Presidential Transitions | Reimagining American Institutions

>> Tom Schnaubelt: Welcome, and thank you for joining us for today's webinar, hosted by the Hoover Institutions Center for Revitalizing American Institutions. It gives me great pleasure to introduce today's moderator, Brandice Canes-Wrone. Brandice is the Morris R Greenberg Senior fellow and the director of the Center for Revitalizing American Institutions at the Hoover Institution.

She's also a professor of political science and a professor by courtesy of political economics at the Graduate School of Business. She has served on the faculty at MIT, Northwestern, Princeton, until just a few years ago when she was wooed back to the farm. Without further ado, I'll hand it off to you, Brandice, who will introduce our guest.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Thanks so much, Tom. I'm delighted today to introduce Chris Liddell, who's held senior roles in politics, the private sector, and philanthropy. He was White House Deputy Chief of Staff during the Trump administration and has been involved in three presidential transition cycles, including the White House Operational Head of the transition to the Biden administration, where he played a key role.

And that's, we can talk later that he's being modest in the having that be the description in the private sector, he has been Chief Financial Officer of several major companies, including Microsoft and General Motors. Most recently, Chris authored Year Zero: The Five Year Presidency, which, if you can see back there, is standing up on my bookcase.

It's published with the University of Virginia Press. It's an excellent book that lays out suggestions for successful presidential transitions based on Chris's own research and his personal experience. Chris, we're just delighted to have you with us today to talk about this fantastic book and your experience on presidential transitions.

I'm gonna open it up for Chris to offer some remarks at the outset to talk about his book. And then we'll lead into, as Tom mentioned, a few questions between Chris and I, and then we'll open it up to your questions.

>> Christopher P. Liddell: Thanks for that introduction, Brandice. So, yeah, a few thoughts.

My core thesis in the book is that we have a deficit of trust in our core institutions. So whether you look across at higher education, Congress, media, big business, basically all of them are underwater in terms of level of trust and trending downwards. And so with that stark reality, you could do one of two things.

You can either complain about it or you can do something about it. And I wanted to do the latter. First by serving my adopted country. I became a citizen in the United States just over a decade ago, and then writing a book about my experiences really focused on improving what I consider to be one of the core institutions in the country, which is the White House.

But way back in 1939, the Brownlow Commission, as you probably know, made some recommendations, and they had this famous line, which is the president needs help. And that led to the creation of the executive office of the president, which you can think of as if you like, the institution of the presidency.

And my thesis in the book is now the presidency needs help. The institution needs help, as well as the president themselves. So the question is, how do we make the White House more effective? And that's the theme of the book. And it's all of the things that you need to do as a candidate in the year leading up to governing in order to achieve the objective of an effective White House.

So the topic, the title year zero, is basically the year before you govern, if you like, the year before, January 20, and all the activities that are required in order to have a successful transition. And I guess people often ask me what was the most memorable day in my four years in the White House.

And I often say the last day, January 20, 2021. And on that day, this beehive of activity that's the west wing, was actually more like an empty shell. So I was the last person to leave the White House at 1159 on January 20 of the outgoing administration. And essentially, it was very quiet, most of the people had left.

There were no computers, there were no papers, there was a bit of furniture. That was it. I worked into the Oval Office, and there they were sort of rolling up the carpet and taking down the pictures, getting it ready for the new administration. It just reminded me how amazing the situation we have in the United States, we're at 1159 on January 20, one administration's in charge, and 12 o'clock's the other.

Another one is. And so the book really focuses on that minute, but it talks about the six months after that and all the things that need to do in order to make a successful start to the presidency. So it starts with the philosophy that you need to think about the end in mind before you think about where you start.

And the end in mind is, what do you need to do to have a successful presidency? And the first thing you need is a fast start in the first six months. Traditionally, we think about the first 200 days of the presidency as really being the key to getting off.

And again, our system here in the United States really focuses on that short window where you can get signature legislation through. You sign a lot of executive orders which set the tone of your presidency. The president gets to appoint 4000 people, 1200 of them Senate confirmed, a large proportion of those need to be ready at 12:00 on January 20.

So you need certainly more than 1000, close to 2000 people on the field ready to have an effective government. And you also need to think about how you're going to run the White House. You can't walk in on day one and start thinking about how you're going to make decisions and how you're going to structure it.

So all of that work for the first six months needs to be done in the 75 day sprint, between 75 days, plus or minus a day, depending on the calendar, between election and inauguration. And that's just too short a time in the modern presidency to get all of the things necessary for a successful presidency.

100 years ago possible, now impossible to get it done. So you need to start at least six months, and I recommend more than that beforehand to put in place all of the activities necessary to do the what, what's the policies you're going to have, the who, the people you're going to appoint and the how.

