welcome to 2024.

hi. one year from today or actually 363 days from today, a new president will be sworn in and i'll actually be potentially a second biden term, potentially a second trump term, potentially a first nikki haley term. 4000 political appointees will be installed. the federal government, 8000 positions will be decided. and a president will have to pick their priorities and have to work backward from that to try to move them forward. it's an enormous undertaking and we are really delighted today to have three experts in the most complicated transaction that happens on the planet. we've had turbulent transitions before. obviously in 2021 we had a very turbulent transition and we have experts on that transition. with us today. but turbulent transitions are

also not new. in 1800, we had the first peaceful 1801 we had the first peaceful transfer of power from one political party to another ever in human history, because prior to that, we didn't have democracies with competing parties. and that was not a particularly it was a ended up being a peaceful transition, but it was also turbulent. we've had turbulent transitions in 1824, 1860, 1876, 2000 and turbulent transitions may now be part of our future as well. to unpack all of that, we are particularly delighted to have a new book published by the university of press in the miller center's series on the american presidency, which is ably led by our own marc selverstone and jane mckee. and the book is by chris liddell and it is called year zero the five year presidency. and we're delighted to chris with us today to talk about book.

his book is, concrete. it has nonpartisan recommendations. it's kind of the as zen, if you will. it is an extraordinary accomplishment. and we're really proud not just to have the book, but to have chris with us to talk about it today. and we are particularly thankful to our friends at the university of virginia press, eric brandt and the dean zimmer, who helped pull this together and move it forward for us. let's just think back to the transition that chris helped usher for the trump administration. chris was president trump's deputy chief of staff and four years ago in that position amidst covid, amidst a turbulent handoff of power together, working with ted kaufman, president, representative in the transit, and he saw a peaceful transfer of power actually take place. but the book is much more than about 2020. and he will talk about that. he talks about it in the book

and we'll talk about it a little bit today. it's a deeply researched book on the structure and functioning of the white house, how it works and how it doesn't work, what it can do and what it can't do. it's built not just on his 2020 transition experience, but his 2016 2017 transition experience, where he was brought in by the newly elected trump administration to help see through the transition and in itself was based on work that he had done working with mitt romney in planning for a potential transition in 2013 after the 2012 election or as chris refers to it in the book, as the ship that never sailed. before that, chris was a senior vice president and chief financial officer at microsoft and vice chairman and chief financial officer of general motors to discuss the book with chris and us today are two real experts on this. to my immediate left is dr. martha joynt kumar, who's the

director of the white house transition project and an emeritus professor at towson university. she's written two books before the oath how george w bush and barack obama managed to transfer power and managing the president's message. the white house communications operation, which won the richard nustar award, the best book on the presidency from the american political science association. we also, the far end of our panel today. we have david marchick who one of the first books in the miller center's series on the american presidency with the university of virginia press. the peaceful transfer of power in 2022. dave served as the director of the center for presidential transitions at the partnership for public service, a nonprofit entity in washington that helps incoming and outgoing administrations manage their transitions and the book is actually a transcribed and edited series podcasts that dave conducted going back and looking at presidential transitions in

american history with authors of great histories of these books as well as practitioners from past presidential transitions. but he didn't just do this as an academic enterprise. he behind the scenes with the outgoing trump administration in the incoming biden administration, not just to do the mechanics of the transition, but as things became turbulent, how to walk through a number of uncertainty use in unprecedented operations. and we were really fortunate to get to work with dave and an incredible team that he assembled. dave and i actually wrote an essay in the run up to the election in 2016. looking at these previous turbulent presidential transition and what the lessons learned were from that. but let me just say, as a coauthor of that piece, i was kind of like a copilot in the airplane. i'm glad there was a pilot on board and that i was just there to make sure that i could fill in the gaps. dave is currently the dean of

the kogan school of business at american university. he has previous jobs both in government and in the private sector. and dave and i worked together 25 years ago at the at the state department before starting. i do want to introduce one very special guest who's here with us today. and that sitting here in the front row is lauren henry here at the miller center. he's the man the myth, the legend, warren actually helped invent the business of studying presidential transitions in the 1950s at the brookings institution. with the advent of nuclear weapons, suddenly this long period between one one presidents elected and the other president hands over power suddenly became super consequential. and lawrence spent ten years at brookings working on that, including helping brief an incoming kennedy administration. he then came to uva and served on the faculty in the politics

department and helped design the miller. he was turned to when mr. miller was about to make his gift, and they asked him, given his experience at brookings, what should a place like the miller center do? and his fingerprints are all over the blueprints for this organization. and more than fingerprints, we actually have photographic evidence. one of the first things we did at the miller center was an oral history of the ford administration. and i can ll the picture up. we can't. well, as you're walking out the the event space later today, when you walk down the hallway, there's a picture you'll see a young -- cheney and a young don rumsfeld and brant scowcroft, for whom there is no photograph for evidence of him everavg been young and stainnext to brant scowcroft is lauren henry in t front row? thisashe ford oral history. it got us in the business of doing oral histories. so, lauren, thank you for joining us today. there it is.

