How do you lead a presidential transition? With former Governor Mike Leavitt

Valerie Boyd: On today’s episode of Transition Lab, we’re pleased to welcome former Governor Mike Leavitt. Governor Leavitt entered government early in his career, starting in Utah politics and eventually serving three terms as governor of Utah before joining the George W. Bush administration, first as the EPA administrator and later as the secretary of health and human services.

In 2012, he became the chair of Mitt Romney’s presidential transition team. In this role, Governor Leavitt designed a robust transition plan for a Romney presidency by assembling a disciplined, dedicated framework to organize personnel and policy planning. Had Romney won the election, Governor Leavitt’s meticulous advanced planning would have jumpstarted his presidency.

The governor’s efforts were not in vain. He turned his team’s exemplary work into a playbook for anyone hoping to conduct a presidential transition, the Romney Readiness Project. Governor Leavitt also worked with the Partnership for Public Service and Congress to apply lessons learned from this work to a law modernizing the 1963 Presidential Transition Act.

He was recognized by Congress for his stellar contributions to the work of presidential transitions when the law was named in his honor. The Edward (Ted) Kaufman and Michael Leavitt Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2015 enshrines into law any of the best practices of past transitions to foster a smooth handoff from one administration to the next.

Leavitt has extensive experience in both the private and public sectors, and his transition experience is so valuable that he is Transition Lab’s first guest to appear in both seasons one and two. Governor Leavitt, we’re so grateful to have you back today to talk about your expertise.

Thank you for being here.

Mike Leavitt: Thank you for inviting me.

Valerie Boyd: There’s an incredible amount of preparation and organization that goes into transition planning. You know that better than anyone else. At the time of this taping, President Biden has just withdrawn from the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee. At the moment, the public is focused on the complexities this creates for the campaign.

But this also means that the new Democratic nominee will have less time than ever to prepare for the task of governing. So, before we get into questions about this cycle, Governor Leavitt, we asked you a lot about the details of your work when you last spoke with us. And I want to encourage people to go back and listen to that episode.

So, before we talk about the dynamics in this cycle, I would love to dive a little bit deeper on the parts of leading that organization that seem especially relevant today. We live in a tense political time, and as leader of an organization, a key part of your job is taking care of your people and uniting everyone around one mission.

When reading the Romney Readiness Project, I was struck by how much emphasis was placed on creating a strong culture. How did you think about the culture piece of leading the project? What values did you emphasize?

Mike Leavitt: I feel that it’s crucial that the president elect be presented with materials that were designed to advance the process that he would need to go through, not to try to supplant it or replace it. 

I felt it was necessary that the process was devoid to the extent possible, individual agendas. Or a bias that could be the result of a desire or aspiration on the part of those who participate. So, we worked hard to develop a culture that would support those values. And I think to a large extent, we were successful.  

Valerie Boyd: Your book about the Romney Readiness Project says that many employees, more than you were expecting and most of them senior staff, gave their time to the transition project as volunteers in addition to or in place of full-time jobs. Why was it important to expect senior staff to volunteer time, and how did that change the culture of the team? 

Mike Leavitt: First, we had far more to do than we had money available to pay, and people like to be involved in something that’s bigger than they are. And this was essentially staffed by a group of people who have a strong public service gene, if you will, and they had their public service gene lighted up and that’s what we needed. 

This is a very important project at a very important time and people wanted to be of service and they gave abundantly of their own time, energy, and experience.  

Valerie Boyd: That might connect to my next question, because I wanted to ask you about the culture as you describe it in the book. One of the most interesting aspects was an adherence to the ideals and promises of the candidate. In the Romney Readiness Project, you say that the transition chairman needs to not only understand the policy and ideology of the candidate, but also share it personally. 

Why is this? 

Mike Leavitt: I’ll start by saying that it’s very important in my view that the transition is about preparing to implement the commitments of the candidate, not looking for good things that the president elect could do that, again, might comport with their agenda and priorities and not the president elect’s. There’s an unlimited number of people who would like to view the transition as a time to get their point of view heard or to give an advantage to their idea or to raise up the priority list, their agenda. 