How are you going to run the processes inside the White House. So overall, the book is a philosophy of how you run the White House to be more effective and all of the things that you need to do before you govern in order to have a successful White House.

And overall, I guess the message is I can't solve all the issues of institutional trust, but you've got to start somewhere. And hopefully the book and some of the suggestions are a useful contribution.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Terrific. Well, I can certainly, as I mentioned, highly recommend the book. So I wanna drill down a bit on a few things you say in it and ask you to expand a bit on that.

So you mentioned that it's never too soon to start measuring the drapes, and that as those of you on the webinar who know are in DC or there's often this phrase, you don't want to start measuring the drapes until you've won and you argue, look to presidential transition planning.

As you said in your opening remarks, you say here at least six months. And in the book, you mentioned really maybe twelve months in advance of. What do you know about where the Harris and Trump transition teams are in their planning?

>> Christopher P. Liddell: Yeah, so just let's start with that concept of measuring the drapes, and then get back to the two that are happening at the moment.

I argue in the book, and no candidate has actually ever taken this opportunity, but maybe one day in the future to turn the concept of measuring the drapes from pejorative to actually a positive. And so it's considered the pejorative, it's considered a negative, almost. It's gonna curse your presidency or your chances of becoming the president if you admit to having done all of this preparation.

I argue exactly the opposite, that candidates should lean into it and actually say, look how much preparation I am doing. Look at all the wonderful things I'm doing. It shows I can govern and plan for the most important, you know, governing institution in our country. So I would like to think at some stage in the future, a candidate will say, look at all of what I'm doing.

That shows you that I can be the president that you want to vote for. But that's not the case. That's certainly not the common wisdom in DC at the moment. And again, taking a step back, I make 50 recommendations in the book. Some of them are more novel than others, some of them are more contentious than others.

Some of them are likely to be picked up, some others, so much, not so much in terms of the two that they're out there at the moment, I think they're both in reasonably good shape, would be my impression. And now I'm not involved in either. I'm not involved officially in either of them.

So all of my observations are from afar, if you like. But we start with the Trump team. They have been doing a lot of work behind the scenes, not necessarily the more high profile things like the project 2025, which are more focused around the what and have been discredited by the campaign, but more around the how, things that I talk about, how they're going to run the presidency and how they're going to see it.

And then they appointed two strong confidants, the president's co chairs recently. And from what I can see, what I can gather from other people, they're in pretty good shape. Harris team also, I think, is in reasonably good shape. Again, I don't have direct knowledge of that. And she has the unusual situation of being an incumbent.

We can come back to the specific challenges around that. But she's put in place a chip called Johannes Abraham, who was the chief architect of the Biden transition in 2020 to 21. And so he's very experienced, and I imagine that plus the knowledge of the incumbency puts them in good shape.

But there's some specific challenges around a second term. Sorry, a vice president that becoming a president, which we can talk about if you like.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Yes, let's build on that. Because in the book you mentioned that there are even special challenges for second term president, right, that it might seem, well, you don't really need to transition, but that, in fact, you do.

And then there are added layers when you're a vice president who's taking hold. What would you say are both the advantages but also the particular challenges in that situation?

>> Christopher P. Liddell: Yeah, so to your point, the book addresses both a first term and a second term. In the case of Vice President Harris, it's a very unusual situation.

Actually. It's quite interesting. You would think that we would quite often see vice presidents elected to become president. There are a number of them have become president by result of death of the presidency or resignation. But interestingly, in the last 200 years, we've only had two who have been elected from vice, a sitting vice president to become president, the last one being HW Bush from Reagan.

And then you have to go all the way back to 1836 to Martin Van Buren to find the last one. So it doesn't happen very often. And the advantages versus the disadvantages of the challenges. Advantages, obviously, is incumbency. You know what's going on. You don't need agency briefings as much as you would otherwise.

You should be in the flow of policy decisions. You have the knowledge and you have a team that's on the field that you don't have to change 100%. The challenge is to some extent the flip side of exactly those advantages, which is you need to think about how much you're gonna change the policy settings to be your own.

You don't wanna simply be a reincarnation of the previous president. You want to be your own president. So you want to think about changing some things, but you inherit, obviously, the poor years that you've had, and more particularly on the people side. The challenge is how much do you keep versus how much do you change?

A new president comes in with 100% of their team. If you're a vice president being elected, you to some extent inherit the last person's team unless you decide to change them all, which would be a very drastic step for an inter party transition. And that's complicated in particular, perhaps by this election, which is if Vice President Harris was to be elected president, but not, we don't see a Democrat Senate majority, then she would have a potentially a challenge of getting nominations through.