lauren is in the first row right next. father right there in the first row, all the way on the right next to brant scowcroft, sharing the lead, though, he's 102. so a few years he'll have the experience run for president. lauren, thanks you for being with us. you're a mentor to us all. so. he's also a neighbor and and a regular miller center attendee. so let's let's come back to chris. chris, the book is really terrific. as i said, it's the presidency on this. and it's how you would want to run a presidency, even though chris accounts for the idea that disruptions and crises happen. but chris, let's start at the beginning, which is at some level starting at the end, the book looks ahead and it looks backward called the five year presidency. year zero starts the day before yesterday, but it also starts

with a core organizing principle, which is the president needs to know what his or her legacy is going to be and structures all five years. unpack that for us. how does that all work in your in your mind sure so let me just a couple of things before i answer your question first you yourself, bill and the miller center and everything you and the team do to contribute to making the government better, which is what i'm focused on inside the book. and secondly, i just think it's wonderful to be in this little triangle with lauren in front of me here, martha and day are on either side of me. one of the wonderful things about transition work is it's bipartisan and you stand on the shoulders of those who come before you. so i was very proud to. meet lauren a few months ago and take a photo of him holding his book. me holding mine. and one of the first things i read when i did the romney transition ten odd years ago was was lauren's great work from and then martha's also made an incredible contribution over the

years i stand on the shoulders of her work and dave for his book as well. so i'm in the middle of a wonderful triangle. so i just want to recognize everyone on the stage. thank you very much. so text it back. what are we trying to solve and where the book fit into it? the fundamental problem we have is, is that we have a crisis of trust in country. and i'm sure seen the various studies, but the ones that struck me recently were more than 70% of people think the country is on the wrong track and probably even more starkly with respect to two to my work saw gallup's survey a few months ago that said there's no institute asian in the country. we're more than 50% of people have a trust that its going to the right thing and that's across every institution, from the judiciary to the government to whatever. and so my view is what do we do about it? you can observe it and you can complain about it. at the end of the day you have to do something about it and i

believe that that starts with the white house, which i think is the most important institution in the country in a lot ways. and it's what i describe as the head and the heart of the government. so you can try and solve the public sector. you can try and solve government overall. but if you don't solve the white house, it's unlikely to be effective. and so all of my recommendations are around how do we make the white house more effective for the people in the country? and hopefully in doing that, start to rebuild trust in one of the most important institutions that we have now my book is not going to solve all of those problems. journey of a mile two starts with a few steps. so i have 50 what i hope are reasonably practical suggestions about how to make the white house better and the important thing is that they are the control of the president to a large extent, or the candidate. so these are not things that rely on miracles. these are things to a large that

an incoming president or an existing president can do. to your question specifically, one of the important things is in order to have an effective presidency, have to know where you're going. like any journey in life, you have to know what the distillation is and one of the consequential that you find out working in the white house, you take over and you're buffeted by everything around you. and we see that at the moment the number of crises that are in the world, the things that happen, that are outside your control. so unless you have a strong north star that you're towards. you will be buffeted left and right and you will lose your way quite so. it's critically important you have an idea of what is the legacy that you wish to leave for the country and work backwards from that. from there, the most important first step in that legacy is year one. and in the way the government is set up and the way the white house is set up, you have a very small window in year one to get

substantial legislation passed and to really get momentum in your administration. and if you don't get that, you're on the back foot immediately and then you start to get buffeted around. but you can't have a successful year one if you don't have a successful what i describe as year zero, which, as you point out, has started around now. and year zero is critical because there is just so much to do once you're elected or elected, and it's impossible to have a strong governance structure and, a strong momentum, if you haven't done all the work that leads up to it. so it's that you do all the work that's necessary to have a strong years, year one in year zero, appointing all the right people, the thousands of people that you need in order to make your administration work to get your policy initiatives ready to go and launched very quickly, to get the team together that you are going to rely on in the white house and to build the of

that team and the mechanisms about how you're going to make decisions. there's just so much to do in this tiny little window between election and inauguration, way too much than it's possible to do if you stay in, if you start from just the election. so year zero is critical to leading to year one, which is critical to delivering that legacy. so let's bring in martha. dave here. martha, you've you've studied so many of these transitions and in particular, you looked at this transition from bush to obama in the middle of a financial crisis. those guys, how both of those presidents outgoing bush, incoming obama, think about the year beforehand and then how did it work in that in that period before there was a recognition on sides that there was a financial crisis and and so they worked together. josh bolten, the chief of staff

