Too many cooks in the kitchen? With Lanhee Chen 

Valerie Boyd: On this episode of Transition Lab, we are excited to welcome Lanhee Chen. Lanhee’s career spans a wide array of roles in government, politics, business, and academia. 

He served as a member of the Social Security Advisory Board during the Obama and Trump administrations and in the Department of Health and Human Services during the George W. Bush presidency. He was also the policy director for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. Currently, Lanhee is a public policy fellow at the Hoover Institution and a director and lecturer at Stanford University’s Public Policy Program. 

In addition, he’s a partner and co-lead of the Brunswick Group’s U. S. Public Affairs Policy and Regulatory Practice and an on-air contributor for NBC News Meet the Press. Today, Lanhee joins us for a conversation about his role on the 2012 Romney campaign and how he coordinated with the transition team to prepare to turn policy ideas into reality. Welcome Lanhee.  

Lanhee Chen: Thanks Valerie. Great to be with you.  

Valerie Boyd: So, let’s get started with the area where our audience is most interested in campaigns and the transition to the transition. Can you tell us a little bit about your role as policy director for the Romney campaign and how you joined?  

Lanhee Chen: Sure. So, I had worked with then Governor Romney when he was in office as governor of Massachusetts. 

And so, when he made the decision, actually in 2008, the first time around to run for president, I was privileged to join his team. To lead our efforts on domestic policy development and obviously he lost to John McCain in that primary, but we kept up over the years. And when he made the decision to run again for the presidency in 2012, I was asked to lead his policy team, as policy director.  

And what that was initially, at least, you know, we had a very small operation that started as a political action committee and then migrated into a primary campaign and eventually [00:02:00] into a full-fledged general election campaign. But my responsibilities were, first of all, to provide advice and counsel on whatever policy issues would come up during the course of the day, or during the course of the campaign, which, as you can imagine with a presidential campaign, is a lot of different things. 

It’s foreign policy, it’s domestic policy, it’s economic issues, it’s social issues. My job was to furnish counsel on how we as a campaign and how Mitt Romney might approach those issues. And you know, I think that that had its own excitement because you’re, you’re dealing with a different set of issues and a different set of equities every day. 

And then, the other part of my job was to ensure that I ran a policy development process that brought to him ideas about ways of effectuating his goals and his strategic aims if he were to be elected. And so, we looked at everything from what a tax plan would look like to a budget plan, to a healthcare plan, to an approach on some of the biggest and most pressing foreign [00:03:00] policy issues of the time. 

And so, it was a combination of policy development, policy advice, and then interfacing with the rest of the campaign as the, as the policy chief, I was interfacing with our political team, our communications team, our advertising team, our operations team to think through how the substance of the campaign could help drive, some of the outcomes we were looking for in those other modalities.  

And your listeners would probably be able to intuit the fact that Mitt Romney is an incredibly substantive, thoughtful guy. And so, policy was of great importance to him.  

In my shop in particular, I had policy development and policy advisory pieces. I was also responsible for our relationship with Capitol Hill. And so that involved liaising with lawmakers, leaders in both the Senate and the House talking through what our agenda was, what our plans were.  

I also was responsible for speech writing. Speech writers in the campaign fell within the policy shop.  

Of course, as we’ll talk about in greater detail, I was sort of the chief [00:04:00] liaison from the campaign, at least with respect to policy and issues, to the transition, which got started initially pretty early on as a very nascent effort led by Mike Leavitt , I think probably, in spring of 2012 and then grew into a full-fledged transition under the terms of the presidential transition act and, was a group that was ready to spring into action if Romney had won that election back in 2012. 

So, had a lot of different responsibilities toward the tail end. It was a lot of travel with the campaign, with Governor Romney on the campaign trail, debate prep, things of that nature, but it was an exciting campaign. It was a great campaign and very proud of the effort that he and the team put forward. 

Valerie Boyd: Yeah, you’re reminding me of what a serious responsibility it is to run policy for someone who is such a substantive public servant as Mitt Romney. And so, one of the things you had the opportunity to do was assemble a team that helped gather information about all of these different national [00:05:00] security, foreign policy, domestic policy. Was there already a large universe of experts in the circle? How did you go about finding the right people to support?  

