The Permanent Transition Team

Transition work used to be improvised after an election, in a scramble that historians agree produced avoidable mistakes. It is now a standing industry with funding, staff, and a product.

The product is a set of personnel lists, policy memos, and day one executive actions, prepared far enough in advance that an incoming administration can move immediately. The organizations producing them are ideological, well resourced, and generally more prepared than the campaigns they support.

This is genuinely an improvement over the old chaos. It also relocates a meaningful share of policy design from the elected government to outside institutions with their own agendas, which the electorate never evaluated.

The people who staff these efforts move between them across cycles. What they carry with them is not just a policy preference but a set of assumptions about what is feasible, and those assumptions have become the real continuity in American governance.

The formalisation was deliberate and it is written down. The statute that funds it provides support to candidates before an election is decided, which is an odd thing for a government to do and an obviously sensible one once you consider the alternative.

The alternative was a standing start. An administration arriving without personnel lists spends its first months appointing people rather than governing, and the months it spends are the ones in which it has the most political capital.

So preparation is the correct response to a real problem. The question is who does it, and the answer has drifted from the campaign to a set of institutions that outlast any particular campaign.

Those institutions are not shadowy and their output is not secret. Personnel lists, memoranda and draft orders circulate openly, and the people who write them are frequently named.

What is unusual is the timing rather than the transparency. The work is done before anyone has voted, by people accountable to a board rather than an electorate, and it becomes government policy in the first week if the right side wins.

The day one order is the clearest artefact. How an executive order is prepared is itself a regulated process with a defined route through counsel and review, and a draft arriving fully formed on day one has completed that route somewhere else first.

The result is legible in the record. Early orders are published within days of an inauguration, at a level of drafting quality that is not achievable in days, which tells you when they were actually written.

None of that is improper. A president is entitled to arrive with a plan and a text, and the alternative is a slower government rather than a more democratic one.

The accountability question is narrower and sharper. Voters chose a candidate and a direction. They did not choose the institution that converted the direction into forty pages, and they have no mechanism for evaluating it.

Personnel compounds the effect, because the same preparation supplies the people. The vacancies rules govern who may act in a Senate-confirmed post before confirmation, and the acting official is very often someone the transition organisation put forward.

That person then makes decisions for months, on the strength of a nomination that may never be voted on, having been selected by a body with no formal role in government at all.

The reform that would help is not disclosure, which largely exists. It is timing: publishing the personnel and policy work at the point it is produced rather than the point it is implemented, so that a voter deciding in November knows what a January would look like.

There is a defence of the current arrangement that is rarely stated and is fairly strong. Continuity of expertise is a public good, and an outside institution that keeps people between administrations preserves knowledge a four year cycle would otherwise destroy.

The trouble is that the same continuity carries assumptions as well as competence. A group that has prepared for four consecutive administrations has a settled view of what is feasible, and feasibility is where most policy is actually decided.