Staffing a New Administration, With Stephen Hadley (Transition 2025, Episode 1)

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boies 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 and 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 & Emanuel 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 Sr. and Gerald Ford administrations. Steve is the editor of the 2023 book, Hand-Off: 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.

HADLEY:
Delighted to be here.

LINDSAY:
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 an 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 could start with your laying out the nature of the challenge any new president faces when they move into the White House.

HADLEY:
Well, Jim, it's great to be with you and let me start by recalling a transition now decades ago from Gerald Ford to Jimmy Carter. I was on the Gerald Ford National Security Council staff, was asked to stay on for the National Security Council staff under Jimmy Carter. So when I left office—left my office on the last day of the Ford Administration—I had file cabinets full of classified documents, and I had fellow staff members throughout the offices of the NSC. The next day when I arrived is the first day of the Carter administration, all of those documents were gone because they were presidential records and they went to what became the Gerald Ford Library. All the staff was gone. There were only three or four of us who were asked to stay over. So if you were Zbigniew Brzezinski—the new national security advisor for President Carter—and you showed up, you had no staff and no documents. Welcome to the White House.

Now things have improved a lot, but it is still the case that all of the records go off-site to what will become the outgoing president's presidential library. And only if you've taken special precautions to get special permission to copy some of those documents to leave for the new administration, will there be any paper records for them to deal with. Similarly, most of the senior staff on the NSC will leave with the outgoing administration. We're all asked to submit our resignations, and certainly in the old days all of those resignations were accepted. More recently, the senior people's resignations are accepted and more junior staff can stay behind. This is because most of the staff of the NSC is not hired by the NSC staff of a particular president, but are people who work at the State Department or the Department of Defense, or the Treasury department or the Commerce department, and are virtually on loan to the White House to fill out the NSC staff. So you can leave the more junior people there so that the incoming national security advisor has a staff with which to work.

LINDSAY:
So I have to ask you, Steve, in that situation, how do you get up to speed given that documents aren't there? You have junior staff, how does it operate?

HADLEY:
Well, I can tell you in the transition from President Bush to President Obama, we had gotten permission so that the junior staff people who would stay there and be present on day one of the Obama administration had permission to copy those documents they thought they would need to do their job under the new team. That's first off. And secondly, we had designated among those junior NSC staff who would remain to be available to the new administration, someone who would lead the office in the interim until the new administration had brought in their own senior people to staff the senior positions at the NSC. So you can structure in such a way that there is an adequate paper record and adequate staffing for the new team, but it takes the old team to be willing to set that up for the new team, and the new team being willing to accept that kind of arrangement for it to work effectively and smoothly.

LINDSAY:
So let me ask you about that. In terms of bringing your own team on, obviously they have to get security clearances—is that something that can get wrapped up before Inauguration Day or does someone walking in as National Security Advisor perhaps have half or two-thirds of their team while they wait for other people to get clearance?

HADLEY:
It's tricky. Some of the people who are on the transition team will have gotten security clearances, and if they are then to be part of the new team's NSC staff, they'll walk in with the necessary security clearances. Others who are new, were not part of the transition team, or did not have clearances before, they'll have to go through the clearance process, which is quite lengthy. One of the things that they won't have to do as people going into the cabinet positions or sub-cabinet positions in the various departments and agency of the government, is they will not need Senate confirmation. The NSC staff is appointed by the president. Its members are not Senate confirmed. They don't testify before Congress, for example, but they are staffed to the president and therefore are exempt from Senate confirmation.

And that means that the White House and the NSC can many times staff up more quickly than the departments and agencies, which leaves a certain amount of imbalance when you have your first inter-agency meetings that bring together the key people from the White House staff and the staff from the various departments and agencies. The first deputies committee meeting I had under the Bush administration, the only people that showed up were actually civil servants who were working in the various departments and agencies because the cabinet departments and agencies didn't yet have their Senate-confirmed presidential appointees.

So there's a little bit of an imbalance in the opening days of the administration. And that's why people think that the new administration starts on January 20th when the new president is confirmed. Actually, it doesn't really start until sometime in March and April—when not just the people working at the White House, but also people working in the department and agencies at senior levels have actually received Senate confirmation and can take their positions in their departments and agencies.

LINDSAY:
Steve, thanks for raising the issue of cabinet posts and the various executive agencies. How far down the staff hierarchy does it go before you hit people who stick around for the next administration? And I take your point that some cabinet secretaries may get confirmed even before the president is inaugurated, but people below them...Often it takes some time for them to get the stamp of approval from the Senate.