Basic rule in our culture was we’re going to deal only with commitments the campaign has made and basic obligations to stand the administration up. So, we define that as being put a team on the field. First of all, we have to put senior people into place quickly so that they could begin to build the rest of the team. 

Second, we had a careful inventory of commitments that had been made. And our effort was designed to allow the implementation or the fulfillment of those commitments and nothing else. The president, once in place, would have a team whose job it would be to decide what else needs to needed to be done as for the first 200 days of an administration, they needed to focus on commitments that had been made during the campaign.  

Valerie Boyd: This might correspond well with the four phases that you organized the Romney Readiness Project around. Readiness, planning, transition, and handoff. Can you tell us a little more about these phases and whether they still make sense today? 

Mike Leavitt: Readiness was important because there was no framework for transition planning. One of the things that was very revealing to me is how little of a tradition there was for transition planning. In the past, almost everything had been done under the cover of darkness, because people didn’t want to be viewed as being too confident or measuring for drapes. 

And consequently, what was done was done basically in secret. Most of the records were either destroyed or didn’t exist in the first place, and so we had very little to go from. So, in terms of hours, the readiness process was designing what a transition ought to look like and what the product should be and what the culture should look like and how we should go about it.  

And we spent several weeks with a lot of discussions and whiteboard sessions and devised principles, and then began to sell those out. So, by the time we got to the end of what we named the Readiness Project, we had an outline of objectives and a very clear set of guidelines. 

We had to figure a lot out as it unfolded, but that was the primary purpose of Readiness. 

Valerie Boyd: You mentioned how many former transitions have felt the need to operate under the cover of darkness. And, we’ve seen that most other chairs of transition efforts have avoided the press. Part of the reason is an argument that the work should be done quietly with the campaign out front, but you did several press interviews during this period, and so I wanted to ask you why did you think it was important to communicate what the transition team was doing? 

And how did you coordinate this with the campaign team? 

Mike Leavitt: Actually, our transition had as part of our culture that the transition had no voice. The only voice it had would be its chair.  

And the basics of what we were doing would be conveyed, but no information about the conclusions we were reaching would be communicated. So, there was very little interaction with the press. What had to be undertaken to give them a sense of the fact that we were planning and preparing was not done by the campaign, but rather by the transition chair. And we allowed the campaign to speak for the candidate, not the transition. 

Valerie Boyd: Was it necessary to coordinate any messages or is your point that the campaign really had the lead? 

Mike Leavitt: Well, the campaign had the lead on any communication occur and no communication came out of the transition without currents from the campaign. Our job was to get ready for the post-election period. Our job was not to develop policy. It was to be ready to implement policy that the campaign’s policy shop had developed and the candidate had agreed to. 

Once that had occurred, we started working.  

There was a particular pipeline that needed to, had been implemented and agreed that was to be implemented. The candidate had agreed to build a pipeline between Canada and the United States, and I had agreed that it would be done by an executive order in the first 200 days of the campaign.  

Well, if that were to occur, we needed to have lots of legal work done. We needed to know what regulations needed to be developed. And so, we began charting the pathway for that to occur and actually doing the work so that it could be accomplished in that period of time. We did that across the board. 

If you were to walk down the hall of the Romney Readiness Project, which you’d see was a miniature federal government, there was a Department of State. It was a Department of Treasury. There was a Department of Commerce and Department of Health and Human Services. There was a Department of Interior, et cetera, et cetera. 

And as the chairman of the Readiness Project or the transition. I would organize policy time in a way that was very similar to what would happen at the White House where we would have different departments come in to essentially represent their equities in the discussion that would need to occur in order for decisions to be made. 

So, we would have robust conversations between people who represented those offices who was in those offices. Well, for the most part, it was people who had occupied roles in the government that would give them the perspective that was necessary. So, in the case of pipeline, I referenced clearly there was. that needed to be represented to the Department of Interior, Department of Energy, the Department of State, Department of Treasury. 

And they would all work on this issue in order to shape it in the same way that the White House would, after the fact, the idea was that when government was standing. We would then pass our work papers and our work ideas and the various issues along to the actual people in the government, and they would take it from there.  

