Presidential Transitions with David Marchick
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 17 October 2022
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Presidential transitions are the most delicate and hazardous periods in the entire political cycle. Even at the best of times, incoming administrations face a huge task. Each new president must make more than 4,000 political appointments in a short period of time, as well as get up to speed on ongoing policy issues.
To discuss the history and the current framework of presidential transitions, Lawfare publisher David Priess sat down with David Marchick, the dean of American University's Kogod School of Business and previously served as the director of the Center for Presidential Transition at the Partnership for Public Service. He also is the author of, “The Peaceful Transfer of Power: An Oral History of America’s Presidential Transitions,” and the host of the Transition Lab podcast. They discussed examples of effective and ineffective recent transitions, the role of everyone from outgoing presidents to the GSA to agency teams, and what else might be done to nail down best practices for presidential transitions.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:34.1 | Luckily the Biden team actually anticipated that this would happen. |
| 0:38.2 | They worked on assortment for months and anticipated virtually everything that happened and put |
| 0:44.3 | in place plans to mitigate the impact of problems with the outgoing Trump presidency. |
| 0:50.3 | They anticipated every single thing except for one thing, January 6th. |
| 0:55.8 | So they figured out how to deal with the fact that briefings would be delayed, that |
| 1:01.2 | they might not get access to federal funds to pay staff. |
| 1:05.6 | Really Jeff, Zients and Ted Kaufman and Johannes did a brilliant job figuring out what might |
| 1:11.4 | happen. |
| 1:12.8 | I'm David Priest, publisher of LawFair and this is the LawFair podcast, October 17th, |
| 1:19.0 | 2022. |
| 1:21.3 | Presidential transitions are the most delicate and hazardous periods in the entire political |
| 1:25.6 | cycle. |
| 1:26.9 | Even at the best of times, incoming administrations face a huge task. |
| 1:30.6 | Each new president must make more than 4,000 political appointments in a short period of |
| 1:34.9 | time as well as get up to speed on ongoing policy issues. |
| 1:39.6 | To discuss the history and the current framework of presidential transitions, I sat down with |
| 1:44.3 | David Marchick, who's the Dean of American Universities, Cogood School of Business, and |
... |
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