HADLEY:
That's right, Jim. And one of the things that people I think don't understand is we have a rather unique system here. If you go to the European countries, for example, and the new minister of defense comes in, that minister of defense may have one or two people that are his or her picks that come into office with them. But in the United States we have a different arrangement. As you know, we have presidential appointees that come in with the new president that are Senate confirmed, and staff the cabinet positions, the secretarial positions, the deputy secretary positions, the undersecretary positions, and the assistant secretary positions. These are all basically political appointees. What is the purpose of this? The purpose is so that when a new president comes in, they will have campaigned on a set of policies that will have been endorsed by the American people in their election of the president.

The political appointees are supposed to be the agents of the president to put that agenda into place. In order to do that, they will work with the permanent government, the civil servants in the departments and agencies, the military, the intelligence officers, the State Department career officers as well, State Department officials. And so you have this dynamic tension between the political appointees representing the priorities of the incoming administration ratified by the American people and the permanent government, which is the repository of expertise and history. And it's in that tension between those two groups that a policy could work out that will both reflect the new directions of an incoming presidential administration, but informed by the history and expertise of the folks that have been there before in terms of the permanent government. So the assistant secretary and up are usually political appointees and the deputy assistant secretary is usually mixed—some political appointees, some career—and then below that, office directors and the like, are the permanent government.

LINDSAY:
Steve, I'm glad you raised the comparison between the way the U.S. transition works versus the way it works in most European countries, indeed, most other democracies. And I note your point that much of the permanent civil service sticks around in the case of European democracies, but the flip side also is true that many European democracies—Britain probably most notably—the transition between prime ministers happens overnight. You lose an election, you move out of 10 Downing Street, a new prime minister moves in.

In the case of the United States, we have this rather lengthy transition period, could be up to eleven weeks long, but sometimes it's shorter. And there's a lot of speculation that the 2024 election may take days or longer to determine who the president is. You've lived through a very short transition. That was the case in 2000 where the outcome of the race wasn't decided until December 12. Walk me through what some of the challenges are in having a short transition.

HADLEY:
When you come into a transition, there's an issue of what are your priorities? And the first priority is to identify the people that are going to staff the new administration and try to facilitate them getting in place quickly. Getting their security clearances for those needing Senate confirmation, getting the Senate confirmation process underway and completed. The second thing you do is what is the organization going to be? Are you going to have a principal's committee, for example, under the National Security Council? The National Security Council is created by statute. It has only four members, the president, the vice president, secretary of state, secretary of defense. The question is, is a new president going to want to expand that group, make sure the secretary of treasury, secretary of commerce, maybe the attorney general can come to NSC meetings and deliberate with the president on the president's policy decisions?

Then there's how is the government going to structure below that level? There is usually—traditionally—at each level of government a set of inter-agency meetings that are held to develop policies and raise up to the next level issues that have to be decided at a more senior level. This whole structure is usually set out in a presidential memorandum signed early in administration. So the second thing you do after getting your people in place is get your organization in place.

And then the third thing you do is you try to have some idea of what the administration is going to be pursuing in its opening days and weeks. In fact, the NSC I think is very typical to try to script the president's first day, first week, first month, and first ninety days. What are the president going to do in order to set the tone for the new administration and make it clear to the American people that the new president is going to make good on the things that were set out during the presidential campaign? Normally, you have about eleven weeks to do that. We had about four weeks to do that. I suspect that we may even have less this current time by the time all the lawsuits and other things that are liable to come out of this election are resolved. It's going to be a real challenge for the new team, no question about it.

LINDSAY:
So one of the issues that I've always wondered about as you look at this transition process, which again could be as long as eleven weeks, is the potential uncertainty that it can create, because from election day until inauguration day, you still have a president fully invested with all the powers of the United States Constitution, even if you refer to such a president as a lame duck. On the other hand, you have a president-elect who much of the world is looking toward trying to figure out what the president-elect is going to do, what the priorities will be, what the personnel choices will be, and the like. But that raises the potential of having sort of two people trying to speak on behalf of the United States. What's the sort of proper way to think about that tension?