It’s clear how much the ongoing priorities of federal agencies and the news of the day, the promises of the campaign all interact in really complex ways. So, we’re speaking the day after President Biden announced he’s dropping out of the presidential race. There are a lot of unknowns right now, but one thing that’s clear is that the Democratic nominee has less time than other candidates in modern history to prepare to connect all of the things we just discussed. 

Valerie Boyd: What advice do you have for the Democratic candidate about standing up a transition on such a short timeframe? How can they catch up? 

Mike Leavitt: One lesson that can and should be drawn from the 2012 transition is that the Congress in 2010, for the first time in our country’s history, actually made it an obligation of the candidate for every major party to stand up a transition. Why? Because it’s an absolutely critical degree of preparation that has to occur. 

If the leadership of the free world is to transition effectively, you can’t do that from a standing start. It has to have a dynamic start. So, whoever the candidate is from literally the day after they are awarded the nomination need to appoint a transition committee without any knowledge of whether they will be successful or not. 

It is by order of the Congress, by an act of law, a requirement for candidates who seek the presidency to be prepared to stand up a transition. And why? It’s because it’s for the protection of our democracy and the protection of our country. Transition periods are very vulnerable times, particularly early days of an administration when there’s a lot of new people in place and few people who are bound over from one, administration to the other. 

Those are times that a foreign enemy could take advantage of chaos. Now there are civil servants who are there. It’s the seams where authority has been passed, where you have new people with authority that don’t know exactly what their role is, that needs to be focused on. So, I’m hopeful, whoever it is. 

No matter what campaign looks like at the time that they will appoint a transition chairman and get about the business of preparing to do the people’s work.  

Valerie Boyd: Let’s talk more about that staffing operation for either the Democratic nominee or the Republican nominee. We’re speaking right after the Republican National Convention. President Trump is officially the nominee. and he’s currently running his operations out of Mar-a-Lago in Florida. In 2020, President Biden ran his campaign operations out of Delaware out of necessity, of course, for COVID. 

When you were running Romney’s transition, you focused on drawing from a Washington talent pool that had expertise in government and based the transition here in D.C. to tap into local networks. So how should modern candidates think about the value of new blood versus experience when staffing a government or a transition project?  

Mike Leavitt: Well, I just say I would be hard pressed to plan a transition well without people who knew something about the federal government. Um, and we had that discussion. There were those who would like to have organized the transition. In Boston, where the campaign was headquartered, I persisted in my insistence that it be in D.C. 

I think it was a good decision. However, I spent at least one day and often more days than one in Boston, communicating with the campaign and consulting with them on matters related to policy. I assured that they had information about any decision that was being made because what generally and what naturally happens is those who are outrunning the campaign begin to become suspicious of what those people down at the transition are doing. 

They become convinced that they are down dividing up the kingdom, if you will, while they are doing the work of winning the campaign. And that’s a very natural thing. It required very good communication and openness. Big effort to communicate, to maintain a sense of unity between the transition and the campaign. 

And I’m happy to say we achieved that. There were no significant decisions made in the transition that campaign leadership wasn’t aware of and signed off on. 

Valerie Boyd: You mentioned the need to rely on people who understand the federal government to know what they’re doing. This year there are several outside groups that are working to create plans for a future Trump administration. Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has attracted a lot of attention. America First Policy Institute is staffed by a number of former Trump administration officials. 

As of today, the Trump campaign has disavowed any formal connections between them, but, it has been true since 1980 or before that outside organizations have supported the planning for busy campaigns and busy transitions. Were there similar groups working with the Romney Readiness Project? 

How were they helpful, or were they a distraction? 

Mike Leavitt: Yes, there were several and I would say that it occupied some of my time to meet with them and understand what they were doing. And I made clear to them, we’d like to know what they’re doing. And if they have components that would make our task lighter. We would use what they had provided. However, it was vitally important in my mind that the transition remained independent of them. 

And that we not, subcontract, if you will, the planning for the administration. Well, others may disagree with that, but that was our position. And I think it was the right one. There were, at times, we found text for executive orders that needed to be written. It’s very helpful to have a rough draft, but we didn’t just receive it, accept it, and use it. 

