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There have been a dozen or so books published on Joe Biden‘s presidential campaign and another dozen or so on his time in the White House. Roadblocked is the first and only book focused on that tumultuous time between the campaign and inauguration, a period when over a thousand people, all working from home, helped Joe Biden and Kamala Harris get ready to govern. What I learned from interviewing over 75 members of the transition team reveals a lot for the first time, including the extent of obstruction from the Trump White House as well as the cooperation of hundreds of federal officials just trying to do the right thing to help the new administration be prepared to address the raging Covid-19 pandemic and steer the country toward economic recovery. This excerpt is a glimpse into how the country’s long tradition of peaceful transfers of power ended in 2020-21, and how the Biden-Harris team responded.
On Friday, January 13, 2017, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House, thirty members of the Trump transition team faced a pandemic: H9N2 was spreading through London, Jakarta, and Seoul and heading for the United States. It was a fictional public health emergency created by White House experts to prepare incoming Trump cabinet officials for an unlikely, but real, threat to the country. Suggestive of their attentiveness, Politico reported that Commerce Secretary-nominee Wilbur Ross seemed to be dozing through the exercise.
Two months earlier, just days after the election, public health groups, including the Infectious Diseases Society of America, advised the Trump transition team of an identical concern, urging it to prioritize preparation and funding for the chance this might happen in the early days of the administration. History suggests the advice was largely ignored, and Trump shelved the White House’s National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense the following year.
Four years later, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris faced a very real pandemic, but their transition team was initially blocked from consulting with federal officials at key agencies like the Office of Management and Budget and Department of Defense. Outside groups again offered advice, often filtered through the transition team’s Covid-19 Advisory Board. One coalition of groups, the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities, sent several letters to the team, including one with a list of eight recommendations on everything from required data collection to expanding access to personal protective equipment (PPE), and developing a new national strategy to address the harm the pandemic had on Black, Indigenous, and people of color. The seven-page letter came with examples of recent scientific studies, statistics, and twenty-three footnotes. The heads of fifteen groups co-signed the letter, offering in conclusion: “If you are taking meeting requests at this time, we would like to schedule a meeting to discuss the issues in this letter with you.”
The pandemic wasn’t the only issue for the incoming administration to fret over, nor were public health groups the only ones ready to share their views. Yet, when the Biden-Harris transition team, running short on time because of the obstruction from the White House, invited the Reverend William Barber to a meeting, they didn’t expect his response: “No we can’t meet like that.”
Since 2018, Barber had not merely run an interest group but led a broad national movement of hundreds of anti-poverty groups: the new Poor People’s Campaign. Months earlier, when then-candidate Joe Biden spoke at an event Barber had organized, the future president said: “I promised you that we’d not only talk about (poverty), but that we’d do something about it together.”
“Who (do) you want to bring?” the transition team replied. Barber recalled the movement’s original leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “I remember what he said in the Poor People’s Campaign: ‘I’m taking poor people to the Capitol and we’re going to stay there until the nation shifts.’” Someone who attended the eventual meeting later said they thought some on the transition team were afraid to say “no” to Barber; that he’d expose them as breaking one of Biden’s promises. Barber needed thirty invites and, luckily for the transition team, the meeting would be held virtually, so a bigger conference room need not be booked.
On the December 17 video call were several key officials on the Biden-Harris team, reflecting the typical structure of a transition: day-to-day operations, White House planning, personnel, and policy review. Congressman Cedric Richmond, one of the five transition co-chairs, was there. From the fifteen-person transition advisory board, Ambassador Susan Rice was on the call, as was a close friend of President-elect Biden, Ambassador Mark Gitenstein, who’d once lobbied for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AT&T. Yohannes Abraham, executive director of the team, dialed in, as did issue experts, like Cecilia Munoz, who was heading up domestic policy for the transition.
This was a high-profile set of officials, an accurate reflection of who typically represents the transition team at this type of meeting, a mix of party loyalists, policy experts, and former lobbyists. The representatives also showed Biden and Harris’s commitment to diversity, with as many women as men and many people of color. In 2020 this was not surprising from an incoming Democratic presidential administration: for four decades, gender and racial parity had been a stated goal.
Joining Barber and his co-chair, the Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis, was a much less conventional array of experts. The Poor People’s Campaign had, in fact, partnered with some think-tank experts, like John Cavanaugh, the director of the Institute for Policy Studies, and Thea Lee, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, to write a fourteen-point policy plan pushing for poverty relief through a steep increase in the federal minimum wage, a single-payer universal health-care program, and student debt relief. That officials from think tanks based in D.C. presented a detailed policy proposal was itself nothing new for the transition period. This was the right time to make big asks.
It was the backgrounds of the other attendees, and what they shared, at the ninety-minute meeting — twice the length the team originally allotted — that were so different. “What we do is we put people in the room, we believe in the agency of poor and low wealth people,” said Barber. So, Zillah Wesley from Washington, D.C. talked about her challenges dealing with the coronavirus while she managed other health problems. Kenia Alcocer, an organizer with Union de Vecinos from Los Angeles, explained her status as an undocumented mother of two and the importance of tenant rights. Sara Fearrington from North Carolina recounted periods of homelessness despite working since she was seven years old and her efforts as a union organizer to push for a $15 minimum wage. And Chris Olive, a veteran from Washington State, recounted his own substance abuse and experiences advocating for the one in sixteen residents of Aberdeen, Wash., who were living without sufficient housing.
This was a break from the past, a change in the tone from a typical interaction with a transition team, so often focused on policy details, data, and facts. These personal accounts, rich in emotion, seemed to make a difference for at least one member of the transition team on the call. Reverend Theoharis later related: “(Cecilia Munoz) deeply appreciated that we pulled this meeting together, and said it’s not often, in fact it’s not happened in her life before, to have impacted folk talking about the stories that they come from and the solutions.”