with rahm emanuel, to try to see what they could do, whether it was the automobile interest rate was particularly what they were concerned with, a collapse and yet so they they met together and. then the bush people wanted to a czar for the auto industry but to handle with the the issues but the obama people decided that they did want to do that that an incoming president doesn't want to to bring problems on themselves that come from the last administration. so it is they worked well together, but a lot of it was because of the people and the the work that they had done

beforehand. josh bolten had done a great deal of work with the obama team. but both representatives of both obama and mccain into the white house during the and before the conventions because the conventions were laid and said, you know, you need to get your people in place, we're going to hasten the process of security clearances and we'll have you submit the names to the fbi. they won't be going through the white house. so you won't have to worry about about leaks. and he won't beyond what had done been done before and that was very helpful, you know, establishing that, i think the the the recommendations that that chris has for the planning

beforehand. i think we have an example of an effort to do that and that is the biden administration and joe, as a candidate had worked transition legislation and has been the senate and and so he decided to to start early right after bernie sanders left of the presidential race which was on. april 7th, 2020. then then biden knew the stakes from his time in the obama administration. and so he called ted kaufman, who you spoke of, who took seat in the senate and had been his chief of staff and a very trusted aide by him and instill

a friend and confidant so called ted, and said, do you think it's time to start the transition and already ted kaufman and marketing who also had worked with biden had been of worked him when he was in the senate. the two of them worked with the partnership for public service and with dave and and his staff to figure out what needed to be done and especially for what kind of crises might come up because because the obama administration had to deal with such a crisis. so they set up one of the really unusual projects of theirs where on conventional challenges they anticipate that they were going

to have difficulty and so they had a separate unit that dealt with that and then after after biden asked ted about setting up a transition he met with with ted and mark and they they met on with ted on the 22nd of april and talked what needed to be done and then. he wanted some recommendations on who was going to run the day to day operation and they chose jeff science and science. ted had been in in the obama administration and whenever there were whenever they were problems, cash for clunkers, his first one and then the failure of the white house website on the health.

and so by mid mid-may they had their team set up, they had the coordination mechanisms with the campaign so the two would would be in sync. and i think all of that had to do with the experience that they had had coming in to the administration. so maybe dave is a great place for you to pick up your managing this nonprofit center enterprise, working between the the sitting president and the democratic challenger and then turning the corner into the fall. looking ahead, thinking about what a turbulent transition might look like, what are seeing, hearing, saying and particularly in working with the sitting trump administration. so first of all, let me echo my thanks to the miller and also to nadine when i was running this project on the transition, i turned to the north, said it all the time for guidance and background, and because both the

knowledge and the history, i guess if if thomas jefferson writing a paper for professor silverstone, his class and the assignment was to design a transition, they would fail because it's a you have an organization the most important organization, the world and everybody leaves and new people come in with chris. i both have a corporate background and when there's a ceo change, usually the cfo may leave and a few other people may leave. but basically there's continuity outside of a few people here. the entire cabinet subcamp and it's deputies all way down. 4000 people leave. you know, chris describes leaving the last day of the trump administration. i remember coming in the first day of the clinton ministration. it's a ghost town into the white house. there's nobody there. so we i was working very closely with the biden team, as martha said, starting in march to kind of design the transition. but i was working with chris on the possibility of a second

trump term and what does the second term transition look like? and also uncomfortable situation that chris had to manage out of. what if trump lost? and i remember there was i'll tell a little story josh bolten, who is the bush chief of staff, and i working very closely with chris. we had a dinner at my house. this was during covid, and it was outside. and then it started. we had like a monsoon rain. so we moved into my garage for a nice dinner and chris basically laid out possible he said, let's take the cleanest scenarios a clean trump win or a strong biden win. okay then you could have something in the middle where it's you know a strong biden win strong enough that trump concedes or a strong trump win. but the other side concedes. and then i have this nightmare scenario where it's sufficiently close and trump denies outcome of the election. so we said that would be bad. but the likelihood of that is

pretty low. and then two days after the election, chris called me and said, hey, can you get josh on the phone? so i patched him in. he said, you remember that dinner where we have the nightmares? so that's what we have and so thankfully for the country, chris liddell was in the white house because amid the chaos, chris was quietly working away to to ensure the peaceful transfer power and not that people know about that but this is great public servant i think the most important thing is personnel personnel is policy and personnel runs the functioning of government. and i'll just give you some data. so you mentioned 4000 political positions, 1250 of them need to be confirmed by the senate. and this is a problem with the functioning of our government. this is why year zero was so important. planning starting now. okay, so the best president of modern times coming out of the