So she may have to keep more of the incumbent Senate confirmed positions than she would otherwise as perhaps a new president. So getting that balance right between change in continuity, I guess, is the key thing for an incumbent thinking about their second term. And that is really true of a first term to a second term as well, where you need to refresh your agenda, you need to refresh your people.

So you need that same contrast of change versus continuity. In the President Trump case, if he was to be reelected similarly, it would be historically somewhat unique. We've only had one president elected for the second time in a non-contiguous fashion, Grover Cleveland, all the way back in the 19th century.

And so the advantages there are actually probably outweigh the disadvantages. They come in with the knowledge of a first term, but not necessarily some of the baggage of it. They can come in with a fresh start. So they know how to pull the levers of power. They know or should know how to think about what they're gonna design, how they design the White House.

They come in perhaps with some members of their old team, and they don't have to do something which a sitting prison does, which is both run the country and campaign at the same time. They can focus on campaigning and thinking about how they govern. So it's a relatively unique situation and probably, to be honest, an advantage for President Trump when he thinks about a second term.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Great. Thanks. So moving on to a different part of the book, you mention that there are these differences between government and business, and you're in this very, if not unique, a very nice position of having been at the leadership of both. We often hear that government should run.

You know, the problem with government is it doesn't run more like a business. What are the ways in which you think that operating like a business won't work, having been CFO of firms such as GM and Microsoft? But what are the lessons we could bring in to either White House, since part of the transition planning, as your book lays out, is the structure of the White House and the.

The decision making process. Are there lessons that can also be brought in?

>> Christopher P. Liddell: Yeah, it's a really great point. The first thing I say, that people who come in with that mindset, that let's just run it like a business, seldom succeed.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Yes.

>> Christopher P. Liddell: In a business world, to be honest, it's simpler.

Objectives are to some extent simpler. You have shareholder value, okay, you have ESG and the rise of other determinants of success inside the business. But to a large extent, creating shareholder value is the single reason you're there. And you have one group who you're responsible to, which is the shareholders inside the White House and inside most governments.

Most objectives are to be multiple objectives. They can often be opaque, sometimes conflicting with each other, and seldom black or white. Seldom there's a good decision or a bad decision. Normally, there's shades of grey in between. Also also all the objectives and the things you're trying to do are interconnected.

So seldom are things are truly economic or foreign affairs. Foreign affairs and economics come together. Domestic policy and economic policy come together. So you have this interrelationship, interconnection, and multiple, and as I say, sometimes conflicting objectives. And then you have a multiplicity of stakeholders and people inside the White House and inside agencies who have some equity or input into decisions.

So in a business, and obviously, it's not entirely true, but it's certainly more true, there's clearer lines of decision making responsibility, clearer lines of what the decision's about, and it's a little more black and white. Having said all of that, there are some principles around organizational design which are true to any large scale human organization.

And what I try to do in the book is to say, let's take a first principles approach to the White House and think about what the concepts of good organizational design are as applied to this unique thing called the executive office of the president.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Great. Thanks. One of the big challenges, obviously, in the private sector as well, but in government, is getting terrific people to serve.

And arguably, the costs of serving in government have increased due to polarization. I'm not going to ask, but I'm assuming that not everybody you've met in the business world is absolutely enamored that you were in the Trump White House. And I can assure you that in academia, that would not be a way to win a popularity contest.

But to be fair, that can happen with Democratic administrations, too, depending on your other professional career. So I was actually heartened, and frankly, in some ways, it was the most surprising part of the book to me that you suggest this isn't as big of a problem, as I think many academics think it might be, that there are just these overwhelming numbers of application.

But the book does acknowledge, you acknowledge, the need to look for people who are non-traditional candidates. That sort of made it seem as if, well, there's people who sort of serve in multiple administrations and have made this their career, but the nontraditional candidates, such as from the private sector, are more difficult.

So I thought you could maybe say a bit, having been involved in three transitions, what are the ways in which the president can attract the best advisors and appointees to the White House? And maybe say a bit more about the, you have the people pipeline chapter, how this is a central part of the transition planning.

>> Christopher P. Liddell: Sure, so take a step back for a start. We have an interesting structure of the way that we run the government, which is different, say, to a parliamentary system. So in a parliamentary system, you either are elected or you're a civil servant. There's a very thin layer between those two people.

In the United States system, as I mentioned in my initial comments, we have, say around 4,000 people who are selected by the president, some of them Senate confirmed, but most of them not. So we have quite a big layer between the elected person, the president, and the civil servant, of which there's around 2 million people in the government.

I think it's a real strength in the US system. Different people can argue whether they prefer the sort of parliamentary system and the pluses and minuses for having that layer of presidential appointees. I think it's a real strength because I think you can attract people of varying backgrounds.