Lanhee Chen: I remember very early on in the process, you know, Mitt and I had a conversation and, and he said, listen, whatever we do in terms of proposing ideas on this campaign, they need to be ideas that we can govern on. 

They need to be ideas that are ready to go on, on day one. And I don’t know that a lot of other people in the public space in that position would have had the same thought process about these things, but that really did drive a lot of what we do- did. 

So, we were very fortunate to have a group of very strong external advisors on a lot of these issues who had been with Mitt in 2008, who were eager to help and advise in 2012: people like former Senator Jim Talent of Missouri, who was very helpful on defense and foreign policy issues. I’m thinking of people like Eric Edelman, who was a senior national security advisor to Vice President [00:06:00] Cheney. On the economic side, Glenn Hubbard, the former Dean of the Columbia University business school. Greg Mankiw, someone who taught me economics when I was at Harvard and continues to be a critical part of that faculty. And the list goes on and on. 

So, we had a lot of external advisors. Building the internal team was a little harder because I knew that I needed people who had substantive knowledge, yes, but who knew their limits: who knew when to go to our outside teams of advisors. And we organized advisory teams on pretty much every issue you can imagine. 

And we had in some cases, a few, in some cases, dozens of advisors on the outside on these issues that we tried to organize. And it was about hiring people who, I remember talking to Josh Bolton about this fairly on, Josh was George W. Bush’s policy director and eventually Chief of Staff. And Josh said, you know, what you’re really doing is you’re hiring a bunch of people who will manage process. 

And that’s really what you’re doing as policy directors, you’re managing process. And when you get into government, there’s really no more important job in a lot of [00:07:00] ways than folks who can manage process. And so, I hired people, some of whom were on the young side, but people who I felt I could trust managing process and who knew when to defer to outside expertise. 

And so, we brought on a great team. People like Alex Wong, who has gone on to serve in multiple foreign policy and national security roles. I had Orrin Cass who has gone on to start his own very successful thought organization called American Compass. And folks like that are the highest caliber and eventually, a guy called John Burks was my deputy. 

He’d come out of the white house and served in the Bush administration. Probably, you’ll remember that, Valerie. But there’s a number of folks that we were just very fortunate to have on the team. And people who were seasoned, experienced, in some cases a little bit on the younger side but knew how to run process and knew when to defer to our expertise when we needed to. 

But it was a great team at the end of the campaign. So, I started with me and an assistant and probably two or three people during the primary. By the time we were all done, we had about [00:08:00] 45 to 50 people inside the campaign that reported to me as policy director, and I want to say we had a few thousand outside advisors that we were organizing, because when you become the nominee of the party, you know, a lot of the mechanism of the party, a lot of the mechanism of people who served in previous administrations and want to help and want to be a part of that all come on board. And so, we were very fortunate to have a lot of really smart, capable people who were advising us from the outside as well. 

Valerie Boyd: You’re making me feel better about astounding someone the other day who asked how many people are normally on a transition team. And I said, well, like several hundred to a thousand and they couldn’t believe it was that large. But as you said, there’s a sort of a constellation of people who are close in but experts that you consult with, branching out. So you said something else that’s really interesting about how relationships with the hill and speech writing fell in your purview. And on speech writing, it makes me think about, VEEP episodes where they’re sort of putting policy on the [00:09:00] cutting room floor as they’re editing the speeches around it. 

But it does seem that speech writing is often placed in a separate part of a campaign effort, but, do you think it was unusual that you had these things linked? Because it was-  

Lanhee Chen: Yeah, yeah, very, very unusual. I would say it was a function of 2 things: 1 was, again, Mitt’s desire to drive substance in everything that he said. And particularly when we were doing a set piece speech, we always wanted there to be a policy hook, right? Something where he’d talk about his plans for the economy, his plans for the country, his plans to lead America around the world. So, it was a substantive driver, but the other part of it is that he was very hands-on in terms of his own words, and he wanted to be very much involved in that. 

You know, still to this day, I consider him a dear friend and great mentor. We had a strong working relationship, and so I think he felt that entrusting that piece to our shop would ensure the best coordination. But we work closely with, with other parts of [00:10:00] the campaign and our director of speech writing, someone named Lindsey Hayes, an incredibly capable speech writer, she essentially ran her own team, we would make sure that we were interfacing with her and connecting on the substance.  

