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Refresher Course: How do presidential transitions work?

Former President Donald Trump held a campaign event in Manchester, NH, on April 27, 2023
Todd Bookman
/
NHPR
Then-former President Donald Trump at a campaign event in Manchester, April 27, 2023

Every other Tuesday, the team behind Civics 101 joins NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa to talk about how our democratic institutions actually work.

President Donald Trump signed a number of executive orders, memorandums and proclamations on his first day back in the White House this week. But the presidential transition is still underway, as most of Trump’s nominees for federal agencies await confirmation.

This week, Civics 101 host Nick Capodice joins Julia to talk about presidential transitions, how they work and if there’s a way to make these transitions more streamlined.

Transcript

The inauguration was yesterday, of course, but it feels like the presidential transition has been happening for a while now. What does that timeline look like and when does it begin?

This transition started months ago. They take a long time. Presidential transitions happen under the purview of the United States General Services Administration, the GSA, and they have happened since the 1960s. So the GSA asks candidates to submit plans for the transition by Oct. 1. They asked them to sign an ethics plan and to submit names of transition team members to the FBI for background checks.

So Donald Trump missed the deadline by about two months, but he finally did sign an agreement. However, he refuses to use the GSA transition services at all.

Is that common? I mean, has this happened before?

Folks who work for the GSA say this has never happened before.

So the president is responsible for making a lot of appointments when they take office. We're talking thousands of appointments. Why so many?

Well, it's both less and more than we've had in the past, Julia. Andrew Jackson famously took advantage of something called the spoils system, basically choosing who to hire for government jobs. And this was mostly favors to friends and people who donated to the campaign, [and] supporters asking Jackson for a job. So we've operated that way for a while. Then, when James Garfield was assassinated by a man who felt he had been owed a job from the spoils system, that's when Congress signed an act that created the civil service.

The civil service is where government employees have to prove knowledge and understanding of an area to be hired. So when that act passed, the number of appointees decreased. But in the last 100 years, it sort of sneaked back up. Donald Trump is expected to appoint about 4,000 people to positions, 1,200 of which require Senate confirmation.

So I've got to add, when you have a Senate-confirmed appointment, that [process] can take more than a year. It's worth noting when you're going through all these Senate confirmations, the Senate's not doing a heck of a lot else, including implementing the new president's agenda.

So presidential transitions as they stand sound pretty complicated. A lot of moving parts here. Could they be more efficient?

Well, any system can be more efficient, Julia, but it's important to realize if there is an unfilled position, that is a national security risk. Whenever you have Senate confirmations, that means the chair is pretty much vacant for a while until that person is confirmed. So some folks say one way to speed up the process is to get rid of so many Senate-confirmed positions.

But the major way to make these transitions less complicated is just to have fewer appointments in general. Other democratic nations don't have thousands of presidentially appointed positions. They have tens or fewer than 100. And consider this, when you make a whole bunch of political appointments and you pick a big slew of new people to work in D.C., yes, you're shaking stuff up, but you're also eradicating institutional memory. You are starting from scratch with each new administration, instead of building on the work that the former one did.

As the All Things Considered producer, my goal is to bring different voices on air, to provide new perspectives, amplify solutions, and break down complex issues so our listeners have the information they need to navigate daily life in New Hampshire. I also want to explore how communities and the state can work to—and have worked to—create solutions to the state’s housing crisis.
As the host of All Things Considered, I work to hold those in power accountable and elevate the voices of Granite Staters who are changemakers in their community, and make New Hampshire the unique state it is. What questions do you have about the people who call New Hampshire home?
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