gate was obama at day 100, which kind of april ish he had 69 senate confirmed positions and the entire 69. that's it out of 1250. okay. that's april. okay. three months later in the bush presidency, 911 happened. so the best of all time at year one was president george w bush. he had 521 officials in place. that means that at year one he had about 40% of the government in place. and by that time, people start leaving. and so what why chris's book is so important is getting the government and the candidate ready to hit the ground running on day one because you have no time to waste. and that's why all the policy recommendation ones that the miller center chris others have

have articulated are so important because literally a president does not have the tools for him or her to run the government because the function of government is is so difficult to set up. chris, you talk in the book sticking with personnel? all right. we go in two directions here. does two, one and hear quickly from you about this. you talk about the year zero leadership team. it reads you got your use, the number zero l.t. comes up time and time again and you're essentially saying that groups should be formed now. what is that? who are those people? how big is that group? if you're nikki haley and you win in new hampshire tonight and you're putting your year zero leadership team, assuming that biden, trump already know who that would be, who are you recruiting into that group? yeah. so let me talk about what typically happens and then what may happen typically you have these two parallel processes. so you have the campaign, which is working with the candidate obviously to get elected and

then behind the scenes you have people working on the transition plan and those are really two separate. but obviously related organizations. so most people think about when they think about the year zero. as i think about the campaign, they're running, the events and the debates. and so forth, and that's critically important. if you don't get elected, then you don't have anything to cover. but the trends work is quite separate to that generally speaking a bit quieter, but equally important because once you get elected, then you have to govern. and if you're not ready to govern, going to be ineffective. as we talked about before, the zero leadership team is just a term i'm using for the group that would the second of those efforts martha mentioned already what happened in the biden administration. but typically in the romney case, for example governor mike leavitt and myself were appointed around march, april to lead that effort. and we built a team up from

starting with the two of us to 500. and i'm sure similar thing happened in the biden administration. so all i am in the book is that same general effort has head, but it's much more established. and the important thing that i probably had is it's not only important to have that team the to the governance structure once win it could form the nucleus of the team that then is the white house because the sort of skills that you need in order to build a transition are the sort of skills that you then need to run the white house. so it's not necessarily political skills, although they're important. they're more important than the it's more about how do we choose the right people? how do we organize people, how do we build a culture of of performance around the president? how do take policy, implement it? so all the skills that necessary in the transition, planning are

the same sort of skills that you need to have a successful white house. now, no positions are ever given out pre election but it's a it's a training ground and if you like, it's an opportunity for president presidential candidate to look at a group of people say okay maybe these are the that i might want to have in somewhere in my administration. and the point i'm making the book is it's a lot easier to decide whether you want them or don't want them to than to invite someone in and find out a month or two later that you made the wrong decision. national security ends up coming into this. chris it's it's a big part of how the president has probably more unilateral authority in national security than in any other. and there's a big standing government, you know of the four of the 4 million government employees, 2 million are men and women, either in uniform, them or in the military defense and intelligence services. and the nsc staff is kind a

stable body. so tell me little bit about that or are you planning the national security team as part of the years leadership team hundred percent and just take a step back if domestic policy takes a month or two longer than it should to get, that's not great, the president, but it's not critical if there's a national crisis over the between the election and inauguration or in the early days, an administration that can be literally and figuratively life threatening. so of all of the things that are important getting a fully functional national security team in place is quickly as possible is probably the most important. and the good news. and both matthew and dave have written about this. the good news is generally speaking, the outgoing national security and the incoming cooperate closely because there's firstly, there's a high degree of professionalism generally on both sides. and they both understand the

stakes and so even in the difficult transition that we had last time in 2020 and 2021, robert o'brien, who is the outgoing national security adviser, jake sullivan, who is the incoming, worked very closely together to make sure that any national security issues would be dealt with right, dave? martha, i agree. i would say that if you look at the history, the the miller center has published a number of books on this national security crises don't wait for a president to take office. happen when they happen. and so there have been a series of crises in the history of the united states that have happened in january february you know march april. so for example clinton took office and the world the first world trade center bombing was two months after he took office, going back to personnel. bush had less than half of his national security people in

place when 911 occurred. you remember, he hadn't the bush v gore dispute in florida which meant that he only had a 35 day transition versus a 75 day transition. and so. when the 911 commission, which i think is another uva miller center official, when they did their autopsy of what, during 911, one of their conclusions was the transition and the delay in getting personnel in place put the country at greater risk on 911 because bush didn't have his full national security team in place. so of the recommendations that chris highlights, among them what's important is ensuring that the national security transition is is as smooth as possible and, b, before, in a sense, that you can get that team in place, you need a white house team. the white house team is going to