HADLEY:
There are probably three things to say on this. One, Jim, is something you know: you only have one president at a time. So in terms of who speaks for the United States until January 20th, it is the outgoing president who speaks for the United States full stop. Second of all, in a good transition, there will be some coordination between the incoming president-elect and the outgoing president. So for example, in the Bush to Obama transition as a national security advisor, I kept a stack of papers which were decisions that were coming up to President Bush, which he could make those decisions as president, but he could also leave them for his successor. And I would take that stack of papers and sit down with Jim Jones, who was the incoming national security advisor, and I would go paper by paper and say, "This issue is before President Bush. Is this something you would like President Bush to decide to get it off your plate or is this something that President-Elect Obama would like to have preserved for his time in office so this a decision he can make at the outset of his new administration?" And Jim Jones would give me guidance as to which pile was decided by Bush, holds for Obama. I would run that by President Bush, he would run by President-Elect Obama and you would therefore have an apportionment in some sense of who's going to deal with what issue during that transition period.

Third thing I would say, though, is this one is liable to be a little bit different. It may be until shortly before January 26 before we know who is going to be president of the United States, and this is a different kind of problem. One of the things you worry about if you're in the team that is transitioning out is that our adversaries might try to take advantage of the transition, assume we're distracted and take actions contrary to our interests.

And one of the things I think President Biden views as his legacy and his responsibility is to send a message to our adversaries and reassure our allies that the Oval Office is not empty. He'll be there, he'll be watching, and if adversaries try to take advantage of the situation, he will respond appropriately, and his staff will support him in doing that. I think the other thing he will do, if there's some disruption associated with this electoral process, he will view his legacy as including getting America through this transition process with our democratic institutions in place and without violence in the country threatening those institutions. My guess is that President Biden sees both of those things—safeguarding the country against its adversaries and safeguarding our institutions during the transition—as important pieces of his responsibility and his legacy going forward.

LINDSAY:
I'm curious on this point, Steve, when we talk about how we only have one president at a time and that the president-elect should not assume the powers of the office before they're sworn in at noon on Inauguration Day. But there are obviously, my sense is, conversations taking place between members of the incoming team and foreign officials. What in your sense is the dividing line between proper conversations and improper ones?

HADLEY:
Well, one I think is transparency, and one of the things we would try to do during the transition period where Bush was coming into office was to let the Clinton administration, in that case, know that President Bush was having certain conversations. Secondly, not presume to make decisions or commit the United States during that period. These are conversations, these are get-to-know-you. The incoming president ought to do a lot of listening, probably a lot less talking during those conversations, and keep the outgoing team informed so there are no surprises here. Again, I think the key thing about a transition that makes it work well is if the outgoing president and the incoming president agree that transitions are important, that they're going to make their respective transition as good as it can be, and they are going to be transparent with each other and send the message to their respective staff that that's how they want the staffs to interact during the transition period.

LINDSAY:
Well, let me ask you about this, Steve, because the transition from Bush to Obama is held up by most people who study transitions as being an exemplar of how to do it. And you direct your team in the foreign policy space to draft a number of briefing memos on critical issues that the incoming Obama team would face, and you succeeded in having them released and they appear in book Hand-off that you edited. Tell me what your thinking was that drove you to sort of go through what, from my vantage point looks like a very systematic process of trying to prepare information for the incoming administration, because my sense is historically that doesn't always happen.

HADLEY:
Well, as we talked about, you want to have the critical documents copied so that the new team has access to them when they come into office. You want to have people in place so they have staff with which to operate. But that doesn't mean they're going to understand the history in a succinct and cultivated way. So we prepared these transition memos on the forty key national security and foreign policy issues, and they all had the same format: What did we find? What was our strategy? What did we think we accomplished? What remained to be done? And what were the challenges that we're going to face the new team? And we then attached to each of these transition memos the key policy documents of the outgoing administration, records of conversations the presidents had with world leaders, records of meetings of NSC, National Security Council meetings, principal committee meetings for example, all the things that would put the new team in a position to manage the issue.

Now, this was a lot of stuff. And one of the things, you have very little time when you come in for an administration, you have very little time to read. So in some sense, these memos also served two other purposes. One, they prepared the outgoing staff to be in a position to brief in a focused way the new team in the in-person meetings that occurred between the outgoing staff in the incoming staff. And I think those in-person meetings were probably more important than the memos. Secondly, the memos are there so that once the new team comes in and is confronted with an issue or a development in a subject matter, they've got these memos to go back on and the associated document to see what the history has been.

