WASHINGTON — An independent report on last year’s presidential transition urges that future candidates formally begin to prepare for the transfer of power within days of the major-party nominating conventions, a change that would allow more time for a process that White House veterans agree is too often squeezed between Election Day and Inauguration Day.
The report, released Wed nesday by the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, reveals new details about Barack Obama’s and John McCain’s transition plans and their efforts to avoid appearing presumptuous during the final months of the 2008 presidential campaign, and it includes a generally favorable evaluation of the Obama administration’s transition.
The authors urged Congress to require that major- party presidential candidates publicly appoint transition directors within two weeks of the nominating conventions and candidates to begin planning months before that. The move would “take the transition out of the shadows, and remove the stigma of presumptuousness,” the report says.
“The big point is, let’s set the objective of being able to govern by Day One,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit think tank that studies government operations and the federal workforce. “We have to be able to do that in the world that we’re living in.”
But vetting potential nominees for top posts during a presidential campaign could carry significant political risks. The kinds of revelations that routinely torpedo nominations could prove damaging to candidates.
The report says that by Jan. 1, the president-elect should give the Senate the names of nominees for the 50 top defense, national security, economic and diplomatic jobs, to help speed Senate confirmation and security clearances. It urges incumbent administrations to ensure that agencies provide the candidates’ operations with regular briefings and secure office space.
The report’s authors interviewed top aides in Obama’s and McCain’s campaigns.
The Obama team was determined not to repeat mistakes of Bill Clinton’s chaotic ascension, and then-President George W. Bush and his staff were committed to a seamless transition, Stier said.
Martha Joynt Kumar, a political-science professor at Towson University who has long chronicled presidential transfers of power, said of the last one: “What I think was missing in this transition — and it’s not the fault of either campaign — was a climate where early planning was valued. Instead, early planning was viewed as arrogance.”