Because again, Romney didn’t want to go out there and make a promise he couldn’t keep when he would govern. As the keeper of his promises, in some ways, it was up to me to make sure that we weren’t getting out over our skis on stuff, and I think we managed to hold that in check pretty well.  

Valerie Boyd: It seems that Hill relationships might have been in your purview for a similar reason. Am I right to infer that, what was realistic in terms of building legislation was- is that why Hill relations were also in your purview?  

Lanhee Chen: Yeah, it certainly was. I mean, definitely preparing committee chairs and leadership for the kinds of ideas that we wanted to hit the ground running with. But there was another thing, which was making sure that, and this is quite common, that the nominee’s campaign is synced up with leadership in terms of what needs to get done on the Hill: [00:11:00] understanding what those priorities are, what their policy priorities are, the ways in which we can be helpful in amplifying one another’s messages. 

Those are all things that I think run most smoothly when they’re run through the policy shop. And in our case, I think it worked very well. We had some really talented folks, actually two people who are still in senior roles on the Hill in the Senate, J. T. Jezerski and, Erica Suarez, one of whom works for Leader McConnell, the other of whom is the Chief of Staff now to Senator Capito and several others who had great experience and understood the value of coordinating with Capitol Hill on everything that we were doing and vice versa.  

So, yeah, I think it ran well, and different campaigns will approach it differently. Some will put it out at the political shop and there’s no question there were relationships with Hill leaders all over the campaign, but it was still my job to make sure we were coordinating effectively. 

Valerie Boyd: You’re making me think about our mutual friend, Chris Liddell’s book, I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to read Year Zero yet, but it’s excellent, and one of the things that he talks [00:12:00] about is the importance of building legislation in the year before the president elect actually takes office. 

So, that integration between policy, Hill outreach, all of that seems to work together. 

Lanhee Chen: And there’s also a trust element as well, because you’re building relationships that if you’re elected, you’re going to have to work very closely with these folks and that they know who they could pick up the phone and call if there’s a problem, or if they hear something from the campaign that’s dissonant with what they’re trying to do. 

There’s a point of contact that they can call and get the real scoop on what’s happening. And that would have been useful if Romney had won, and we would have had to govern. We would have taken those relationships very seriously, I think. So, I think Chris is absolutely right. It’s about building the agenda, but it’s also about relationship building. 

Valerie Boyd: Well, let me ask you about moving from the campaign to the transition itself. You mentioned that you were first the liaison to the transition. So, when did that transfer become official?  

Lanhee Chen: Yeah, I mean it’s funny [00:13:00] because, um, it wasn’t like going from one job to another. It was like adding a second job, really. Because, I had my day job still, which was to make sure that we were running the campaign policy shop. I mentioned John Burks earlier, very, very fortunate that he basically took over day to day in Boston for me and I was mostly on the campaign trail and liaising with the transition. 

So, when I would need to check in with a transition, I’d go to Washington. So, I think I was probably going to Washington pretty frequently during that last couple of months of the campaign. But the transition really got off the ground post-convention.  

We had our national convention in August. And then after that, it was a sprint between late August and the election in November. It was all sorts of things. I mean, it was about making sure that there was consistency between what was being developed by the various strategic groups led by Tim Adams, who was the guy who I had deputized on the transition side to really lead the strategy and planning effort. 

We had a whole host of agency review teams that were [00:14:00] being led by Jim Quigley and Chris was also involved in that process and Secretary Leavitt as well as personnel. There was a whole personnel vetting piece as well and part of that was making sure that folks in the personnel team who were vetting potential appointees to the administration understood who are the people that had been working with us on the campaign, who did governor Romney trust with policy council in various areas, and really providing that insight so that they could help prioritize, quite frankly, people who had been helpful on the campaign and who were substantively prepared to take on those roles.  

So, it was a gradual process, but it was one that we felt was important because we wanted to make sure that whatever the campaign did, the transition would reflect that in terms of things that Romney was promising.  

