Even a Harris Transition Would Be Challenging. By Matthew Yglesias

Trump’s chaotic transition planning is getting a lot of headlines, but same-party handoffs are fraught in their own way.

September 1, 2024 at 12:00 PM UTC

Matthew Yglesias is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A co-founder of and former columnist for Vox, he writes the Slow Boring blog and newsletter. He is author of “One Billion Americans.”

If she wins, Kamala Harris will face one of the rarest tasks in American politics: the same-party presidential transition. Although it wouldn’t be as chaotic as the transition her opponent appears to be planning, it would come with its own set of challenges — both professional and political.

Outgoing presidents are almost never succeeded by a fellow party member who won the election. This is mostly a coincidence (Richard Nixon, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton all came extremely close), but it’s happened only twice in the last century: George H.W. Bush succeeded Ronald Reagan in 1989, and Herbert Hoover took over from Calvin Coolidge in 1929.

In theory, a same-party transition should be easier than a partisan turnover. In practice, it’s more fraught. Precisely because a partisan transition involves a large gap in policy perspectives, there’s nothing personal about people losing their jobs. Joe Biden didn’t “fire” Donald Trump’s cabinet, he just became president.

But suppose Harris wins and really wants to put in place her own EPA chief or Interior secretary, but Deb Haaland or Michael Regan are reluctant to leave. Then she’d have to fire them, which would be awkward both personally and politically. That’s why Ken Duberstein, Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, sent a letter in 1988 asking Reagan’s political appointees to tender their resignations after the election so that Bush would be able to start with a clean slate. The problem, as Andy Card later recalled, is that many of them didn’t do it.

What’s more, new presidents tend to rely on people with experience from prior presidencies. Even Trump brought back many who’d served in some capacity in the Bush administration, while the Biden team is full of Obama veterans. Three members of Reagan’s cabinet, including the attorney general and the Treasury secretary, were retained by Bush, while Coolidge’s secretaries of State, Treasury and Labor served under Hoover.

Given this reality — as well as today’s charged political climate — there is a certain logic to not asking Biden appointees to resign.

Technically, presidential appointees remain in place until they resign or are fired, which means that if Harris kept Biden’s people around, she wouldn’t need to confirm new ones.1 This is an appealing option if Republicans win back a majority in the Senate.

The last time a newly inaugurated president lacked a Senate majority was, again, 1989 — when politics was much less partisan and polarized. In 2025, it might be extremely difficult to get anyone confirmed. So instead of asking for resignations, Harris might find herself begging people such as Merrick Garland, Janet Yellen and Lloyd Austin to stay in office.

I know from reporting on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 transition planning that she essentially had two blueprints: one to be used if Democrats retook the Senate, and one if Republicans retained control. I do not know if Harris’ contingency planning has reached that level of detail, but I do know that she has had far less time to get a transition team organized, and that trying to plan two transitions simultaneously takes a lot more time.

Meanwhile, Biden has been strikingly indecisive on a number of personnel matters. Essentially nobody has been fired from any significant role, and vacancies at Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, and Veterans Affairs haven’t been filled. Within the White House, there are a handful of senior advisers who wield significant influence but lack defined portfolios, and agency officials tell me it’s often not clear who exactly is in charge of what.

Last but by no means least, the stakes of all these personnel changes will be elevated because Harris’ factional positioning inside the Democratic Party is unclear, maybe deliberately. Since she didn’t need to win a party primary, she wasn’t forced to run the usual gauntlet of interest-group demands. That’s mostly a plus, but it could give small-bore personnel decisions outsized ideological significance.

The impulse to avoid getting bogged down in detailed discussions of policy arcana has served Harris well so far. But deferring decisions now only raises the stakes of choices later. And there are few decisions more consequential than the ones a president-elect makes about personnel. Kamala Harris’ transition could be far more difficult than it appears.