2020-2021 – The Transfer of Democratic Power

Office of Management & Budget, An Insider’s Guide – September 30, 2020
On September 30th, The White House Transition Project and its partners at the National Academy of Public Administration hosted a Zoom event to highlight publication of WHTP’s new Insider’s Guide to OMB. To see the event, click here.

Former OMB Director and White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten hosted a discussion of this new briefing book and its subject, the Office of Management and Budget. Bolten recalled that he experienced greater challenges at OMB day in and day out than he later experienced working every day as the President’s White House Chief of Staff. When he arrived at OMB, the first conversation he heard in the hall was one staffer saying to another, “Here comes another one we will have to train. I wish I had had this brief then.”
The round table, co-sponsored with the National Academy of Public Administration, included former OMB officials, all coauthors of the new OMB briefing book.

2016-2017 – The Moody Series on Bi-Partisan Leadership

The Moody Series on Bipartisan Leadership
In Conjunction With
The Texas Presidential Libraries

Hosted By:

As partisan wrangling has increased in the Washington political world, a counter trend has gradually taken hold in the area of presidential transitions. In four of the five most recent presidential election years, Congress and the president have together enacted presidential transition legislation. President Obama signed the latest bill on March 28th. Behind the scenes of seemingly constant discord, presidential transition represents an area of bipartisan commitment to make the hand-off of power a smooth one. In the 2008, 2012 and current the election year, competing campaign staffs met together with academics, experienced practitioners outside of government as well as with administration representatives to learn how to plan for the coming transfer of power. Government officials of different parties pull together to assure the republic a smooth change of government. Can this island of bipartisanship expand to include additional areas of government action and further develop the cooperation between parties and campaigns into more than occasional cooperation? How can those inside and outside of government effectively assist that transfer of power while invigorating bipartisanship in transition-related issues, such as improving the presidential appointments process? The notion of bipartisanship in presidential transitions is the focus of a new series of public discussions sponsored by the Moody Foundation of Galveston, Texas, and carried out by the joint efforts of the White House Transition Project and Rice University’s James A. Baker, III Institute for Public Policy.

National Security Transition at the
Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library,
Austin, Texas, September 22 and 23, 2016.

Two other events will then follow this inaugural meeting. The first covers the haunting challenges of a national security transfer during a contentious presidential campaign. How does the outgoing administration prepare the new team without creating the opportunity for raising a campaign issue and having national security ensconced in a partisan squabble? This event involves a host of academic partners at the University of Texas in Austin:

Crisis Management at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library,
College Station, Texas, on October 18, 2016.

The last in the Moody Series will consider the task of managing the unexpected. Every administration inevitably faces a hostage crisis on American soil, like Waco, or an international incident, like downing an American spy plane in China. And with troubling regularity, every administration must contemplate an economic meltdown on a global scale. What steps does an administration take in the first moments of these crises? How does the President’s team handle the urgent without losing sight of their own ambitious agendas? These questions represent some of the critical issues that the participants in this last event will consider. That event involves partners at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library and School of Government Service.

For more information on these events and previous events involving the White House Transition Project return to this website regularly.