Welcome to the President's Inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boyes Distinguished Senior Fellow in U.S.

Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. This is the first episode in a special

presidential transition series on the President's Inbox. From now until inauguration day, I will be sitting down with experts

to unpack who will staff the next presidential administration in how it will likely approach

the many foreign policy challenges it will face. This week's topic is staffing a new administration.

With me to discuss the presidential transition process is Stephen Hadley. Steve is a principal of Rice Hadley-Gates-Emmanuel LLC, an international strategic consulting firm.

From 2005 to 2009, Steve served as national security

advisor to President George W. Bush. During President Bush's first term, he served as deputy

national security advisor. Steve was also a senior foreign policy advisor to the George

W. Bush campaign in 2000,

and he later helped lead the transition process on national security matters after the election.

Steve was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy from 1989 to 1993,

and he served on the staff of the National Security Council during both the Bush Senior and General Ford administrations.

Steve is the editor of the 2003 book Handoff, the Foreign Policy George W. Bush passed to Barack Obama,

which provides and analyzes the foreign policy briefing papers that

his National Security Council team prepared for the Obama transition team. Steve, thank you for

joining me on the president's inbox. Delighted to be here. We are talking a few days before

election day, Steve, so we don't know who the next president will be.

But I'd like to talk about the challenges that any new president faces in staffing up in administration.

You have seen it on both ends, both going in to an administration, as well as handing the baton over to the next presidential team.

So perhaps we can sort of start with your laying out the nature of the challenge any new president

faces when they move into the White House.

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