It was used. There were times we would actually ask people to provide us with names, but they were providing, there were many groups that were providing names, and we were using it as a means of generating alternative options. We were very clear in the culture of what we were doing, that we would be the transition and we would do everything we could to prevent or to present the president elect with options and to super charge the deliberation process they needed to go through because we could not be a substitute for their deliberation. We could in fact help them speed it up.  

Valerie Boyd: Speaking of organizations that are seeking to support the candidates, in 2012, when you were leading planning for Governor Romney, and again in 2016 and 2020, you participated in our Center for Presidential Transition® convenings and work supporting candidate representatives of both parties to discuss lessons learned and how to stand up and operation. 

My understanding is that you once referred to these nonpartisan gatherings as the embassy of good citizenship. Can you tell us more about the value for a transition team of engaging with the center’s nonpartisan resources and people from both parties?  

Mike Leavitt: There were moments in the transition that I think Americans would find both reassuring and I would say make them proud to be Americans because on a couple of occasions, under the sponsorship of the Center, the candidate’s representatives would lay down their swords at the door and talk about what would need to happen in order to keep the government’s business and the government safe, and we would have joint discussions about how to things. 

There were times the Governor Romney was running against President Obama. And on a number of occasions as chairman, I would sit with the chief of staff for the president or whoever was representing them in the transition process, and we would discuss what would occur if President Obama was replaced by Governor Romney and what the actual steps would be for the transition of power and the transition of responsibility. 

There were times when we actually organized joint exercises, so that if there was an event, an incident requiring response of the government that the new officers of the government would know what to do. I participated in those during the Bush ‘43 transition to Obama and to his credit that President Bush made clear he wanted the transition to be the smoothest transition in the history of us government. 

And I think that occurred. And I think it created the potential of an example on how transition should be implemented. Now in 2016, it was a little different, but there’s a good example. There’s a good pattern. the Center has done a marvelous job, in my view, in creating a repository of documents and of plans and examples of what needs to be done.  

We spent months developing the pathway for transition that exists. It can be modified, but it now exists. And it’s something I’m very proud that we did. And I’m grateful to the Center for the pathway that they’ve created for presidential campaigns in the future.  

Valerie Boyd: Well, it’s thanks to people like you who ran an outstanding process, wrote it up for future teams to learn from, and then not only shared your thinking, but also invested your time in meeting with future candidates. I want to ask one more question about the election cycle before asking you a little bit about your experience managing federal agencies. 

And I guess my last question is the hardest one. Last time you were here, you spoke about your emotions on the night that Governor Romney lost the election and how disappointing it was. What advice do you have for whoever the losing candidate and their teams are on election night 2024? How should they prepare themselves? 

Mike Leavitt: I was reminded is that in our democracy, someone loses every time. And I look back on what we did to both put all the campaign and to prepare to assume the opposite president in the event of our success. And I deemed both of those to be service. It was a lot more fun when I was involved in campaigns that won, and it was more rewarding when we had a chance to move in and implement our plans. 

What we did was important. And I look back, despite the fact that Governor Romney was not successful, we produced a product of value. And I think it has paved the way for many other presidential campaigns to know what needs to be done and to make transition basic part of an election and it’s in a day as complex as we are in today. That’s important.  

Valerie Boyd: We would be remiss if the Partnership for Public Service did not ask you a few questions about how future aspiring leaders of federal agencies can prepare themselves. So, as EPA Administrator and Secretary of Health and Human Services, you are the leader of very large and high profile civilian agencies. 

This might be a, I mean, to ask a governor this question, but what professional experiences in your past were most relevant preparing you for a role in the president’s cabinet? 

Mike Leavitt: Being governor was an important part of my preparation. I had a history before that which was oriented to business. And I gathered a lot of information and valuable experience doing that. But I cannot dispute the fact that having served as governor was perhaps the most important preparation.  

I’d made decisions of consequence over and over as governor. I understood the process of decision making and felt comfortable with it. But more important than that, much of what the federal government does is assisting states in the administration of programs that are too local for the federal government to the programs are administered by the states. 