And thirdly, the transition doesn't really end on January 20th, but hopefully you've established relations between the outgoing staff and the incoming staff so that a month, two, or three down the road when the incoming staff is faced with a challenge, they can pick up the phone and call the folks who were there before and say, "Look, when you were facing this problem, what were your thoughts and what would you suggest we think about as we confront it under the new team?"

LINDSAY:
Steve, is that practice or understanding, of being able to reach out to the people who've just left, is that as easy to develop in a cross-party transition than it is let's say if you switch from one president of the same party to the next president of the same party?

HADLEY:
It's probably harder in a cross-party, but it's not easy even in the same party situation. I think when the transition is from an administration of one party to an administration of the same party, there's, I think, an expectation among the people staffing the outgoing administration that a lot of them will be kept under the new team, and usually those expectations are disappointed. It was certainly the case in the transition from Reagan to President George H.W. Bush for example, because a new president wants to have their own team and wants to have their own agenda.

The other thing that happens when you win an election, which is really an enormous challenge, and if you win, the adrenaline is flowing and you kind of think here you are, you're going to be making history, you're going to be writing on a blank sheet of paper and everything the prior administration did was probably wrong. You're going to show them and you're going to get it right. These are great illusions of course, but they, I think, plague every new administration. And what administrations need to understand is they're not writing on a blank sheet of paper. They're going to be bound by the history and policies and the consequences of those policies from those who went before. And their own policy initiatives will depend on their success in many respects by whether they are adopted and pursued by their successors.

The dirty little secret is there's a lot more continuity between administrations, even administrations of different parties. There's a lot more continuity in foreign policy than you would think if you listen to our presidential debates and the discussions of foreign policy, which are usually about strawmen and red-herrings rather than real analysis and strategic discussion of the issues in question. But the good news, there's a lot of continuity and a good transition can actually help an incoming administration preserve what was good in the actions of the prior administration, while at the same time having scoped go in new directions that come from the American people and the voice they have given in the election of a new president.

LINDSAY:
I take your point, Steve, that is probably helpful in deciding what you're going to do to have a very clear idea of what has been done. But that leads me back to the tension between setting priorities and the fact that you don't get a blank sheet of paper. How did you think about priorities? Because you come in, you inherit an inbox, it has a bunch of issues, you do have differences with the preceding administration—in your case, the Clinton administration—but obviously there is, as you point out, you can't have a sharp disjuncture. You want to, in some sense, decide to carry on existing priorities. So how did you think through that challenge?

HADLEY:
Well, I think any new administration will come in and they will have a set of priorities. They'll usually come out the campaign. They'll be the things the president talked about or promised during the campaign, but of course, they will very quickly be impacted by events. I remember in the Bush administration, we got some pressure early on in the first six months, particularly from the Defense Department, "But when are you going to issue a new national security strategy?" For a lot of reasons to me, it just didn't seem quite right yet. And then 9/11 happened when the United States was attacked by an enormous and deadly terrorist attack, and all the national security strategy that we would've written about before 9/11 would've been superseded by what we had to say after 9/11 in a revised national security strategy. So yes, you prioritize. The priorities reflect very much how the president has campaigned, but as you react to events, those priorities are going to change.

I remember we had an exercise that George Tenet ran to try to come up with intelligence priorities. Where should we allocate resources? And those hold up until something happens that's unexpected and is at the front page of every newspaper in the country, and suddenly what has been a low priority becomes a high priority because it's the focus of our media and public attention. So the whole notion of priorities is sadly a flexible concept that's going to have to be revised reflecting events and the reaction of the American people to those events. And the trick in some sense is to react to those events but not lose sight of the long-term things that you're trying to achieve. And if you can do that, if you can react to events in the crises of the moment, but still have enough time and attention to pursue longer term goals and objectives, that's the real trick and it's really hard.

LINDSAY:
Steve, I want to draw out that point because it strikes me that you're quite right that new administrations come in with plans and then those plans encounter reality. Events can sort of change things, but those events can also test how well foreign policy team or a national security team operates. And I recall early in the Bush administration, George W. Bush administration, we had the EP-3 incident where a Chinese jet flight fighter crashed into American surveillance plane. All of a sudden the issue of China and how to deal with it was on the front page. It was a major international incident. To what extent, or how do you learn as senior people in administration whether you actually have the right procedures in place or the right processes in place?

