Many political appointees in the Biden administration are celebrating the ascendance of Vice President Kamala Harris this week as Democrats coalesced around her as the party’s presidential nominee.
But a new boss in the White House — even one from the same party — could bring job insecurity for thousands of appointees.
The president is responsible for filling more than 4,000 jobs throughout the executive branch, and a new president would undoubtedly want to fill some of those gigs with their own people. It remains to be seen how Harris would approach such a task if she shores up the Democratic nomination and beats former President Donald Trump in November.
“The vice president and her team are in the driver’s seat to decide how much of the existing personnel and policy apparatus they rely on or whether they set their own strategy,” said Valerie Smith Boyd, director of the Center for Presidential Transition at the Partnership for Public Service.
There isn’t much precedent in recent history. A Harris victory would be one of only a handful of times in history that a sitting vice president has been elected to the White House and would be the first time it’s happened in more than three decades.
The most recent example is George H.W. Bush’s election in 1988 after he served two terms as vice president under Ronald Reagan.
Prior to that, the only sitting vice presidents to have won the White House were Martin Van Buren in 1836, Thomas Jefferson in 1800 and John Adams in 1796.
Other vice presidents have ascended to the top job when the sitting president has died in office. Presidents Joe Biden and Richard Nixon served as vice presidents but weren’t elected immediately afterward. And other sitting vice presidents have run for office and lost, including Al Gore in 2000 and Hubert Humphrey in 1968.
Lessons from George H.W. Bush
Unlike a change in party, when political appointees typically resign in droves ahead of the new president’s inauguration, a friendly transition can be complicated. Just ask former George H.W. Bush Cabinet officials.
William Reilly, who was sworn in as George H.W. Bush’s EPA administrator in February 1989, recalled the instructions he got from the president when he took the job.
Bush “said we would sweep with a new broom,” Reilly said this week in an interview. Bush said, “I’m not saying don’t keep the old people,” Reilly recalled. “Keep some if you think they’re really perfect for the situation or there’s another job in the administration you might think they’d be just as good at. But we want a new look here. We want to make some changes.”
Biden only just announced his decision to drop out of the race Sunday, and Democrats in the campaign and the executive branch are still sorting out what it could mean for them if Harris inhabits the White House next year.
On the campaign side, Team Biden quickly transitioned to become Team Harris. The vice president is keeping top campaign aides Jen O’Malley Dillon and Julie Chavez Rodriguez, she announced Monday as she visited the campaign’s headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware.
‘Managing the expectations’
Because White House transitions within the same party aren’t the norm in the United States, Harris’ team could largely write its own playbook.
“There are not a lot of recent modern examples to go by, which gives her team even more space to decide what is right for them,” said Boyd of the Partnership for Public Service. “The important thing is, in addition to campaigning, to use every minute they have to also prepare to govern the federal government.”
Most presidential transitions have centered around “hostile takeovers,” former George H.W. Bush administration Transportation Secretary Andrew Card recalled in “The Peaceful Transfer of Power: An Oral History of America’s Presidential Transitions.”
The switch from Reagan to Bush “was a friendly takeover, so we had the added burden of managing the expectations of people who are working for President [Ronald] Reagan who just assumed they would stay in their jobs if George Bush was elected,” Card said.
Ken Duberstein, who was Reagan’s chief of staff in 1988, sent letters to all of the Reagan appointees saying, “A new president is coming in, we want to make sure the new president has the right to put people in positions that he wants to put in,” Card said. “So think about sending in your letter of resignation.” But that letter, Card said, “I don’t think generated any response.”
Bush retained some senior Reagan appointees, including Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, Education Secretary Lauro Cavazos, Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady and CIA Director William Webster.
The heads of EPA, the Energy Department and the Interior Department all resigned at the end of the Reagan administration and Bush appointed Reilly at EPA, James Watkins at Energy and Manuel Lujan at Interior.
Some Biden appointees might be ready to leave anyway by next year.
Biden’s Cabinet so far has a “historically low rate of turnover,” Boyd said, so it would be “reasonable to expect that many appointees may be ready to make their own choices about what’s next.”
Reilly doesn’t expect Harris to make a clean sweep of executive branch personnel, in part because she’s expected to continue the implementation of massive Biden administration climate and infrastructure laws.
“I think that there will be a tendency to keep a lot of the same people with whom her staff will have worked, and presumably productively,” Reilly said. “She’s very much cast herself in the light of the president,” he said. “I would not anticipate any kind of bloodletting in the makeup of the new people.”
A Harris administration could benefit from keeping officials around who have spent years learning how to get large amounts of money out for infrastructure and environmental programs, Reilly said.
“I think you’d want to be very careful if you were the new president about replacing them and expecting a new crowd to figure out the game that they’ve had to spend so much time learning,” he said.