I am not in an executive position to effectively oversee them. So, if you focus on the two departments or agencies I ran, EPA and HHS, nearly all of those programs are administered by the states. The states administer Medicaid, welfare, substance abuse, many of the human service programs that are administered through HHS. 

States administer almost all of our environmental programs as a country. So, having the experience of having administered the programs at the state was a highly important relevant part of my job. I think operating in an environment where the executive branch is needing to deal with the legislative branch, you have never dealt with the state legislature. 

You might struggle to understand how Congress works. And that was a big help. I think actually having a cabinet and understanding the relationship between, you know, the cabinet members and the exec and the president, or the, in my case, the governor I will remember many conversations I had as governor that resembled the kind of conversation I had with the president. 

He told me, this is what he expected of me as a member of the cabinet. It’s a conversation I had with members of my cabinet. So, the relationships were both familiar and very practical. 

Valerie Boyd: Can I ask you about your private sector experience too, or the important private sector practices that you think the public sector could learn from? 

Mike Leavitt: Oh, yes, we all long to live in a government that is not devoid of good common sense. And in many cases, that’s what business requires is a common sense and a sense of fairness. But one also learns the differences between business and government businesses have to deal with market share. If you get 10 percent of a gigantic market, you could do very well. 

However, if you are in government, you have to satisfy more than 10%. You typically have to satisfy the majority of the population or there’s unhappiness dealing with minority parties. And I’m not referring to any specific minority, except to recognize that in business, we don’t always have to deal in government. 

You do recognize that you’re sharing power. If you’re the CEO and I had been a CEO. You are often the sole decision maker in government. That’s rarely the case. You share power with the Congress and with the courts, you share power among and between parties. There are lots of ways that you have to learn to accommodate that. 

Those are different in government than in the private sector. And so those that have only served in one or the other tend to miss not just the similarities, they miss the differences. That’s a very important part of being able to operate. 

Valerie Boyd: So, I have to ask one more question about your background and you alluded to this earlier. From your experience leading state government, how should a new presidential administration prepare to engage with state and local leaders? What type of federal outreach and support did you find most helpful from your seat and the governor’s office? 

Mike Leavitt: I think it’s vital for leaders in either party, maybe more important that those in the Republican party have relationships with governors than those in the Democrat party. Though it’s vital for both, the Democratic party essentially reflects more activity at the federal level than the state and the Republican party tends to see more action happening at the state and local. 

On a state and local basis, both need to have relationships and both need to be respectful of the other’s role.  

Valerie Boyd: You mentioned earlier that during times of vulnerability during a transition, it’s so important for incoming and outgoing officials to share information to be prepared for national security vulnerabilities. 

You mentioned that career civil servants are an important part of the connectivity. Can I ask you more about the role of civil servants in government and what did you learn about relying on career civil servants during your time leading EPA and HHS?  

Mike Leavitt: I came to have great respect for those who choose a career in civil service. I learned to depend on them. I learned to trust. And I found that if I did depend on them and I did trust them, they served our purposes very well. They were loyal and willing to give me their best judgment. I observed during my time at federal service many people who were skeptical and felt like it was them and us, and they excluded them from important decision-making goals. And in doing so, they excluded for themselves access to a lot of information. It was in many cases, like a second Lieutenant taking a unit to war, not the benefit of the first Sergeant’s experience who’s been there many times. 

It’s important to have a trusting relationship and one that has open communication. And I felt very well served by my relationships with career civil service servants. Yeah, I’m also not naive to the fact that there are civil servants who have agendas and opinions and they want to use whatever they can to influence government in a way that might be, may contradict the political agenda of the party in power. 

If that’s the case, in my view the political leadership will ultimately find that out and do their best to isolate them. And that’s the reason that it happens.  

Valerie Boyd: It may be a bit like coming into any organization as a leader, high level person that there are people who were there before who know quite a lot about what has been tried before, what hasn’t, and it’s part of the role of the leader to understand what they’re hearing, kind of gauge the advice and make decisions about, you know, is this advice what we need to move our agenda forward. 

Mike Leavitt: I found within a few months as a head of a large government department, I began to realize where I was getting good advice and where I wasn’t. And when I was getting good advice from career civil servants, I included them in every decision making council and treated them as though they were part of the political team. 

