Biden transition team didn’t wait for verdict to get busy
WILMINGTON, Del. — Joe Biden’s transition team didn’t wait for a verdict in the presidential race before getting towork.
Well before Saturday’s victory for Biden, longtime aide Ted Kaufman had been leading efforts to ensure the former vice president can begin building out a government in anticipation of a victory.
Kaufman is a former senator from Delaware who was appointed to fill the seat vacated when Biden was elected vice president. He also worked on Barack Obama’s transition team in 2008, and helped write legislation formalizing the presidential transition process.
Biden first asked Kaufman to start work on a just-in-case transition in April, shortly after the former vice president locked up the presidential nomination at the conclusion of a once-crowded Democratic primary.
The transition can be a frenzied process even under normal circumstances.
Before Saturday’s decision in the race, an odd political limbo had taken hold. The Biden team was moving forward but couldn’t tackle all that needed to be accomplished; President Donald Trump was claiming without evidence that the election was being stolen from him.
It was at least somewhat reminiscent of the 2000 presidential race and that year’s postelection legal fight over the recount in Florida. After more than a month, the dispute between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore was decided by the Supreme Court — truncating the transition period to just 39 days before the January 2001 inauguration.
Clay Johnson, who headed Bush’s transition team, said Biden’s advisers couldn’t “wait to be sure that the president-elect really is the presidentelect.”
Johnson said that in June of 1999 — about 17 months before Election Day 2000 — Bush approached him about heading the possible transition, having seen his father go through the process 11 years earlier. Prior to Election Day, Bush had already settled on Andy Card to serve as chief of staff for both the transition and at the White House.
Johnson thought they were ahead of schedule. But then came the recount.
After an initial 10 days or so, Bush’s running mate, Dick Cheney, told Johnson to begin raising money and making staffing decisions, declaring that the race “is going to be resolved one way or the other.”
The Bush team was unable to conduct FBI background checks on potential Cabinet members and other appointees with no official winner declared. Instead, it used a former White House general counsel from the Reagan administration to conduct interviews designed to screen for potential problems that might have turned up in background checks.
“You have to assume you are it and not be presumptuous but they better be working hard as if they are it,” Johnson said of Biden’s team.
Biden’s campaign has refused to comment on the transition process. His closest advisers say the top priority will be announcing a White House chief of staff, then assembling the pieces needed to tackle the coronavirus.
A president gets 4,000 appointees, and more than 1,200 of them must be confirmed by the Senate. That could be a challenge for Biden since the Senate maywell remain controlled by the Republicans.