And then vice versa, there’s another piece to this too, which is making sure that the transition isn’t getting out ahead of the campaign. Because the danger in this is always that the transition makes a pronouncement that the campaign [00:15:00] has to defend and that is not consistent with the campaign, and the governor’s policy wasn’t consistent with Romney’s policy. 

And so, our goal every day was to keep the transition out of the news. And I think we did a pretty good job of that. And I credit that to the leadership of the transition under Mike Levitt and Chris Liddell and others. 

 They always used to say, you know, let’s make sure Boston’s the one making the news, and what they meant by that was the campaign, because we were all headquartered in Boston. They didn’t want to be the center of attention, and they did a very good job in keeping their head down and doing their work and not getting in the way of what we were trying to do to win an election.  

Valerie Boyd: Yeah, we got to talk to Governor Leavitt a couple episodes ago, and he, of course, set the modern standard in our view for what an excellent transition should look like and that relationship between the campaign and the transition. Particularly on the communications, where, as you said, Boston should be making the news. 

Lanhee Chen: Yeah. And his relationship, um, Governor Leavitt’s relationship with Governor Romney was really important because they had been friends and they had known each other and served together for long periods of [00:16:00] time and they had a trust and an understanding and an admiration for one another. And that created the environment, that allowed for what I think was a very warm relationship between the transition and campaign.  

Because that can be a source of tension, if it’s not done the right way. The danger point there is that the transition is perceived as measuring the drapes when the campaign is doing the work. We were all very aware, first of all, in our campaign, that there was a ton of great work being done at the transition that we would have never had the bandwidth for. 

But also, from the transitions part of respect that the campaign had a job to do and that they wanted to keep as much out of our business as possible. And so, it was a great and really strong relationship all around. Of course, there were days that were tougher than others. Anytime you’re in a really challenging environment, like a presidential campaign in the last 30 days, you’re going to have that. But by and large the relationships were strong and the people involved were of the highest caliber. 

Valerie Boyd: I wanted to ask about how you kept the [00:17:00] politics and the day-to-day craziness of the campaign away from the transition, but you described it as having two jobs at the same time. Unfortunately, you didn’t get to see that the post campaign element of the transition planning where it all morphed into one job. 

So, it seems like it was organized craziness all the time.  

Lanhee Chen: Yeah, it was organized, I mean, as I think back on it, really, what allowed for that to work was, first of all, having really strong people whom I trusted and whom Mitt Romney trusted at both the campaign and the transition who were able to sort of, guide the ship without needing a daily steer, if that makes sense. 

But also the quality of material produced, and I was looking back the other day actually in preparation for our conversation, I’ve got a lot of material from our transition still that our policy teams put together and the level of thinking and analysis that went into how to operationalize governor Romney’s promises was amazing. 

Everything down to [00:18:00] specific executive order, specific regulatory guidance, agency guidance, the way in which we would sequence certain policy priorities. I mean, these are all things that they take a lot of time and effort and thought. Certainly, more than I had in terms of available time and bandwidth, given what was going on in the campaign. 

We were incredibly fortunate to have Tim Adams and Laura Dove, who is his deputy, and Chris Papagiannis and a lot of great people over at the transition who were really doing the yeoman’s work of making sure that we were ready to go on day one.  

Valerie Boyd: I think we have an audience that’s really interested in the details of how you put together executive orders and regulatory actions and what that looked like months before the election itself. 

Can you walk us through the process for that? Is it, it starts with the germ of an idea? You consult with the candidate? You consult with the Hill?  

Lanhee Chen: Yeah, it’s a lot of those things together. I mean I would say, first of all, we were very fortunate in 2012 and actually subsequent Republican [00:19:00] campaigns have also been able to rely on a very strong bank of outside thinkers, outside legal thinkers, outside policy thinkers who devote time and energy and attention to literally putting together potential executive orders, presidential memoranda, agency guidance that can effectuate policy goals because, you know, they can see the policy promises as well as anybody else can.  

When Mitt Romney says he wants to do tax reform starting on day one, most of that’s done legislatively, of course, so that the Congress comes into effect. But are there areas for executive activity that can pave the way for that? Certainly with respect to trade issues, that’s an area where there’s a significant role for the executive to play via executive action. And we’ve seen that with the section 301 tariffs under the Trump and Biden administration. 

