High-stakes transition could serve as a model

Gathering storm clouds. Turbulent rapids. Massive mountains. Observers are using many metaphors to describe the unique circumstances surrounding the upcoming transfer of power from President George Bush to President-elect Barack Obama.

The United States has faced deeper crises during transitions - ranging from the secession of the Southern states during the handoff from James Buchanan to Abraham Lincoln to the Great Depression, which began during Herbert Hoover's administration and continued well into Franklin Delano Roosevelt's - but it is rare that the government has had to deal with so many challenges at once. The nation is engaged in two wars, is in the midst of an economic crisis, and federal agencies are operating under the strained budgets of a continuing resolution. And the entire process is overshadowed by heightened fears that terrorists will test the new administration with an attack.

These issues require a daunting amount of work for the new president, but their urgency has had a paradoxical effect. The challenges of homeland security, the economic crisis, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are so great that the Bush administration ramped up early for the transition, with more aggressive and comprehensive planning than ever before. And good government groups have worked to avoid overlap and to maximize their impact by uniting around a common agenda and coordinating their push for the swift confirmation and education of new political appointees.

While acknowledging the magnitude of the challenges awaiting Obama, observers both in and outside government predict this could be a model transition, providing the foundation for improving a notoriously difficult process. One of the first tests of the transition will be the administration's handoff of the Office of Financial Stability, the Treasury Department entity created when President Bush signed the massive bailout program for the nation's financial system.

"You had many of the Great Society programs that were under way when Nixon arrived. Medicare had been up and running for a couple of years, and Nixon had priorities there to shepherd, but it wasn't as urgent," says Paul C. Light, Paulette Goddard Professor at New York University's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. "There wasn't a major program coming out of the Hoover administration that Roosevelt had to deal with."

The transition will be even more complicated because the Office of Financial Stability has not hired substantial numbers of staffers to manage the bailout. A group of political appointees is overseeing contractors, and it was unclear in mid-November whether those employees would stay on in the new administration. The president will have to move quickly to get his economic team nominated, through the security clearance process, and confirmed by the Senate to build confidence in these new leaders and avoid roiling the markets again, says Donald F. Kettl, the Robert A. Fox Leadership Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd has said the next Treasury secretary should be confirmed before Obama is in office, though that process normally takes place shortly after Inauguration Day.

The bailout is only one of many priorities competing for the president's immediate attention. He will have to move quickly to submit a budget and sort through spending priorities at a time when many agencies are operating under a continuing resolution. And while voters now say the economy is much more important to them than the war in Iraq, Obama is under pressure to re-examine U.S. involvement in that conflict.

The new president will have to address these issues as he gets his executive branch up and running. Unlike Lincoln and Roosevelt, who were inaugurated in March, Obama will have less time to pick appointees and consider policy strategy. Beginning with Roosevelt's second term in 1937 the inauguration moved to Jan. 20. Now leaders across government are taking a long, hard look at the transition process earlier than ever before.

In the December 2008 issue of Government Executive, Brittany Ballenstedt and Alyssa Rosenberg explored some of the preparations that have the potential to ease the handoff.

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