help the president decide on what decision making process he wants. and so that is going be something that's critically important during the trans session. and then once he decides how he wants to make decisions, what kind of information he wants, when a decision is right, then then you can start filling out, beginning with the nsc. shortly after, the inauguration, biden swore in 206 white house staff that they saw that the white house staff was going to be in port and they worried about getting it. the senate confirm people through and what they focused on were the people in policy making

positions who not confirmed and. so they filled those and by inauguration they had. 1100 non confirmed person. now the the risk in that though is that the department gets confirmed comes in and his staff is already there and he would like or she like to appoint their own people so you have some conflict there but they thought it was very right at the start to to get people in place and then with the nsc was was critical and jake sullivan had worked with with biden as had tony blinken and the two of them could work well together in the

secretary of state and the white house positions coordinate on what's going to be an important part of that coordination is a great pivot process. and dave and chris have both mentioned process before. chris, in the book you talk about and i'm forgetting the exact phrase, something like on position conflict but not personality conflict. i forget exact phrase there, but encouraging people to debate, disagree, and then putting decisions up in front of the president as we'll come back to in a second decision point is actually only in the middle of a broad process. we talk a little bit process, culture. how does an incoming team do that? when do they establish those processes that january 20th or is it before that when the can as late as that and that's what i am arguing against that really you want to try and start ironing some of those out and and trying to eliminate the bad actors out of it because the worst that you can have in a white house is a bad actor who works around the system.

someone who leaks, someone who is you may say none of that in the trump administration, so none of it in the trump administration actually had to deal with a few of them. but the important thing is and the distinction between the types of conflicts is critical you do want conflict of ideas. it's critical that the president gets good and differing opinions. the worst thing you can have is groupthink and the president can influence by him or her sort of suggesting what they might want and everyone congregating around it. you want the opposite of that. you want people to challenge the president's ideas and put in front of him or her the most number of different ideas possible so that they are able to make the best possible decisions. but what you don't want is personality, conflict because that's corrosive and that's different from idea conflict. so in my role, for example, where i was deputy chief of policy, i'm trying to promote one and eliminate the other. now, sometimes human nature gets

in the way and you have deal with the other thing, but that can be destructive and working around the system can destroy the quality of the decisions. the other one is constructive because it's giving the president the best number options and the best researched as well. so you're promoting one, trying to eliminate the other the you you know, i mean, i would say that going back to a point that chris mentioned that the benefit of the work of transition is why the work of uva press and miller center are so important, is that you learn lessons from each transition and then the next people learn those lessons. so martha wrote a book which highlights the bush to obama transition. i think that was probably the best and with this transition history and as a country, we were lucky that both the obama team planned and the bush team planned because during the transition we had the financial crisis and the country benefited

from the fact that bush and hank paulson and, josh bolten cooperated with bernanke and tim geithner and obama coming in. what happened there was the outgoing chief of staff under the instruction of president bush, president bush had a rocky transition in 35 days. 911 happened nine months later. and he said to bolten, i don't want what happened to me to happen to the next leader. and so josh set up these councils and processes to work with whomever won. mccain or obama. obama had a very, very experienced team and actually they set up these the same councils during the transition that would run the government once obama took over. so, larry summers and jim jones was the national, economic and national security council. tom donilon was the deputy they set up mock national security and national economic team

processes during. the transition to get those kind of policy chops and the the process the and the muscle memory. so that once they took office, they were ready to go. and the country benefited from that. just one little anecdote. my book focuses heavily on lessons learned during the previous big financial crisis. during a transition was the hoover to roosevelt transition there hoover and roosevelt hated each other. hoover thought that roosevelt was not worthy of being president and refused to cooperate. and historians would say that the lack of cooperation lengthened the great depression caused more banks to fail, more people to lose their houses more people to lose their farms. and therefore, people starved and died. the bush to obama administration actually the opposite, in my view. the cooperation accelerated the recovery because of the collaboration between, the

outgoing and the incoming bush was highly unpopular at that point. he was, you know, iraq war. he he was pulling in his toes. but still felt like he had an obligation to the country regardless of who won. i want to move this along. we're at about 20 of and i want to take a few questions from the audience. but i want to talk about priorities, in particular on as it relates and maybe connected to the politics that is passing legislation. in the book you lay out and president trump and president biden and president obama have all used executive actions. i think president obama was the one that coined the phrase, i have a pen and a phone strategy can sign things and i can call people and tell them to do things. and you argue very strongly favor. and president trump famously said, i like executive actions, right? because i can just get things done. you argue in favor of legislation. tell us why.

