President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team has still not sent policy advisers to coordinate with the federal agencies he plans to take over, delaying preparations that could be key to implementing his ambitious agenda.
The Trump transition signed an agreement on November 26 that cleared the way for these “landing teams” to begin working at the agencies. But before they can do that, the transition must submit the lists of people who will serve on the teams to the Biden administration — and they only started forwarding those names at the end of this week, the White House confirmed Friday.
That puts Trump officials nearly a month behind their recent predecessors, who immediately after the election began what’s known as the “agency review” process — meeting with existing agency staff and being briefed on key policy issues and challenges — to to ensure that their new governments would be up to speed. However, Trump delayed signing an agreement with the Biden administration to authorize these teams for months before finally brokering a deal just before Thanksgiving.
Amid other transition delays — including in processing security clearances — former officials from both parties say this delay in starting the usual crash course in agency operations only adds to the obstacles Trump will face as he takes his wants to quickly implement a far-reaching policy agenda. This is especially true in areas such as health policy, where few of the presidents elected to lead agencies have any experience in government or in managing such large and complex bureaucracies.
Trump’s health care nominees include television personalities Dr. Mehmet Oz as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Dr. Janette Nesheiwat as general surgeon; Florida Rep. Dave Weldon to lead the Centers for Disease Control; surgeon Marty Makary to lead the Food and Drug Administration; and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. No one has ever worked for the executive branch or led an organization on this scale.
And thanks to the delay in assembling landing teams, they only have a few weeks before Trump takes power to meet the workforce, review the budget, learn how different offices interact and familiarize themselves with the pitfalls that await them. after Inauguration Day.
“They are really operating, I would say, at a serious disadvantage,” said Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of Health and Human Services under President Barack Obama. “It has been decades and decades since anyone has sat in these Cabinet offices without any kind of expertise or experience. And there are a lot of barriers built into the structure of a huge agency like HHS, where you really can’t just come in and wave a magic wand and say, “You used to do things this way, and now we’re going to do that.” do it differently. ”
While the Trump transition declined to comment on the status of their landing teams, new White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt praised the president-elect’s nominees in a statement, calling them “highly qualified men and women who have the talent, have the experience and necessary skills”. skills to make America great again.”
The agency’s review process typically begins in mid-November. Trump’s team began submitting the names of some of their landing team members to the White House on Thursday, but has not yet completed the process. By comparison, President Joe Biden unveiled his landing teams on Nov. 10 — though their work was then delayed for weeks by Trump’s refusal to concede the election. And when Trump won for the first time in 2016, his transition began on November 18 with the launch of his landing teams.
Even after Trump’s landing teams arrive at their assigned agencies for meetings and briefings this year, they will likely be stymied by Trump’s refusal to sign a separate transition agreement with the General Services Administration and instead let the transition proceed carried out with private resources from private facilities. using private email servers with federal cybersecurity support.
“Normally, agencies would be willing to share unclassified information now,” said Valerie Smith Boyd, director of the Center for Presidential Transition at the nonpartisan nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, which helps all parties with transition planning. “But in the absence of a GSA-secure network, individual agencies will have to rely on their best practices for sharing controlled but unclassified information – anything that may be more sensitive than the norm, such as law enforcement information.”
Rather than quickly sharing data via email, she added, “They may only want to share that kind of information on paper or on standalone terminals” within agency buildings, “but they may not feel comfortable convenience in sending it over a non-government network. .”
People in both parties who have previously held these positions tell POLITICO that these kinds of delays in the transition of less than three months undermine the new administration’s ambitions on everything from revamping vaccine safety data collection to tackling chronic diseases. can delay or even destroy it. and leave them unprepared to deal with emerging threats such as bird flu.