HADLEY:
One of the things I think that characterizes a good presidential transition is for the outgoing team to walk the incoming team through a crisis simulation. Not to see how they were doing, grade their homework, but to make sure they understand the intelligence resources, the communication channels that are available to them in dealing with a crisis. That can be helpful. In the case of the downing of the U.S. aircraft by a hot-dogging Chinese pilot, we found we did not have a direct line to the Chinese president. In fact, it was days before we could find the Chinese president who was actually on a foreign trip to Africa somewhere.

So one of the things you do is you deal with these events in crises, you recognize your inadequacies and try to put in place a set of communication channels and procedures that you need to manage a crisis. Something that Biden administration has been working on, for example, by reestablishing military to military contacts between the U.S. military and the Chinese military. So if that kind of incident would happen again, we would've more reliable communication channels.

LINDSAY:
Steve, I want to close by drawing on your expertise and insights in how to set up a National Security Council staff so that it is most effective. There are debates about what the right size is for a National Security Council staff. There's talk about how many divisions or departments or directorates it should have. There are discussions about how you either integrate or separate economic issues from national security issues. How do you think about the issue of structure? Well, I guess one question is it really that important or is it more a matter of people, but also are there some sort of rules of the road that any national security advisor should keep in mind?

HADLEY:
Well, the NSC structure is flexible, so it can adapt to the decision-making style of the president, and that's how it should be. I can tell you the things that went through in my mind were the following. When I had to view that we should try to keep it small, because I would like to have more information in fewer heads so that people were more likely to see the interconnections and patterns. Also, you want to keep it small because you don't want to reproduce the stove-pipes on issues within the NSC staff that exist in the departments and agencies. The goal of the NSC staff is to integrate across those stove-pipes, and you can't do that if you reproduce those stove-pipes in your organization of the NSC staff.

The third thing we did was try to make the staff reflect the priorities of the president. President Bush had four or five key areas: war on terror, promotion of democracy, some international economic issues that he was dealing with and thought were a priority. And, we tried to have a deputy national security advisor for each of those four or five areas of presidential priority. In order to ensure integration within the White House, we did a lot of dual-hatting of NSC personnel. So the person who did international economics at the NSC staff as a deputy national security advisor had a similar position in the White House inter-agency and international economic organization. We dual-hatted our intelligence officials, our communications officials, so that the NSC staff was integrated into the White House staff rather than being a stovepipe within it. Those are the kinds of things I think you need to think through when you think about how to structure your staff as a new national security advisor.

LINDSAY:
What about the role of the national security advisor, him or herself? I mean, there's always this debate that part of the role the national security advisor is to sort of bring the government together so that it's communicating and then presenting options to the president's so-called "honest broker role." But there's also an argument that what the national security advisor owes to a president is candid advice about what the president should do or how the president can achieve and advance his vision or her vision foreign policy. How do you think about that issue?

HADLEY:
I think you have to have a situation where you can do both things at once. There is potentially tension between the two of them. Your job as national security advisor is to resolve that tension. On the one hand, you are running an inter-agency process. If it is going to be credible, it has to be an honest and open process where all the cabinet officials can participate, get a sense that they can get their views directly in front of the president, and that the national security advisor isn't putting his or her thumb on the scales to try to skew the decision in one particular direction. As national security advisor, the most important thing is maintaining the confidence of the president. The second most important thing is maintaining the confidence of your inter-agency national security principal colleagues. Transparency is a critical part of that.

On the other hand, you are also a counselor to the president. Many times after an inter-agency meeting, President Bush would walk back to the Oval Office. I would come back with him and he would say, "Well, that was an interesting meeting. What do you think?" And at that point in the privacy of the Oval Office, you give your advice confidentially to the president. How do you reconcile those two roles? One of the ways I did it was to make sure that the NSC principals, my NSC colleagues, knew what I was likely to be advising the president so that they have a different view, they have their opportunity to convey that to the president. You might say, "I guess Steve is probably telling you X. Let me tell you what's wrong with that." That's fair. So you've got to do both things, but in a way that keeps faith, both with the president on one side, that the president can get your confidential advice, but also your inter-agency colleagues know that you're running a fair and open process and not trying to skew the results in one direction or another.

LINDSAY:
On that note, from somebody who has been in the room and understands how the process works, I'm going to close up this special presidential transition episode of The President's Inbox. My guest has been Stephen Hadley, former national security advisor in the George W. Bush administration. Steve, as always a pleasure to chat and again, thank you for your service to the country.

HADLEY:
Thanks for having me. It was a real pleasure.

LINDSAY:
This special presidential transition series is supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at Carnegie.org. Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, wherever you listen, and leave us your review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox is solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.