Certainly, if I take my own case, I wouldn't be able to. I didn't want to run for office and I didn't want it as a career. So you can bring in people, say, from a business background, but also from political or other backgrounds to serve inside it. So I think it's a real strength of the system.

To your question, though, how do we get the best people? The first thing I say is 4000 sounds like a lot, but really the key positions are obviously a small subset of that, and it may sound like a lot compared to zero. And certainly in setting it up, it's a big lift to get at.

But in a country of 330 million people, finding a few dozen key positions and a few hundred or thousand people to serve is not quite as challenging as you see. And certainly the ones I've been involved in, there are multiple really good candidates who come forward for every position.

Now, not everyone wants to serve, obviously, you have Republican, the Democrats. So that puts about 50% of the population out of contention straight away. There's some people who don't want to serve because of previous presidencies or whatever, even inside the party. So I recognize all of that. The thing that I would say is there is, generally speaking, a lot of extremely good people who are available.

The thing that we need to do, and I talk a little bit about this in the book, but I talk more about it when I give talks like this and presentation, is we've got to encourage people to serve. I served, as you say, at times that was challenging.

At times you get positive feedback. At times you get negative feedback from people. We have to make it a safe space for people to serve. Regardless of the administration. Regardless of who wins the election, we want the strongest team on the field. There are too many challenges in the world.

It's too important for the White House to be able to deal with some of those challenges, in particular the foreign ones that we're seeing to not have the best possible team on the field. So I do everything and say, look, if you have people of the other persuasion politically who are thinking about it and encourage them to do it, you may not like the other person, you may not vote for them, but encourage them to do it.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Great, thanks. And now I want to dive into just a little bit of the challenges of transitions during controversial and possibly contested elections. Obviously, 2020 is on a lot of people's minds, and it should be noted Chris has been declared a hero by the Biden administration. That's where I mentioned he was modest for sticking with his position and helping, stay through and lead that transition.

But there have been other contested elections in US history, right? So in 1880, as your book points out, 1876, and in more recent memory, for many of us, 2000 was a challenging transition period as well. So when contested elections occur, how do we best achieve presidential transitions and how do we best build strength into, as your book sort of talks about, the institutional process itself, so that while we certainly hope we won't have anything that's as disruptive as some of these key historical moments, probably counting on that is not the best policy moving forward.

>> Christopher P. Liddell: Yeah. So I would say first thing it's important to understand is during the 75 day period, there are two processes going on. One's the electoral process and the other's the transition process. So when we talk about contested elections, we're talking about the first of those processes, the contesting of the nature of the election.

And that might take, as we saw in 2020 and in the other ones that you mentioned, days or weeks, potentially with people challenging the nature of it. And it goes through the cycle to the Electoral College and then to Congress confirmation, the transition process to some extent acts independently of that unless otherwise affected by it.

So the transition then is between the outgoing administration institution and the incoming one, and can act independently of it if allowed to do so. To your point, how do we strengthen the second of those processes? I don't address or intend to address the first.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Yeah,

>> Christopher P. Liddell: because that's a whole separate thing.

But how do you make the second happen, given the fact that the first may be happening at the same time? So when you think about institutions, they're a combination of laws, entities, and norms. So in terms of laws, we need to strengthen the laws around the Presidential Transition Act.

And one thing that's actually been done since the last election, which was one of the things I refer to in the book, and I was pleased to see it done, is this idea of provisional ascertainment. Now, I don't want to get too deep into the weeds, but one of the challenges in 2021 was we had this delayed ascertainment, which is a step where the general services administrator ascertains the election, and that allows the incoming administration to access resources and agency briefings and so forth.

What Congress has done is amend the Presidential Transition Act since the last election to basically, even if there's a contesting of the results going on for both the contestants. In this case, it would be both the Harris administration and Trump administration to access resources straight away. So that's helped make sure that we don't have the situation where we had in 2020.

We not only didn't have 75 days, we had an even shorter period of time to get all these activities done. So that's on the legal side. And I think we should continue to strengthen the Presidential Transition Act. I think it would be good to review it after every election, including the one coming up, and say, are there specific issues that come up each election that we need to address to make it better in history?

The Presidential Transition Act, which is the key one, was initially passed in 1963, has been amended a number of times to address specific issues and to improve it in each iteration makes it better. So that's on the law side of it. On the entity side of it. We have made some progress there.

There's now things like the White House Coordinating Council, which is an entity set up to coordinate all the activities. There's a very structured process which GSA runs to get agencies to together to prepare briefing documents and so forth. And now on the, that's on the outgoing side, on the incoming side, most transition, most campaigns set up transition entities to do the things that are necessary to campaign.