I had conversations with them about the awkwardness that that might create for them and we openly communicated. I’ll remember a specific person named Kerry Weems, who had been at the Department of Health and Human Services for 27 years. He’d served in virtually every part of the department. I found him to be a man of great judgment and extraordinary experience. 

And he was smart, and I could call on him and he would give me the straight shot. He’d give the information to me as he saw, and it was really valuable. At some point in the course of my time, I went to the president and said, I have a sensitive role that I need to have filled. And I think that for the protection of your interests, as well as ability to govern the department, it would be very useful to use this person. 

It was a career employee in a position that would be typically a political and he agreed and he served very well. I saw the opposite happen as well, where I felt like I needed to say someone with political sensitivities in a role that, or with duties that might have normally been overseen by a career. 

So, it’s about looking, finding people of good judgment and then finding a way to use it. 

Valerie Boyd: I’m so glad you told that story. I think it really explains perfectly how leaders need to look at skills and abilities and match responsibilities against them. And that’s more of an individual basis than a category basis of whether people are political or career. What advice do you have for aspiring appointees of either party to start preparing themselves for public service leadership? 

How should they prepare to serve a new administration in January? 

Mike Leavitt: Believe that career employees who are given an opportunity to serve around and with the political leadership should be, first of all, very open about their desire to serve, and they ought to make commitments that they will, within the limits of their conscience, serve to be faithful to the agenda of the elected leadership with an understanding that if it ever breaches their sense of morality, they always have the capacity to resign, but it ought to be done in a way that preserves their career. 

Just come and tell me that this is not comfortable for you and we’ll work it out. I had a conversation with George W. Bush that I look back on as being important. I had a conversation very similar to the one that I’m going to report to you with everyone who served in my cabinet. I said to them, I’m looking to you to be loyal. 

Here’s what I mean by loyal. I need you to use your best judgement to do what you believe is the right thing to do, and to do what you believe I would do if I were making that decision. That’s loyal. Another definition of loyal is that you’re going to come upon things that are bigger than your department. 

And when you do, loyal is being willing to elevate that for a bigger discussion and not just moving forward, even though it would affect other departments and other places in the government. That’s loyal. A third definition of loyal is that you’re going to need to collaborate with others to come up with the best solution. 

And that’s loyal. A fourth part of loyalty is in the course of those conversations, I want to know exactly what you think, not what you think I want to hear. That’s loyal. And finally, loyalty is when it comes time to make a decision. I need you to remember who got elected president or who got elected governor. 

And if you’re uncomfortable with the decision that might be made differently than what you recommended, then you always have the option of leaving, or you can acknowledge the fact that that wasn’t a decision for you to make. And I would suggest that there are lots of decisions that get made that we weren’t empowered or expected or positioned to make. 

And we should do the best we can on those that are, and on those that aren’t, we ought to be loyal according to the definition I just laid out. 

Valerie Boyd: I have one more question for you following that sage advice. Which is, knowing the complexity of this year’s election cycle, are you optimistic that whoever takes the oath of office on January 20th will be prepared to do so? What gives you hope? 

Mike Leavitt: Well, I want to believe that we will be. I will say that looking back over the course of American history, we haven’t always been prepared. And as a result, there are periods of time when our government has been as effective as it could be or as safe as it needs to be. So I have great hope that those who are serving the candidates in both parties, whoever it turns out to be, will actively engage in a planning process so that when January the 20th comes and the clock strikes 12, that a transition is made that protects the American people and our form of government.  

Valerie Boyd: Governor Leavitt, you’ve allowed us to dive deeper into the Romney Readiness Project and understand how it remains relevant today. Since our first interview in Season 1, you’ve helped us understand how different experiences from different sectors is helpful as a cabinet and administration leader. You’ve helped us unpack some of the dynamics in this unpredictable election cycle, and you’ve ended on a very inspiring and thoughtful note. 

So, I want to thank you for all of your time today talking to us and our audience and for your long history of public service and everything you’ve achieved. 

Mike Leavitt: Thank you, Valerie. I’ve enjoyed the interview.