? because he wanted to do exactly the opposite of nixon remember, nixon had haldeman. haldeman was in jail and carter said, i don't want to do what that guy did. so he said, i don't i'm going to have a chief of staff. and it imperiled the presidency he did appoint a chief of staff in year three and that helped stabilize the house. and actually they got a lot done the last couple of years, even though they the election. yeah this idea of i feel like there's a whole sort of cottage industry now around presidential transitions but it's still sort of like a fairly modern invention. when did it really start? was it really sort of josh bolten, the bush administration, that really sort of set up the standard or when did this idea that this is something that needed to happen in organized fashion, really come to the i would say, post 911. it really accelerated and the partnership for public service gets a lot of credit because

they created a center and they basically created a whole depository of documents about presidential in the white house. the documents are saved and they go to the archive theoretically in a presidential transition. it's not a government and so the documents are not saved. there's a great story in the book. chris lew, who ran the transition for president obama, then senator obama, he was a longtime aide to. and he and obama asked him to run the transition and he said what's the transition? so what did he do? he went to jim johnson who ran the transition? mondale and johnson. i've been waiting for someone to call for four years. and he took them to his closet and handed him a box and said, here's all my documents and that was it. so partnership for public service said we're going to actually create a system and records to have lessons learned from presidential transitions and allow future transitions to

study the past. so i think that post 911 the experience of the bush administration findings of the 911 commission accelerated focus congress passed a few laws and now there's a hole in history of transition planning. so what has been the worst transition, would you say. it's history yeah in history the trump transition. should we take that one out and so to lincoln for sure during that period of time, seven states seceded. they the buchanan government was paralyzed. half of his cabinet supported, the south, several his cabinet were pushing to have recognize the south. jefferson davis was elected and lincoln was in springfield, illinois, with basically no communication with washington. the more interesting question is what's the second worst transition not that your question is not interesting and this is an issue that we debated with some famous historian like

ken burns and ted widmer and eric rauchway. and there's a debate was it hoover to roosevelt or was it trump to biden ken. burns was on the podcast twice, and the first time he said oh, you know, dave, you're focused on some of the minutia of transitions but think back, we've had 233 years of uninterrupted handover of power presidents may not have wanted to leave, but they've always left no troops have been alerted, no shots have been fired. nobody's been. that's the miracle of. america. so i had him on after january 6th and i read him that statement and i said troops have been alerted shots have been fired, people have died. and he said, this is worse than hoover. roosevelt. yeah, it seems. now, the good part is that the

biden team actually was the most effectively organized, the largest team and anticipated virtually everything about what happened. except for january six, the fellow that ran the transition, ted kaufman, who was biden's long aide, probably his best friend, put together to streams of work, one he called conventional issues and one he called unconventional conventional were all the things that a transition normally does. personnel agency, etc. the unconventional was all the threats that could occur if. trump did not cooperate and the biden presciently predicted every single issue that happened. delays lack of agencies not opening except for one thing they never predicted. january 6th. nobody could have predicted that. yeah, i think that's a good note to open it up for questions that people have some. we have a microphone there. people want it just go up and ask their question question.

hi, thank you. what the date of your article about the transition. the trump was good. it was sometime in september. of 2020. it was prior to i gotcha. and i had heard dr. burks, who was trump's medical service very specifically that trump was responsible specifically for like 130,000 deaths. do you think that was about she was speaking about that period of time that you were talking about when? 170,000. so i don't know exactly what she's talking about. i know that during this period in january. of 2021, that's when the covid peaked, we had more people infected. more people die than any other period. i think 4000 americans were dying a day, 4000 and other hit. other experts can debate

responsibility, lack thereof. i guess my point would be that if trump cooperated with biden, that perhaps they could have accelerated, had a better approach to just distributing the vaccine, which was the most important issue for the country at the time. gotcha. okay. any other questions. hi, i'm eric emmerson. who who pays the transition process? that's a where does the money come from? so that's a great question. prior to their periods of time, prior to the nominating conventions, the candidates need to raise money for their own, for everything, staff resources,

offices, computers, cell phones. after the nominating convention, the government pays for office space, computers, staff security, security clearances, etc. they don't pay. they don't pay for staff. after the election, when the candidate president elect then all the transition officials actually go on the federal. so this is one of the things that congress could do. congress it's in our public interest to incentivize candidates to put as much and many towards transition planning as possible. and so if congress were to appropriate money for candidates to, allocate and hire staff prior to post-convention prior to the election that would be positive as well because that would create an incentives for more planning. more planning would be good and it's just the money. there's also like gsa gives them offices and computer ers and cell phones and tech help. so there's like a whole sort of

apparatus. yeah, go ahead, sir. hi. thank you very much. first of all, i enjoyed presentation a lot i learned a lot. i'm interested in the center that you led and, so forth. obviously. or i would assume that it was kind of designed designed on a bipartisan, you know, with a bipartisan structure. and to some to whatever extent possible, have it be a bipartisan reality? is it a bipartisan reality? not. so it is nonpartisan. it was created by a fellow named, max stier, who created the partnership for public. he did a great public service by creating this, the center and it was created in 2008 at at the time that bush was leaving office because max recognized that transitions were to our democracy. the partnership for public service is an organization created to help the effectiveness of government. and max basic view was the

