Transition from Bush to Obama is most successful yet, observers say

A Thursday congressional hearing on presidential transition planning featured one of Washington's rarest sightings: genuine bipartisanship.

Top Democratic and Republican officials from previous administrations praised one another, as well as career employees, for the relatively smooth management of the past two changeovers during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee hearing on the 2008-2009 executive transfer of power.

"My experience in the prior two presidential transitions confirms that, despite campaign sloganeering, both Republicans and Democrats have taken presidential transitions extremely seriously and kept their work from being overly affected by political influences," said John Podesta, who served as co-chairman of President Obama's transition team and was the outgoing chief of staff to President Clinton in 2000. Podesta now runs the Center for American Progress think tank.

Podesta and Clay Johnson, who led the Bush-Cheney transition team in 2000 and served as deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget during the Bush years, cited the transfer of power between the Bush and Obama administrations as the most successful to date. "They took it really, really seriously," Johnson said. "It was the kind of cooperation that you would hope would take place between an incoming administration and an outgoing administration."

Podesta and Johnson said earlier planning as well as formalizing the transition process through executive orders and regular appropriations contributed to standing up new administrations faster.

Sens. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, George Voinovich, R-Ohio, and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., introduced a bill (S. 3196) in mid-April that would encourage presidential candidates and incumbent administrations to start the transition process earlier and would provide additional resources to help them with logistics such as office space, training and equipment, which the General Services Administration oversees.

But lawmakers and witnesses on Thursday agreed that at least one aspect of the transition process -- the nomination and Senate confirmation of political appointees -- is anything but bipartisan. "The Senate has to consider whether the use of filibusters on executive branch nominees is appropriate, and I say that as someone who spent many years in the Senate as a staffer and supported filibusters," Podesta said.

A new report from the Center for American Progress found that the Obama administration had filled 64.4 percent of Senate-confirmed executive agency positions after one year, compared to 73.8 percent for the George W. Bush administration and 69.8 percent for the Clinton administration. The report blames Senate delays for the slowdown.

Gail Lovelace, GSA's chief human capital officer who oversaw 2008-2009 transition planning governmentwide, noted that while the process continues to improve, future presidential transitions likely will be more complicated from a security perspective, making good management, preparation and bipartisan cooperation even more important.