This series provides the essential information needed to assure a smooth transition. Reports in this series detail organization and operations in a range of offices critical to a properly functioning White House. These reports rely heavily on the extensive interviews conducted by WHTP's White House Interview Program, an innovative program that has given practitioners a useful way to pass on their experiences to those that follow, regardless of party. Pictured at left, WHTP Director, Martha Kumar reviews with Bush Transition Director Clay Johnson one of the briefing books WHTP provided for each of the offices covered by the 2001 series: Chief of Staff, Staff Secretary, Director of Personnel, White House Administration, White House Counsel, Press Secretary, and Office of Communications. Mr. Johnson had served as the Bush for President Transition planner and had worked with WHTP staff for almost two years by the time the new administration took office. He would go on to serve as Director of Presidential Personnel in the new White House.

The institutional memory series office descriptions detail basic organizational structures, as well as typical work routines, identify what those who have done the job commonly think has worked and what has not.

• National Security Advisor
  by John Burke
• Public Liaison
  by Joseph Pika
• Legislative Affairs
• Political Affairs

A shortcut to the Institutional Memory Series, The White House World gathers and digests the same material provided to the Bush White House staff in 2001.

General Guides

• Presidency & the Political Environment by John H. Kessel
• The White House World: Start Up, Organization, and The Pressures of Work Life by Martha J. Kumar
• Meeting the Freight Train Head On: Planning for the Transition to Power by Martha J. Kumar, George C. Edwards, III, James Pfiffner, & Terry Sullivan
• Opportunities and Hazards by Martha J. Kumar

Evaluating Past Transitions

• Lessons from Past Transitions by John P. Burke
• Tales of Transitions 1980 and 1988 by John P. Burke
• Evaluating Transition 2001 by Terry Sullivan

A new series for the 2009 transition, these briefing papers concentrate on issues and resources identified in discussions with past White House staff, including those attending the WHTP and James Baker Institute's meeting of the former White House Chiefs of Staff. Seen at right are two of the former Chiefs, Howard Baker, Jr. and James A. Baker III, discussing these issues with WHTP Exec Director Terry Sullivan.

• Presidential Work During the First Hundred Days New!
  by Terry Sullivan
• Orchestrating Presidential Decisions: Institutional Choices in White House Operations by Terry Sullivan
• Late Executive Orders and Early Land Mines: Working with Presidential Legacies by Martha Kumar
• The President on the Road New!
  by Brendan Doherty
• Managing the White House Budget by Bradley Patterson
• Presidential Power in National Security: A Guide to the President-Elect by Louis Fisher
• The Rythms of Presidential Encounters with the Press by Martha Kumar

In its first book in the special studies series, WHTP and its partner The James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy of Rice University focus on the specific operational problems faced by the White House Chief of Staff. The book, Nerve Center: Lessons on Governing from the White House Chiefs of Staff is published by the Texas A&M University Press.

Nerve Center compiles the collective judgments of 12 of the 14 living former White House Chiefs of Staff who convened to discuss the challenges that present every White House trying to move the nation's agenda forward. "Some of us have tried to oust others of us from office," noted James A. Baker III in his remarks opening the conference, "but on many issues about how to do the nation's business, we are all agreed there is no partisan answer. Every new administration deserves a chance to realize the electorate's will without stumbling through the simplist mistakes. We've all been there and regardless of who steps into this job on the twentieth of January, we want the best for them."

Those involved in the conference and covered in the book include:

• Former Congressman, Sec. of Defense, and Vice-President Richard Cheney
• Former Sec. of Treasury and State James A. Baker III
• Former Senate Majority Leader and Ambassador Howard Baker, Jr.
• Former Congressman and Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
• Former Congressman Leon Panetta

• Former Governor John Sununu
• Erskine Bowles
• John Podesta
• Jack Watson
• Thomas "Mack" McClarty
• Former Sec. of Transportation Samuel Skinner and
• Kenneth Duberstein.

Their discussions in Nerve Center range over topics about staffing the White House, crisis management, political leadership, predatory partisanship in Washington, presidential decision-making, and a host of other topics associated with presidential transitions and governing from the modern White House. Two scholarly articles summing up the operational dilemmas the Chiefs face and evaluating the 2001 transition round out this useful resource from the WHTP.

• The Details of Inquiry — Useful Strategies for Fixing the Presidential Appointments Process by Terry Sullivan
• The Real Invisible Hand: Presidential Appointees in the Administration of George W. Bush by G. Calvin MacKenzie

• A new face for WHTP
• WHTP welcomes new partners
• WHTP in Post overview...
• WHTP launches new series with the first hundred days.

A New Website for WHTP

The White House Transition Project takes on a new face with the launching of its newly redesigned website. "In the past ten years, our website has has millions of visits," noted Terry Sullivan, WHTP executive director and the WHTP website manager. "We have filled requests for information from all over the world." The new website features new information resources along most of the other materials expected of this clearinghouse for transition assistance. It retires the NFO software downloader which has become obsolete.

The new website also creates an opportunity to highlight the new partnership with the LBJ School of Public Affiars (see below).