So, part of it was we had a group of people who were outside the campaign, and in some cases outside the transition, who had devoted time to actually thinking about these things and then bringing them into the house and helping [00:20:00] us understand what was doable and what was not, I think is important.  

I think, secondly, having people who’d been there before was also very important, you know, folks who served in the Bush administration, the Bush White House, who had sort of thought through what could and couldn’t be done. I mean, we had the all star team in 2012 as part of that transition. 

Anybody in the conservative movement, the center right movement, who had wanted to be involved was almost certainly involved in some way. So really giving it some thought.  

And then you raise a good point about sequencing because it’s more than just having the ideas. It’s thinking through, what do we actually want to go out with on day one? 

And how did the politics mix with the policy? How does the activity at the executive action level interfere with or compliment what’s happening legislatively and advancing the president elects legislative agenda? Those are all things that we gave some thought and energy and attention to. 

I actually think I’ve got somewhere still, about a hundred or so draft executive orders. Now, some of that actually made it forward to the Trump transition in 2016. [00:21:00] And, there’s been some thinking around it, as I understand it for the 2024 transition that we’re about to go through potentially, if former president Trump’s to win. But that thinking that happens in the thought community and the legal community outside of the campaign and outside of the transition is critical. 

Valerie Boyd: You’ve mentioned so many things that make me think about potential parallels this year, and I’m trying to save them for the end , because I think that’s a really interesting place to land as you’ve talked about the personnel who are influential, the close relationships with the candidate. Your point about the way that politics and policy mesh is so, it’s just the foundation of everything that happens in D.C. So I think that’s a good summary of how to describe it.  

I’m going to try to stay disciplined and keep asking about the transition effort itself, because one of the things that Romney team was particularly good at was developing something called general instructions for the first 200 days. Is that something that you were responsible for?  

Lanhee Chen: Yeah, that was actually very early on, in the process. This was actually [00:22:00] something that came from Governor Leavitt, uh, from Secretary Leavitt. He was of the belief that we had to think bigger than 100 days, you know, 100 days is usually the way we think about the start of an administration and the gauge of success. 

How much can you get done in your first hundred days? I remember having a conversation with him in the spring of 2012, and he said, you know, I think a hundred days is too limiting. I think we really have to think about what the first 200 days looks like and what our goals are. And can you help me think through what those priorities would be in the first 200 days across the biggest issue areas that a new president’s going to have to deal with?  

So we literally took campaign promises, because we had a fully fleshed out agenda by then. I mean, we had done the thinking on all of these areas and Mitt being such a substantive guy had all this stuff already thought through. We translated those promises into what we call general instructions that could be guiding lights, northern lights or points to return to for folks in the transition as they think through how to [00:23:00] effectuate the policy goals of a new administration. 

We could be very clear about what the 4 or 5 things were that we wanted to accomplish in healthcare and tax, in national security and in dealing with China and trade, et cetera. So, it was a really novel concept, both thinking about it in terms of 200 days, but also having this kind of North star to go back to. And it was entirely the germ of Mike Levitt’s imagination. I mean, the reason why we had it was because he felt very strongly we needed those guideposts. And that’s what that was.  

Valerie Boyd: Yeah, I’m sitting here thinking there’s a lot of us who like to do assessments of a hundred day progress: a hundred day progress in nominations and confirmations is a report that our center tends to do to help understand how well the personnel process is working. 

But I’m also sitting here nodding and thinking governor Leavitt was right. You really need 200 days to accomplish some- to move the needle on a lot of these bigger picture priorities that you’re trying to do.  

Lanhee Chen: Yeah.  

Valerie Boyd: It makes me want to ask about the desire to balance [00:24:00] continuity with, implementing your agenda immediately after taking office. 

I was just talking to somebody who was canvassing in Pennsylvania last weekend and they said that they were talking to a voter who said, that they want change. They don’t want to see the same person in office every four years. And that kind of surprised me as a DC person, because you kind of think there’s some areas that are so big picture, you need continuity and policy over time. 

Is that something that you thought about how to balance big picture national challenges and the need not to reverse course?  

Lanhee Chen: Yeah, I think we were very careful to be realistic about areas where we knew there would be a dramatic change from one administration to another. And I mean, I think some of that’s warranted. 