tell us how it works and including what kinds of legislation you would encourage the next president to think about. and i'll ask you all to think about your questions. please submit them in writing and alfred will collect them and get them up here. sure. so executive orders just for those who don't understand in the room are ones the president signs that he can do unilaterally that require legislation? i describe it as the sugar are the sweet and they're easy to eat but you don't want to have them your whole diet at the end of the day, the white house is there to pass legislation in terms of coming back to your first question, legacy the the issues that we remember presidents for the legislation, they not the executive orders, generally speaking, executive orders. yes, a president can put them place, but the next president can overturn them straight away. and what you're seeing now increasingly is a -- for tat. so the thing that each president

does once they get in power is they overturn all the executive orders from, the previous president, and then the next president comes along and overturns them. so we have seen executive orders which have been like a tennis game going backwards and forwards from one administration to the other. so they feel good because you get them done and you make a nice announcement and you get a press release. but then they take a while to implement and by the time the action comes from, the implementation is starting to happen. next person comes in and overturns them. so the part of the they're certainly of the arsenal that the president has and their important, but they're not critical terms of defining a legacy. the things that define legacies. generally speaking, legislate. and because they're the ones that survive multiple administrations. and so my view is certainly going in in the first year this the activity that the president should be really focused on is legacy legislation not just

legislation but legacy. we have this tiny window in the country which is generally speaking, the first 200 days or year to pass significant legislation and after that we're near to and people are starting to think about the midterms then have the midterms and then depending what happens with congress, you may or may not get another window. then we're into here we are now with one year to go and we're talking the next election. so the chance to pass legacy legislation is a very tiny the window and it's in that first year and when you think about what is going to impact the country in ten years or 20 years. it's legislation and when we look at what past have done, generally it's the legislative initiatives that we remember them for. i'm going to sort of go into the wonky weeds of presidential first years here. but chris and i have talked about this, and i want to ask him publicly, chris, chris makes the recommendation that a

president usually gets in the first year or two bites at the apple. and typically presidents have gone with partizan legislation first because their fan base has just gotten them elected and they want to reward them. and then they tack back and they get centrist legislation. so president clinton got some tax that he wanted to tack back and gotten after president bush got some tax cuts that he wanted, he tacked back and got no child left behind. and you argue opposite. you say, actually go with the president. biden got a partizan covid bill through and then tacked back and got infrastructure and you argue the opposite. go first and then go partizan explain for us a little bit so to bits but on the reality of the congress that you inherit but the likely reality which is why the recommendation is there is is that we're going to have a very tight congress and so the first question i said why don't we do an fdr the 100 day legislation in the blitz? why can't we have that again?

well, you look at fdr, he had, i think, from memory a 24 seat majority in the senate and something like 170, 180 seat majority in the house. so it's lot easier to do partizan legislation than when you have like a 5050 senate and a slither of a in the biden case, a slither of a majority in the house. so the reality is the way elections are going and almost certainly year and this is a wave election in which case my recommendation might be different will have a a tight congress, perhaps a split congress. well, the chances of getting strong, bipartisan, strong legislation through that congress is tiny. so you have a tiny window and then you make it even smaller. now, it's not to say it's bipartisan legislation is difficult in any environment, but if you are ever going to get

done, it's going to be in the first 200 days because that's when you the greatest goodwill, you have a congress that's come in. okay might be a split congress or a tight congress, but they've all just been elected. they all want to get something done. none of them are quite yet worried about their reelection in the midterms. so it's your best opportunity wise waste that goodwill on ramming through partizan legislation and alienating the very people who you need to get something done. assuming that it's a tight congress. so that's the logic. use that goodwill. it's not going to be easy. it's i recognize all the difficulties in the polarized environment we have but if there's ever going to be a chance to get legacy bipartisan legislation and by the way, if it's a legacy bipartisan is the most likely to survive. subsequent administration wins. so it's in your first 200 days. well let me let me ask two questions. that sort of cluster with each other and open it to the whole panel here.

and they have to do with if former president trump wins the election this year, what do you expect the transition to look like? what do you expect in terms of staffing and appointments? will will people want to come back in and work for the trump administration again, we've seen a lot of media attention to a couple of different efforts aimed at not just staffing a trump admin. second, trump administration, but also how to deal with the federal bureaucracy in a trump administration to what this trump audience. just sit back and listen to this one. this good i'm i'm happy to go into the lion's den on this front so the first thing is i would say do not underestimate the trump next administration if he's elected. it is not going to be 2016 again. and the reason i say that is there's a couple organizations which are doing really work, american first policy institute and which if trump campaign sits up in a transition, they can use