“The most dangerous implications are for national security, and that includes health care,” emphasized Democratic health care strategist Chris Jennings, who has served on both sides of several presidential transitions, including Biden’s 2020 transition. “They need to be informed and prepared to respond quickly to viral, microbial and chemical warfare threats. You can’t afford to play with that. These are predictably unpredictable risks that cannot wait until officials are aware of the consequences and the necessary solutions months into a government.”
Trump is poised to take office in January amid a troubling bird flu outbreak that public health experts fear could quickly turn into a threat to the food supply or the general population, as well as a resurgence of once rare childhood diseases such as whooping cough and measles. Health officials and outside experts who remember Trump’s chaotic Covid-19 response during his first term now fear the combination of his current nominees’ disdain for mainstream science, their stated desire to move away from funding infectious disease research, and their inability to take advantage of the transition. A period of inadequate preparation could mean a slow or inadequate response to future health crises that endanger the general public.
Trump’s surgeon general during his first term, Jerome Adams, warned in a post on X that the new administration risks being “distracted by outbreaks for four years this time instead of one.”
Trump’s tendency to resist the usual transition processes is not new. As he prepared to enter the White House in 2017, he threw out months of work prepared by then-transition chairman Chris Christie in a shakeup of his transition leadership, was slow to assemble agency review teams and ignored briefing materials that was put together by the outgoing Obama. government – including a nearly 70-page “pandemic playbook” given to them years before Covid-19 struck.
On health policy, the impact of those choices was partially mitigated by a team of Cabinet members, including state health commissioners, former HHS officials and others with years of experience working with federal health programs.
Tom Scully, who headed the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under Republican President George W. Bush, said coordinating the transition was less important to him because he already had extensive experience in the federal government and a personal relationship with the official he replaced. But for Trump’s new health officials, who don’t have these connections, it’s a different story.
Scully said it is “critically important” for the Trump nominees to “get in there and start working with the departments to see what’s going on.”
“I don’t know Dr. Oz, and I’m sure he’s a very capable man, but he should probably call [CMS Administrator] Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, a nice person, and spend some time with her, find out what her biggest issues are and where she agrees with him,” he continued. “It’s just the rational thing to do to find out what’s on their agenda, what they think has been left undone, whether you agree with them politically or not.”
The administrative inexperience of Trump’s recent picks to lead these agencies — which together have tens of thousands of employees and a budget of more than a trillion dollars a year — also increases pressure on the new administration to appoint people familiar with their inner workings. appointment to deputy positions. .
For example, Trump has appointed Jim O’Neill, a veteran of George W. Bush’s HHS, as the agency’s deputy secretary.
But RFK Jr.’s lack of policy experience continues to worry some key conservative allies.
“While RFK Jr. at HHS has the skills to end gun agency policies and assess the environmental damage of abortion, the Trump team must balance the HHS ticket by ensuring that pro-life voices are heard and experienced experts are added to the RFK Jr. team. ” said Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America. She added that reports that the Heritage Foundation’s Roger Severino, a senior HHS official in Trump’s first term, was passed over this time “represent the wrong direction.”
The next Trump administration, Hawkins argued, will need “experienced hands” who know how to undo all the Biden policies that have expanded access to abortion over the past four years.
Some former Democratic officials who spoke to POLITICO — including Sebelius — expressed hope that the Trump health team’s inexperience and lack of preparation will hinder their plans to put a conservative stamp on the system.
But Leslie Dach, a former senior adviser at HHS during the Obama administration who now works for the health advocacy group Protect Our Care, warned that Trump officials can still accomplish a lot by into take action, especially as the Affordable Care Act’s enhanced tax credits expire in 2025.
“All they have to do is sit on their hands and 5 million people will lose their insurance and over 15 million more would go bankrupt, possibly because of their health insurance premiums,” he said, adding that there were many other ways that would require little effort. they could undermine Obamacare. “You could shorten open enrollment, eliminate the special enrollment period, close the call centers on weekends as they have done before, and all of a sudden you would dramatically reduce the number of people with health insurance. You can show up late to work, leave early and take health care away from millions of people.”