transition is the start of government and an effective transition has a positive impact on governing. so totally nonpartisan the chairs in the last were to penny pritzker and mack mclarty to democrats and josh bolten and mike, the former governor of utah and head of the romney transition. and we worked in a totally bipartisan. and there's a whole group dedicated americans and policy experts who devote themselves to the peaceful transition of power. they believe it's in their public interest to help. and they do it regardless of party. so even chris christie ran trump's transition. he benefited from advice from people like mack mclarty and others who were violently opposed to trump president, but basically that we should help the trump in case they win. and that's the spirit of the traditional transition, which

trump upended. right. so the buy you would say from the parties trying to speak generally about republicans and democrats and and the hierarchies in those organizations the buy the buy in has that changed kind of from transition to transition or not. there's been total buy in outside of trump trump changed. so i'm hoping that we can go back. nancy's original question appeal to the better angels of our society and get back to the norms of bipartisan cooperation regardless of who wins. but i do think it's interesting because the people who are involved, the partnership for public service on the republican side, are really relics in the party now. john, i mean, it's like it's like romney people it's bush people like are, you know, jim jordan not on the board. do you mean he's involved? chris christie is involved. he spoke at a partnership event. it's true. in the book, i asked, i invited

i interviewed chris christie. i reminded him that he endorsed trump. he was the first elected official to endorse at a time when the only a big names that endorsed endorsed trump were ted nugent, kid rock and a couple of others. and i asked chris christie. why did he do that? and he said well thought he could win. so thank you. yeah, good question. thank you for this. seems like a very project. you know, it seems to me that we have a fairly long transition period. you know, places like the u.k. prime minister could be in office the day after his party wins an election. and i'm if you feel moving forward, this extended process makes us, you know, more exposed to attempts to disrupt the transition, or if you still, even after the last election cycle, feel it's necessary continuity of governance. so the transition, as you may used to be longer up until 1933, was four months. and in 1933, after the hoover to

roosevelt transition, the 20th amendment was passed and that shortened the period and inauguration day was moved from march 5th or sixth to january. in the u.k. and other countries. it's it's a parliament democracy. you don't that many officials turning over. so in the u.k., you have the ministers and maybe one staff person at each ministry. in the united states, it's it's a much larger endeavor. there are 4000 political appointees, 4000 and 1250 of them need to be confirmed. the united states senate. that is a flawed system. if i as a business school dean or business leader were to propose this as a grade idea, i would be fired. just to give you data. so biden had a very effective transition at the end of his hundredth day. he only had 44 senate confirmed

officials in place, 44 out of 1250 at the end of his 200th day in office, which is around october 1st. he only had about 120. he only had 127. there are 1250 senate confirmed officials. he had percent in place after almost first year. that's a flawed. so one of the other reforms that actually the partnership for public service recommends is reducing the number of senate confirmed officials that need to be put place so that you can get the government much more quickly. and that would be a positive change as well. and that's so interesting because the biden team is so i mean, say whatever you want about them. they're very very experienced. i mean, they really understand how to work the levers of power. so it's very that even they have had problems the senate confirmation process. so they again, they anticipated this. they recognize that confirmation be very slow. so they actually create a new to focus on the nine senate confirmed positions.

and they put 1100 official roles in the government by within ten days after biden took office. so the minute that the data comes on january 30th of each year and, they had 1100 officials in place, which was more than trump and obama had combined at day 100. so, you know, there's still i think around 450 or 500 senate confirmed officials that are in place. and now they're starting to leave. so the you really never catch up. it's a flawed system that needs to be reformed. thank you. have you seen any sort of trickle to the state level of the idea of non-cooperation? are you getting this question through your. i really have not seen that. i haven't studied state level

transition in most states. the the amount of turnover is small. there are a few states like texas that have 2000 plus officials that actually helped bush anticipate. the challenge of staffing the government in most states, the number of officials is is infinitesimal compared to the federal. i have not that this election you know because of the issues that nancy flagged where have a number of candidates who say that if i don't win the election is flawed? you know, you may see that, but not. thank you. all right. and thanks, dave. has been. so assuming things go as they're supposed to go. the documents from the white house of the outgoing party or the outgoing president are sent to the archives. when individuals in the white house.

there virtually no documents from the previous administration. has there ever been any discussion about that process and any adjustments to that process to facil a smooth transition? so you're talking about the white house, really the white house, including the national security council staff, omb and all of the white house entities. so bush actually, steve hadley started a in place, a process where officials would receive briefing memos from the outgoing. but the law is that the outgoing president's papers are the outgoing presidents. they go to the archives. and i remember i went into the ministration white house on 20th and there was nothing we didn't even have computers work. they had taken all the hard drives out. i think for some litigation and you in and the white is empty. so it is a good suggestion that there should be policies

procedures in place so that incoming officials actually know what they're doing. i think parts of the national security counsel, like the executive secretary and others, they have career officials that are their military officials, that know the policies and procedures but it's a flaw in the system. maybe you have a book in you that's coming. do we have any other questions? well, i just to say thank you thank you for writing this. interesting book. i had a great time reading it this past week. and thank you for all your your work on the transitions. thank you very much.

good afternoon. my name is mark schmitt. i'm the director of the political reform program here, new america. and we been navigatine