work that's being done to educate themselves and give them some momentum. now they won't necessarily do that, but they certainly have that opportunity, that sort of observation number one and observation number two, the trump campaign to date has very disciplined and very run quite different to the 2006 interest ring. so i think there's a degree of system approach which is quite different, so i don't quite know how that's going to play out, but i wouldn't underestimate their ability. hit the ground running. yeah, more, yeah. the of the campaigns don't like to see outside people and organization telling them what they should be doing they want to focus on the campaign getting the elected and it's president who decides what should be what

the policy should be the priorities should be. on the other hand, you're going to have outside a lot of groups that are going to to push their own agendas and to that been in the news. all the one more than the other is the heritage foundation has a project, 2025 that pulls together a lot of conservative, organized nations and makes specific recommendations and is very public. for example the head of heritage edge. this sunday had an interview in the new york times about what they were doing, the america first policy institute, which is headed by across johns, who was the outgoing head of the domestic policy council, is taking a much lower profile and,

has a lot of people from the trump administration and at the the campaign has has reacted to these to these efforts and and has not been happy. so in november, november 13th, suzy wiles and chris last veto who run the campaign said the efforts by various nonprofit groups are certainly appreciate it and can be enormously helpful. however, none of these groups or individuals speak for president trump or his campaign. we will have a transition effort to be announced at a later date, but the the efforts continued heritage and by december, i think the campaign had had enough. and so in early december of they've said despite our crystal

clear. we're being crystal clear some allies haven't gotten the hint and the media in their anti-trump zeal has been all too willing to go along. let us be very specific, unless a message coming directly from president trump or an authorized member of the campaign team, no aspect of future presidential staffing. our policy announcements should seem official. let us be even more specific and blunt people publicly discussing potential administration jobs for themselves or their friends are in fact hurting president trump and themselves. these are and welcome second term priorities and decisions will not, in no uncertain terms, be led by anonymous, thinly sourced speculation.

they, the ever it seemed, seemed continue. but from the campaign point of view, the campaign workers are working for low low wages and focused on getting the president elected. and so they're going to be very worried sad fall and that is a problem with transition planning. so one of the things that are done in the campaigns is that they when they set up a transition operation, they so in the biden case of the top people, in the transition had a saturday zoom session with the campaign so that they could make sure that they were working together. you spend some time in the book talking about how those. need to talk to one another day. i'm just curious few. look ahead. you know, a lot of folks in the

in the biden administration, you work with them as they were going in, coming. would you expect if if president biden gets reelected, how how would they be thinking about a transition over the next year? and what would you expect the second biden team to look? so the biden team is very he has a lot of experience. and jeff zients is the chief of staff jeff is someone that i think listens. former chief of staff, you know, what happens in the book. i had a dialog with two former chiefs of staff, josh bolten and denis mcdonough, and the debate was the bush administer, the obama administration had a lot less turnover in the second term than the bush administration. josh bolten, who was bush's chief of staff, said, well, i actually think that's not a good thing because a second term president needs fresh eyes, fresh legs and fresh perspectives people are tired. they're exhausted. and you kind of get groupthink. so i, i think that a second

term, the best practice for a second term president is to really take a fresh look at his or her team and refresh, because you need new energy, new ideas and new. and you need to invigorate the administration and in order to have the energy in the second term martha in her writing points out that second term presidencies are much less active much less successful than first terms. it's just harder the easier stuff has been done and the country tires of the president in the second term it's happened to the last number of second term presidents. so it's hard to predict what. biden will do. i would say best practice would be to take a very hard look and to. so there's a quick follow up on that not explicitly that way, but it's quite interesting. so does vice president biden. vice president harris have a transition plan or team, given president biden's current of health? i think christian answer that

one. well, take a step back. always the in the first term transition, you always have a team that's focused on the vice president making sure that person is set up successfully. so, yes, the vice president has a team focused on making sure that they transition. i think it might be getting a little ahead of themselves, the vice president, to be doing transition planning about how they become the. so i don't think that would probably be appropriate, but vice president harris, i'm sure, has a team thinking about what are going to be her fundamental planks in his second term as vice president. so there are a couple of questions here. and in fact, even in the run up to the event, several people asked me about how important her career federal employees during the transition and this is a technical question but an important one ahead schedule have been fully implemented could have that have undermined the transition in 2020 to 2021. do you want to unpack that for

us, dave or martha? let me start with so the the career civil servants are absolutely essential for a transition they provide the stability in the government. there's an absence of stability by definition and you often have departments i'll just go back to even the you remember tim geithner who was the treasury secretary and in when obama came in. he had the turbotax issue very experienced, very accomplished. that meant that the treasury department confirmed missions were delayed during a financial crisis and famously some journalists said he was home alone. they had he was the only confirmed official for months in the treasury department. so career civil servants are really important. again, i want to give chris liddell credit. we talked during the outgoing trump transition or we didn't know is going to be an ongoing transition. but there's a woman was running the transition for the civil