So we're making some progress on the sort of structural side of the entities. And then norms is a big one. Excuse me. We really need to continue to promote positive norms. And I know you're interviewing Stephen Hadley, I believe, coming up, but there's a very strong norms, for example, on the National Security Council, where the outgoing National Security Council very professionally prepares the incoming National Security Council.

And I think Robert O'Brien, for example, did a very good job in 2020 of preparing Jake Sullivan, the incoming National Security Advisor, despite all the issues that were happening on the contested election. So these norms between parallel entities, the existing and the shadow entity, are very important as well, and the positive ones need to be promoted.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Thanks, Chris, terrific. Well, I have lots more questions, but I know that our audience also has questions for you, so I want to give them a chance to ask questions as well. So, and just as a reminder, Chris is more interested in talking about the how than the what.

So he's going to comment on transitions and the topics of his book, but less on sort of personalities and kind of topics that are of interest but are less related to the core issue of presidential transitions. So one question, Chris, is, so John Connolly gave advice to LBJ when LBJ became president that he should ask all Kennedy cabinet members to resign and then reappoint any he wished to retain.

So that, you know, you might first on what do you think of that advice? But I think it's also a broader question in some ways, which is that a third category of transitions is where it's mid presidency. As you mentioned, we actually have more of those in us history than the vice president being elected.

So how do you think, what do you do if the transition's thrust upon you as the vice president?

>> Christopher P. Liddell: So if I take the first part of it, we had the same situation between Reagan and Bush. And in that case, Reagan, through his chief of staff, asked all of the political appointees to resign.

So they did in fact do that. I think some begrudgingly did it because they just assumed that their jobs were continuous. I think it's best practice. I think everyone should resign and then be reappointed. It doesn't mean by resigning that you don't get reappointed, but I think the appointment should be a positive thing, not a negative thing.

And you don't want to have difficult situations on day one where someone, for one reason or another, thinks that they still have a job, but they don't. So best practice. The outgoing administration should clear decks, ask everyone to resign, and then if 50% of them are reappointed straight away so the resignation doesn't become effective, that's better than fighting over the ones and In the middle who might be difficult cases.

On the sort of inheriting the presidency, well, you don't have a transition. Unfortunately, you have one president at one moment and the other. And so hopefully the vice president has been doing some of the things necessary to be prepared to be president. That instance always is a possibility.

And I guess they have to go through a transition of some form just by necessity over the following months. But a lot of the principles that I talk about really just don't apply cuz you're not gonna do planning for just in case the president might die tomorrow. That's not realistic.

In the back of your mind, sure, you might be looking at all the people and saying, gosh, if I become president, who do I wanna keep and who do I want? But to a large extent, in terms of my change in continuity on day one, you want 100% continuity.

The president has just died or resigned or whatever the circumstances are, the last thing you need is upheaval on top of that. So you need continuity and then change over time to the extent necessary.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Thanks. We have an interesting question on how do you get involved to serve?

So we talked about the people pipeline, and let's say there are listeners, and it sounds as if there may be some on the call who have very successful careers outside of government and they'd like to serve. Rather than just sending a resume in that transition, how do you let people know you're willing to consider it?

>> Christopher P. Liddell: There's multiple paths in. So the traditional way that a lot of people do it is by volunteering on the campaign. And so, for example, in my case, I originally got into the political system by volunteering on the Romney campaign in 2012, and then I was asked to be the executive director of his transition planning.

So a number of people volunteer for the campaign and as a result of that they build up some degree of loyalty factor, which then converts into a position of appropriate. So some proportion of those 4000 appointees that I mentioned typically go to campaign staff. And there's the senior positions which people focus on and the exciting ones, the secretary of state and the chief of staff and things.

But there are a series of other really interesting roles that are significant and important in the White House that perhaps aren't as visible, that might suit younger or less experienced people. So again, I think one of the strengths of the US system is because there's 4000 roles and because a number of them are really quite impactful in their particular area.

There's lots of places you can come in. That's the sort of one route, is through the campaign. The second is, perhaps, come in late in the piece, the president's elected and you wanna put your hand up or you wanna put your hand up shortly before the election. Generally speaking, most campaigns have a place where you can cold call and put your resume in.

That's hard to get in that way just because there's thousands of resumes. And how do you sort of work your way through the system, like applying for a job, but with thousands of other people applying at the same time? It's possible, and certainly you wouldn't discourage people from doing that.

In particular, if you have a niche that you're really going for, and it's important to look at the 4000 roles that most of them are. There's a government website where you can find out what they are. So pick one where you might have a specific expertise and apply for that and get your name into it.

