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jobs and getting new folks up to speed as quickly
as possible. “If you’re running a company, if you’re
running a university, you wouldn’t on one day just
remove your entire senior leadership and put it in a
whole new group of people, but that’s what we do,”
Lu says. “It is a period where adversaries are going
to try to take advantage.”
Still, because Biden was so recently in power
with Obama and has nearly a lifetime of experience
working in the federal government, he doesn’t need
that much help from Trump anyway, says University
of North Carolina political science professor Terry
Sullivan, executive director of the White House Tran-
sition Project. Sullivan was likewise not concerneddepartments to provide assistance to both the
Obama and McCain teams far in advance of Elec-
tion Day, and there were several planning meetings
and calls throughout the summer of 2008 in which
staff from both would-be successors participated.
The law also provides expedited security clearanc-
es, government office space and a budget. “It could
not have been a more collaborative working experi-
ence,” Lu says. “When President Obama took office,
he was publicly effusive about the cooperation he
got from President Bush and he pledged that same
level of cooperation to the successor.”
All of this matters because the transition is a gi-
gantic undertaking that involves filling some 4,000SMOOTH SHIFTS
The transition from
the George W. Bush
administration to that of
Barack Obama is widely
regarded as the gold
standard. The Obama-
to-Trump transition was
described by the current
incumbent as going well at
the time but he has since
taken a dimmer view.FR
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