service named mary j. bert and chris was operating in a very, very dicey situation. he was planning the potential second trump term, but also planning for the possibility of trump losing and the need for a peaceful transfer of power. so chris actually cut through about 17 bureaucratic layers and worked directly with the career federal servants civil servants. and i think part of this was good practice and good policy. but also i think politics, leigh, you can tell me a bit politically inside. the trump administration, it was seen as less political or less problematic for you to be working with just career civil servants who were responsible for the operation of the government. so it's absolutely best practice. i think chris has a number of recommendations, his book and in my book to further empower career civil servants to take responsive ability during the transition because. there's change at political level and the country needs

stability. yeah, yeah. 100% endorse that. the that the connective tissue between administration and so that they play a critical role for the incoming administration because they provide all of the agency briefing books the sort of knowledge and they're there afterwards as well. so they're not only prepared the administration was coming in, but when all the politicals from the outgoing leave and there's an issue, they have the knowledge base and the how to get things done. so they're incredibly important from a connective tissue. so what can we say? what other ways? very quickly. so i remember chris was having a meeting in the west wing of the white house and mary, you know, she was about 12, 15 layers down from chris. she'd never been to the west wing in the white house. and she was being called on to present the transition plan. so she called me that next morning and she said i didn't sleep all night. i've never been as nervous to go to a meeting like this. what am supposed to do? and i said, you've trained for

this for 30 years. just go be. and chris sent his deputy in to see mary. she was very nervous and he and his deputy just said, just be yourself, you know this. and she killed it at the meeting and she did a very professional, great job. and so that i think, was a good act of a responsible leadership on both chris's part and also part. so we have we have we're right in an hour, but i'm going to give you each a lightning round and you can choose from one of these two. final question and put you can use your one minute to answer your own question if you want the two questions i'm going to ask her. how does the u.s. transition process as compared to other advanced democracies? what worries you most about the 2024 election or what makes you hope all about the state of our democracy? so each get a minute. well, the gsa starts work in general services administration and on transition the day after the the inauguration so they have an operation that's ongoing

and there is an agency transition director's council that has the 15 departments and then it has the five largest agencies. and so the people that come to those are people who worked on transitions past for their departments. what worries me most in in looking abroad the the us had been a a a beacon as far as the peaceful of power and you can just see worldwide the difficult parties whether it's guatemala or it is west africa the difficulties and in transition is and even getting the election of a certified and the the president in office so world war ii that is support what

concerns. i think that in a second term the administration chris is certainly right the campaign has been run very differently and i think a transition what is well and there are always who are willing to serve. the pipelines whether heritage and american policy institute pipelines turn out you'll have to see what what people there are but. presidents want to have a legacy that are positive, dave. and then we'll let chris have the final word. i i worry that this is going to be a very difficult year in our history. we have to presidents where whomever wins the other side, i think, will think the outcome is

we have one president who is going to spend half or one candidate who is going to spend half his time on the campaign trail and the other half in the courtroom. and one never knows. so and i still remember january 6th and what a terrible day in that was. and i worry that president trump, should he will not recognize the outcome of the election that could lead to further. so i it's going to be a very, very challenging year and one where hopefully we can learn the positive from history from the miller center and have a stronger future outlook. look there's plenty of to worry about and i don't want to trivialize that at all, not just domestically, but internationally. when we see all the things that are going on in the world at the moment. but i'm just an optimist. i think we tested the institution of the white house and everything associated with it in 2021, 20 2021, and it stood nothing happened on january 20th except the

inauguration of a new president. and so i believe in the institutional strength of the country. and i believe that we are getting better. so all the work that that lauren kicked off, martha and david contributed, hopefully i've contributed making the process better and the institution better. so i mentioned the crisis of trust in institutions. i'm a believer in institutions, so i think there are a lot better off than most realize. and i think we're going to make them stronger. and i think the system will fine. well, i hope you'll all join me in thanking chris for his service, his terrific book, his for his with us today, as well as david martha, who made the trip down for their service and for them being part of our network in our world. i want to thank you all for coming particularly the many governing council members, other supporters of the center here, our faculty, our staff who put together this great event. we're looking forward to 24. i'm remaining relentlessly

optimistic about the year, and that's not looking past any of the challenges, including the ones that we've talked about today. but basically because, as a as a country, i think we're so to our democracy. and i think that that ultimately will prevail whatever happens in the election. so with that, thank you. and i look forward 2024.

tonight, i'm happy to welcome scott shane to the library to discuss