And then the third way is obviously just through connections inside the transition entity and just making sure that you, through the various ways in and the various senior people, you make sure that you let them know you're interested. And generally most campaigns will have a system where if someone's mentions to someone that they know that they're interested, they'll have a place to send them to.

So it's one of those three ways.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Thanks. Okay, we have a question about Chevron and Chevron deference. So, as you know, the Supreme Court narrowed Chevron deference in the past year. And prior to this ruling, it was more feasible for administrations to basically embed policy via agency rule-making.

Do you think that will have an effect on presidential transitions? And I'm gonna push a little that even beyond presidential transition, since you've served as deputy chief of staff on White House policymaking, beyond the transition as well.

>> Christopher P. Liddell: Yes, so not so much on transitions, really, you're setting the government up in transitions.

You're not really affecting that much change per se. Thinking about that balance between legislation and executive orders and regulation, it potentially could certainly change the balance there. So won't change the legislative side of things. But thinking about your approach to regulations and the regulatory body, depending on how you subsequently interpret it, yes, it could certainly have an impact on the way in which you govern from an executive perspective.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: So, Chris, I know we're not gonna comment on personalities, but it is fair to just state they have very different personalities. Presidents are, right?

>> Christopher P. Liddell: Yeah.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: And how does this affect the transition planning, and how much should the structure of what you're planning for reflect a president's leadership style or personality?

But what part of the structure should actually just be independent? Regardless of the president's leadership style, this is what should be done.

>> Christopher P. Liddell: Yeah, so, no, it's a really good point and one I address in the book. And I do it through historical analysis. So it's always safe to go back 100 years and look at different presidents and how they've done it, and who's been effective and who hasn't.

The general mantra is that the White House should be customized to the nature of the president. You can't expect the president to change, you need to change the White House. What's interesting in studying, certainly the last half dozen or so, is they really haven't changed that much. They tend to build on the model of the previous one, really going back to what I recommend, which is this first principles way of thinking about customizing it.

And like any point I made earlier, any good organizational design, first principles, what are the parameters on which you're designing? So I say design around the decision making and implementation process and the structure that is necessary to achieve that. That, to me, is the core principle by which any White House should do.

So then you have to think about how do presidents make decisions? And that can be quite specific to a particular president. Different presidents, and I go back in history and look at them, make decisions in different ways. Some are much more analytic. Some are much more intuitive. Some like briefings.

Some prefer just one decision making process. Some like having lots of people in the room. Some like having small number in the room. Some like having every option presented. Some like having the options pre-baked. And a recommendation brought forward. So it's making sure you understand, in the transition period and in the planning period, you need to understand your president very well.

How do they make decisions? And what's the structure around them that is going to allow them to make the best possible decision? And in terms of customization versus standardization, the distinction I make is, what are the things that touch the president when you look at their daily life, how do they spend it?

And everything should be customized. Everything that touches the president should be customized to the president. Then behind that, things that they don't touch should be standardized to the most extent. So rather than this muddling customization of a little bit of everything, you customize the touch points to the president.

And then you have this layer between that and the rest of the White House or executive office of the president or agencies, which to a large extent, you standardize, and you standardize around the concept of how you make decisions. You don't standardize around people, but you standardise around kind of process.

And so there's some recommendations in the book about how you do that.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Great. So you mentioned earlier a bit about parliamentary systems and the differences. So we have a question about what would you say is the biggest characteristic of the White House us institution compared to others?

And I sort of highlighted the parliamentary aspect, but the question is actually broader than that. So, what is sort of unique about the us institution of the presidency?

>> Christopher P. Liddell: Right. So the first thing that I mentioned is the point that I made earlier, these 4000 political appointees. That's really quite different to a parliamentary system.

Certainly, the prime minister might come in and bring their chief of staff and a few personal advisors. But it looks more like what we had 100 years ago before the executive office of the president. Really, I a very thin layer of appointees. And then their primary advisors are civil servants who are continuous.

So we obviously have a strong and big civil service, but we have a layer between, in this case, the president and the civil servants called presidential appointees. That's one big difference. The second is this instantaneous change of 100% of those people. So the dramatic thing, the allusion I made to 1159 on January 20, one group of people, 12 o'clock.

I And there's no other organization really, that does it that way. Whether it's philanthropic, private sector, or public sector parliamentary systems, where you have 100% turnover of the senior team on day one. And then the sort of last difference, and these are all overlap with each other, is when you switch in the parliamentary system from one party to another, often the cabinet members are people who, firstly, they're elected rather than appointed.

And secondly, they've been serving in opposition generally in the previous administration. So when you have a switch of parties, you bring in people who may have been there in a previous administration, may have been sitting in opposition. And so they're assuming they inherit the portfolio they had as a shadow minister, they have quite a lot of background in that area already.