The 2020–2021 transition was then an unusual mixture of more of the same and something very different. This was alright for Reverend Barber, who had come to expect the unexpected: “We come out of a tradition where in 1964 Lyndon Baines Johnson who got elected was a segregationist, but the movement turned him into a civil rights President.” Barber aimed to convince this new president with a resume no more radical than Johnson’s when he came into office. “We have to push,” Barber said, and to do so in a way that might seem shocking to a transition team steeped in convention and the status quo: “We have to put a face on poverty.”
Across dozens of issues, similar stories unfolded. Harried volunteers, most working safely at home, coordinated the transition of the forty-sixth president of the United States under the direction of Jeff Zients and Yohannes Abraham. As Covid-19 raged — 1,007 Americans died on the date Biden was declared the winner of the election — over one thousand experts dissected how the new administration could be up-and-running in less than one hundred days. The governance challenge of the transition period had always been immense, but 2020 was especially challenging in a mind-boggling number of ways: from the array of pressing public health, economic, and foreign policy issues related to surviving the pandemic to the practical issue of coordinating schedules for volunteers spread across the country and maintaining cyber security. This was why Biden had begun planning months earlier, according to Politico, secretly establishing the 501(c)(4) nonprofit named the PT Fund Inc. on May 1, 2020, to begin fundraising to support his distant transition plan.
Never, however, had the political challenge of the transition period been so dire. Despite Biden being declared winner several days after the election, Donald Trump refused to concede the outcome, the first sitting president to do so. He insisted the election had been rigged and that the transition wouldn’t start until fraud was uncovered and he was declared the winner.
Attention shifted to the General Services Administration (GSA), an integral but historically uncontroversial player in the transition. Starting after the party conventions, the GSA has the statutory responsibility to help prepare all eligible candidates to be ready to govern, should they win. GSA staff had been doing just this since the summer with representatives for both Biden and Trump. But when it came time for the process of ascertainment — when the GSA officially disburses federal funds to the apparent winner of the election — administrator Emily Murphy waited. Weeks passed, with the transition team’s access to the government severely limited and public funds unavailable; celebrities Leonardo DiCaprio, Shonda Rhimes, and Scarlett Johansson chipped in to make up the gap. Whereas past transitions would have already commenced meetings with federal bureaucrats by this time, Biden’s team had to hold back, leading the president-elect to say, “More people may die if we don’t coordinate.” Speculation soon mounted that Trump was behind Murphy’s wavering, yet when she finally released the resources on November 23, Murphy explained she was just doing her job, no influence or favoritism at all.
Now flush with $7 million in federal funds, the Biden team could do away with its precautionary color-coded spreadsheets: red for officials in the government they couldn’t talk to; yellow for think-tank experts and former federal officials they could. They now had the green light to rapidly move ahead with transition planning. Agency review teams conferred virtually with senior bureaucrats and outgoing Trump appointees; they even circulated a copy of the transition plan Mitt Romney’s team had prepared in 2012 and intended to do even better.
Cabinet nominations quickly came from the personnel team: Antony Blinken to run State, Alejandro Mayorkas at Homeland Security, Avril Haines to direct National Intelligence, and Linda Thomas-Greenfield as ambassador to the United Nations. As with previous transitions, these foreign policy posts were deemed the most important positions for maintaining peace and stability during the transition period. This initial batch of nominees also reflected the close attention the transition team paid to tracking personnel metrics such as the race, gender, and background of cabinet members as well as to the influence of powerful groups like WestExec Advisors, where several Biden appointees had recently been employed. One person on the transition team said: “The senior management could tell you at any given moment, like if you popped up on a Tuesday at 3 o’clock and said, ‘What’s the proportion of our own staff of women to men? of African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, veterans?’ [The transition team leaders] always knew what the answer was.”
Yet the fear of foreign attack during the transfer of power, so long the worry of federal officials, subsided as the threat from domestic terror rose. Just twelve years earlier, while newly elected Barack Obama joined President George W. Bush for coffee in the White House, the incoming and outgoing national security teams huddled in the Situation Roomover intelligence of a potential threat from the extremist group al-Shabab. The threat never materialized, but the close coordination between the Bush and Obama teams remained a testament to how transitions had evolved over time, from loosely planned affairs among sometimes petty rivals to an institutionalized, well-funded, and cooperative endeavor to safely ease the country into a new administration.
Not in 2020.
As Washington, D.C., celebrated the holidays, Trump refused to concede, orchestrating a multistate effort to challenge the election results. At the Pentagon, acting secretary of defense Chris Miller halted cooperation between his department and the Biden-Harris team, claiming a two-week break had been agreed upon, according to news reports. At the end of one meeting to share intelligence on threats to the country, a Trump political appointee said to members of the transition team: “You guys are not legitimate, so I’m not sharing this information.” Biden, who didn’t received his first intelligence briefing until November 30, weeks after it was expected, said there were roadblocks at the Office of Management and Budget as well. “OMB and Defense, until the very end, took a different posture than other agency leadership… [the politicals] held out cooperation until the bitter end,” said one team member.
And then, on January 6, 2021, as Congress met to certify the final election results and officially declare Joe Biden and Kamala Harris the winners, rioters attacked the Capitol. What was supposed to be a matter-of-fact vote in Congress became a crime scene as hundreds stormed into the Capitol Building, a coordinated domestic effort to head off the impending inauguration and transfer of power. The two-hundred-year history of peaceful, orderly presidential transitions was over.
Excerpted fromRoadblocked: Joe Biden’s Rocky Transition to the Presidency.Copyright ©2024 University Press of Kansas.Printed with permission. All rights reserved.