As in the past, the WHTP website recieves a great deal of support from our virtual hosts at Ibiblio.org, an internet partnership located on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

WHTP Welcomes New Partners

"In its nearly ten year history, the White House Transition Project has done great things." Professor Martha Kumar recently noted, "It has helped one presidency get off to a record-setting start. It has helped document and translate into useful advice the hard lessons learned in the world's most important governing institution. And it has passed those lessons on to those who govern, in this country and other democracies around the world, to their staffs here and abroad, and to the thousands of political appointees who manage policy-making day in and day out."
"Over the years, the White House Transition Project has received the assistance of a terrific board of advisors and the support of a number of institutions. We want to welcome a new partner for the 2009 transition effort - The Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs of the University of Texas at Austin and its Center for Politics and Governance."

Itself a new project at the LBJ School, its Center for Politics and Governance has received major support from the AT&T Foundation. According to its Director, Veronica Stidvent, the Center concentrates on developing a new public affairs curriculum focused on improving governance in ways that are practical to achieve and comprehensible to students, candidates, office holders, the media, and the public. "Presidential transitions," noted Director Stidvent, "exemplify the challenges of connecting the politics of campaigning with the policies of governance. The Center for Politics and Governance is committed to improving our political system, and we are excited to partner with the White House Transition Project to help the country’s leaders meet this challenge."
The Center and WHTP will shortly announce its plans for joint programs to assist the 2009 transition.

Campaigns Go On, but the Transition Is Around the Corner
by Stephen Barr, Washington Post, 6/5/2008

Even though the McCain-Obama battle is just getting started, it is not too early for their political teams to start thinking about the transition to the White House. It might even be too late.
When it comes to organizing a new administration, history "tells us that any winning candidate who has not started at least six months before the election will be woefully behind come the day after Election Day," John Kamensky wrote on his blog last year, before the Clinton-Obama sprint turned into a marathon.
Kamensky was a "reinventing government" aide to then-vice president Al Gore. Now a senior fellow at the IBM Center for the Business of Government, he posts transition updates and related information at least twice a week at http://www.transition2008.wordpress.com. Kamensky's goal is to pull together what different think tanks, nonprofit organizations and other groups are planning or doing on federal management issues that likely will require the attention of the next president.
Most federal employees usually feel somewhat removed from transitions, unless they have a headquarters job that puts them in contact with political appointees assigned by the winning candidate to scout out their agency.
But a larger number of federal employees may feel the tug of the transition this time because the 2009 transfer of power will be the first in the post-9/11 era, prompting concerns on Capitol Hill and in the administration about possible increased risks of terrorism and other threats to national security.
The Department of Homeland Security, which didn't exist during the last transition, has been taking steps to ensure that career civil servants are in high-ranking positions to provide continuity between the outgoing and incoming administrations.
As the Kamensky blog shows, the Internet will make it easier for federal employees to watch the transition unfold, compared to previous efforts.
The nonprofit Council for Excellence in Government, for example, will lay out the management qualifications and skills required for the 25 toughest jobs in the next administration. The council (www.excelgov.org) also plans to organize online communities to share insights and information and provide links to Web sites that track the transition.
Another nonprofit, the Partnership for Public Service, is joining with Young Government Leaders on June 26 to host a discussion, "Surviving the Presidential Transition." Information about the event is at www.ourpublicservice.org.
The Partnership also plans to launch a campaign to get federal management issues at the top of the transition agenda and will issue a report this summer on federal workforce management in the next administration.
And from the world of academia, University of Pennsylvania Professor Donald F. Kettl is tracking the campaigns at www.thenextgovernment.com, where he describes candidates' plans to improve the performance of federal agencies and programs.

Martha Joynt Kumar, a political science professor at Towson University, is co-director of a project on transitions that began in 2001 and relies on presidential scholars to write essays on how various White House offices operate and have been organized by past presidents. The essays are at whitehousetransitionproject.org. New ones will be added this year, including a paper on the office of the national security adviser.

WHTP Launches new series with the first 100 days

"It really doesn't matter so much if you win," said WHTP Executive Director Terry Sullivan, "if when you do win, you don't know what to do next. And, all too often, presidents-elect find themselves in that exact situation. We intend to help."

With that statement, WHTP launched a new study series designed to inform transition planners about what they should expect during the President's first hundred days. "In the last two cycles and in the transition plans dating back to the Reagan administration, we have seen planners trying to estimate what to expect during the first hundred days. This is exactly the kind of information that only professional scholars can adequately provide. So we are pitching in." Currently, the National Archives has released the daily logs kept for Presidents Eisenhower through GHW Bush. "We hope to be able to show the new president's team how often they can expect to meet with congressional leaders, interest groups, give speeches, hold press conferences, rest, face crises," Professor Sullivan noted. "We will use the actual experiences of past Presidents to help prepare the new one." To see an example of these kinds of daily logs, click here. To see a preliminary assessment of far off previous transition planning groups have underestimated demands on presidential time, see WHTP's report "Evaluating Transition 2001" by Terry Sullivan.

The new WHTP Advanced Research Series will encompass a number of additional studies on similar operational matters that previous practitioners have requested. These include the patterns to the first 100 days, the patterns to travel, budgets, Executive Orders and new regulations, and presidential contact with the press. See this page, for more information on the ARS.