Harris transition won’t be ‘a piece of cake’ despite incumbency
By
Naomi Lim
October 14, 2024 7:00 am
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Whoever wins the presidential race on Nov. 5 will have 76 days to complete a complicated and massive effort to take over the federal government from outgoing President Joe Biden. That process has already begun for Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. While most of the attention will fall on what the president-elect is doing, some scrutiny may fall on Biden’s transition out of office, including on how his team handles classified documents. In this series, the Washington Examiner will look at the challenges ahead for all three leaders’ transitions. Part one will look at Harris’s transition effort.Vice President Kamala Harris‘s incumbency does not mean her transition into the presidency will be easy, a process that is poised to be complicated by the reality of two wars and the politics of being a nominee who did not take part in a proper primary.
Harris’s transition will also be different from that of President Joe Biden, which was delayed in 2020 amid former President Donald Trump‘s election denials.
Max Stier, the president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service and its Center for Presidential Transition, described Harris’s transition as a “hybrid” between that of an incumbent and challenger because although she is the vice president, it is not her administration.
“The only modern, similar example is the transition from Ronald Reagan to George H. W. Bush in 1988 and … most people prior to the transition from [Barack] Obama to Trump would have said that it was the most difficult transition of modern times,” he told the Washington Examiner. “Just because you’ve gone from same party to same party or sitting vice president to president, that doesn’t make it a piece of cake.”
That is because there has been an average of 20% turnover in the roughly 4,000 political appointees between the first and second terms of recent former presidents, but the turnover rate for Reagan to Bush was 50%.
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/presidential/3185747/harris-presidential-transition-incumbency/