So it's a much more sort of continuous flow, but without that introduction of interesting new people as well. So there's pluses and minuses of both.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Chris, we have a question about how well the current. You mentioned in your comments that most presidents have sort of customized around a standard.

I'm sorry, we're at Stanford. So I flip a bit as a standard processor. Unfortunately, yes. Not the Stanford process, but they customize a little bit. But it's basically the same structure where the chief of staff really is, what everything runs through, having read your book. So I'm gonna build, I'm gonna blend that question with something I know is in your book, which is that you mentioned the burnout of chief of staffs now.

So the question is really about how well the current structure is working and what you'd propose. So maybe you could say a bit about what you talk about this in the book and what you would change if you were brought in by a president to say, how should this be structured?

>> Christopher P. Liddell: So I start with the proposition of what's wrong with this picture. We expect a president to serve four years or eight years, and yet, and that's the most important job in the White House. Yet what is often the second most important job, apart from the vice president, which is the chief of staff, averages about two years.

And it's gone down from five years or so a long time ago to, on average, two, maybe three years. Occasionally, they last all four years. Certainly no one lasts eight years. So what's wrong with that picture? Why is it the most important job can last four or eight years, the second most important job can't?

And the reason is that we've delegated all of the crazy responsibilities that a president had to this single person called chief of staff. And when you look at what they're responsible for, at least in concept, there's three clusters of activity. Firstly, there's the staff that, so they hire and fire most presidents don't like firing people, so the chief of staff has to do that.

Building the culture, running the internal operations of the White House, the paper flow, chasing implementation and just running the logistics of the White House. This executive office of president, White House, a couple of thousand people, big job in itself Then they have to deal with external entities. So Congress in particular, a really important role most chiefs of staff have is liaising on significant legislation and dealing with Congress.

They deal with the media occasionally, but they deal with outside parties, like business lobbies, governors. And so they have an external facing role, which is a big cluster of activities. That's a big job in its own right. Then they also have a third cluster, which is dealing with the president.

So they need to be advisor to the president, personal confidant, often travel almost continuously with the president. They're often in the room continuously for hours, and they're really building a close personal relationship with the president and being their confidant, that's a big job. You throw all those three together and you've just described an impossible job for one person to be really good at.

And that's why they burn out because, or they're unsuccessful because it's just too hard to do all of those together and it's certainly too hard to do them all continuously. They work 20 hours a day and they still can't get through all the things that I just described.

So my thesis in the book is that we can continue to watch these chiefs of staff burn out and just turn them over, and I don't think that's optimal for a president. I think some of those responsibilities need to be shared with a broader set of senior people.

The chief should be still the chief, so the first amount sequels, but roles like senior advisor. That need to be brought in and some of the other key roles in the White House to take some of those responsibilities in what I describe as the office of the president of the United States.

This sort of broader office that collectivizes those responsibilities and makes sure that they're done collectively in the best possible way,

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: right? We have a question that flips our earlier conversation about the government running a mortgage business. We have a question about whether there's lessons from government experience that you believe are applicable to the private sector, that it could learn from how to run a successful White House.

>> Christopher P. Liddell: So yes, this is the short answer. So there's certainly parallels, obviously differences as well. But when you think about CEO transitions, think about those three stages. You have an initial period of, firstly, work backwards from the start. So you have an initial period where a CEO, let's just say 200 days to really stamp their new strategy on the entity.

So same three things. A new CEO needs to decide what he or she's gonna do, who they're gonna have, how much change and how much continuity there is and how they're gonna do it, how they're gonna run the organization that might be differently perhaps from the other CEO.

So they need to think about the same things. Interestingly, in the private sector, often they're a little bit more forgiving. From a time-frame, it might be six months a year, whereas in politics, you've got to be there on day one. So you don't have quite the same honeymoon period in politics as you do in the private sector.

Interesting. You would think it would be the other way around, but they still need to decide what they do to do that. The transition period is often a lot shorter just because having two bosses at the same time is not very good, although interestingly, you also have the same challenge.

So one of the things I didn't talk about is this concept during transitions that we have two presidents, two elected people at the same time, the president and the president elect, and this duality of power and some of the conflicts that that creates. And I address that in the book, but let's just assume they happen in the public sector.

They have it in the private sector as well. So if you have an outgoing CEO who says, well, I want to resign, but I'd like to take six months to do it, that seldom works very well. You have this lame duck who's hanging on and this new person who's taking over, and people inside the organization don't know which way to look.

So generally the shorter the transition in the private sector, the better. Obviously, exceptions to the rule, but that's generally speaking, the case. And then planning. And in the public sector, the public decides who's gonna do it. In the private sector, it's the board who's gonna decide who the CEO is.

And the board needs to think about the planning associated with how they help that new CEO be successful. So there's things they need to think about, both expected and unexpected. CEO's can resign or with notice, or they can resign and leave the next day. So the board needs to be ready to make the transition successful.

So there are parallels in the way that it happens, but the timeframes and who's responsible for them differ a little bit.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: We have a question that builds on our earlier discussion about how much of the process and structure are based on the president's leadership style. And this sort of builds on that by asking day to day, you have these processes.

Now there's a crisis first, I guess you could say there's both a normative, how disciplined should the White House be? And then what sort of happens in practice does. Now there's a foreign policy crisis or there's a hurricane, right? How often does the process constrain day to day and is it consistent, and how often are things tailored to the particular situation?

>> Christopher P. Liddell: Yeah, really good point. So I describe in the book the concept of structured and unstructured processes, and you need both to coexist at the same time. So the foundations of the structured process. So I ran those structured processes in my role as deputy chief of staff, where you have a relatively systematic way of doing things.

Certainly, the Stephen Hadleys of this world ran very effectively inside the NSC. And when you have a decision, maybe it's a piece of legislation or a decision that's coming up. Sometimes you have weeks or months that you are baking a nice, structured thing where you start at the low level.

It goes to a deputy's committee, then to a principal's committee, builds a series of options, goes to the prison. They make a decision. You implement it over time. That's the nice, structured process, and that's where you start from. And a large number of the decisions in the White House follow that track because you're on offense, you're thinking about a major piece of legislation.

You think you have time to think about it. Then, to your point of your question, over the top of that is crises and things that happened where you need instantaneous response, or the president has a new initiative that they decide they wanna overlay on top of it. And in my role, part of what I was doing, literally each day, was to look at the structured process and say, well, that might have been, we thought we were meeting the president this afternoon on X, but something just happened overnight and we now need to meet with him on Y.

And then you need to swarm activity in a relatively unstructured fashion as quickly as possible to deal with the context. The important thing to know is to realize that both of those things happen. Both of those things happen, and you need to make them happen and cohabitate the same room, so to speak.

So not be thrown off and say, we're only gonna destruction processes around here. We can't make a decision that quickly. We have to get everyone together and run it. Reality just means you're never going to be able to do that, but you can't operate in the other way, which is swarming resources like kids around a soccer ball, around every issue, because if you run everything like that, you just get chaos.

So you need to be able to have these two types of processes coexist at the same time.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Thanks. We have other great questions, but unfortunately we are running short of time. And Chris, I do want to give you the chance. Tom will have the final word because he's gonna let people know about our next webinar.

But the final word in the core part of the webinar. If you'd like to make any final remarks.

>> Christopher P. Liddell: Yeah, let me just come back to perhaps some of the comments I made right at the start, which is we have this deficit of trust in institutions, and I think we have to be realistic and say that that's just reality out there, but we have to do something about it.

And you can't change everything like a light switch. You have to start somewhere and you have to think about some practical but aspirational steps. And I just hope that my book, which I say at the end of it, please read it and give me feedback. I'd love to do a second edition that's better, but it's a way of addressing at least one institution that I think is incredibly important in a practical and hopefully constructive fashion.

So I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about it.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Thanks, it's been wonderful to talk with you about it. We appreciate the opportunity to speak with you about this fantastic book. Thanks so much for sharing these insights. And I don't think it needs a second edition, but I appreciate your encouraging people to see.

>> Christopher P. Liddell: every four years is an opportunity to make a

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: good point. Good point. Just like Newstat's book. Okay, a new chapter every four years. Fantastic. Okay, thanks again. I'm gonna turn it over to Tom, who's gonna talk about our next webinar. And Chris, thanks. You were our first webinar, you know, guest, so we particularly appreciate your coming on and leading it off so well.

>> Christopher P. Liddell: Thank you so much.

>> Tom Schnaubelt: Well yeah, let me step in and thank both you Chris, and Brandice for a really enlightening conversation that showcased the importance of a well run transition and how that can happen, and even, even with the lack of trust in institutions, as you've referenced.

And, Chris, thank you for your public service and for encouraging other people to serve as well. I wanna encourage our attendees to tune in for the second conversation that's part of our presidential transitions, which will feature two former national security officers, Stephen Hadley and Condoleezza Rice. That'll take place on Thursday, October 24 from ten to 11:00 p.m.

Everyone will hope we can get a link into the chat, so if we can see that, you'll get an email with that information as well. One final note of gratitude to the audience for their great questions and to our events team for making sure that everything ran smoothly.

Thank you to our guest, Chris, and to you, Brandice, once again, and I hope everyone has a wonderful day.