If the American people had chosen Mitt Romney over Barack Obama, it would have been because they wanted a change in direction on the economy, for example, or on our dealings with Russia and other adversary countries. So, [00:25:00] I think the way we thought about it was “Let’s move fast enough that we don’t completely break the system, but go right up to the edge.” 

And so we were certainly mindful of the need for change. To the degree that there were areas where we felt the priorities could wait, then that could be a more gradual process. But sending a signal at the start of a new administration that you’re ready to govern in a very different way, I think, is important. 

Now, you want to be careful because, there’s a point at which it does create a lot of strain on the folks who have to implement all of these different policy decisions. But for us, it was a matter of sequencing and thinking through what exactly were the areas where we knew there would be pretty abrupt change. 

And there will be some abrupt change. I mean, the Affordable Care Act is a great example of an area where we were prepared to go in a pretty different direction than President Obama had gone. So, it’s interesting. I mean, I think it’s, um, a little bit of both. You both have to be ambitious, but you have to recognize that there’s a system in place that you’re working within and you do your [00:26:00] best to be respectful of the system but understand that the new president’s going to have his own agenda. 

Valerie Boyd: That makes sense. Well, I want to ask one more kind of structural question before we turn to how 2012 relates to today. We are taping this right before the election, this episode is gonna air November 12th. So, a lot will happen in this next week.  

Lanhee Chen: Oh yeah.  

Valerie Boyd: Of course. Hopefully we will know the winner of the election, we may not, based on a number of factors. The most recent change to the Presidential Transition Act two years ago, the big thing that it did was say that if the election outcome is unknown five days after the election, or if no candidate has conceded, then access to federal agencies opens up to both candidates teams. 

So, every federal agency is now preparing to receive two candidates teams. So, the question of agency review is top of mind and how candidates can prepare to do that and what information is [00:27:00] most useful for them to receive from agencies. So, is that a stage that you got to on the Romney team? How did you think about integrating the policy review with the agency review?  

Lanhee Chen: Yeah. So, the linchpin is really the landing team of people that go into the agency representing the president elects new administration to think through ways of effectuating both policy as well as personnel changes, and as you’ve mentioned, there’s two sides of the coin. 

There’s agency review, which is about the structure of the agency and personnel. And then there’s the substantive sort of policy review piece of it, which is about where are the areas where we know the president elect is going to want to change direction pretty quickly. And therefore, that transition period becomes very important. 

The change in the PTA, allowing for both sides to have access, I think, is really important. Because, you don’t want a delay that’s effectuated by the nature of our electoral system, which is quite diffuse and can result in some [00:28:00] delays. You don’t want that to interfere with the transition of government one way or the other. 

And we’re going to have a transition one way or the other this time around, whether it’s from Biden to Harris or Biden to Trump. And so, I think having both an agency review process in place that’s looking at the structure of the agency, personnel, et cetera, along with some of the policy goals and things that you want to effectuate quickly, that’s going to be the job of the agency landing teams that, undoubtedly both sides have already developed or are pretty far along in developing at this point, the personnel who are going to go in and make those changes. 

The interesting thing about our landing teams were that, you know, you had some folks that maybe they didn’t want to go into the administration. They didn’t want to stay. They just wanted to be part of the initial period of time and smoothing the way for the new president, and then they wanted to go back to private life. 

 And you’ll find it’s interesting in that way that. There’s a little bit of a debate, I suppose, about what the right model is, but regardless, if you’ve got people who have the right intentions, which is to prepare the agency for the new president elect, [00:29:00] then it doesn’t really matter what their future intentions are, but it is important to understand that, as an agency landing team, you have a job and that job is to effectuate a transition and not necessarily to govern quite yet, but it is to effectuate the governing process.  

Valerie Boyd: Yeah, you could see that as a very pure intention. If you’re not looking for a job after the inauguration, then to come in and help out, provide information to the president elect to know what’s facing them. 

 I know these issues are very sensitive about the staffing post inauguration.  

Lanhee Chen: Yeah.  

Valerie Boyd: Well, let’s go back. You’ve kind of dropped all of these breadcrumbs leading to the 2024 transition throughout this conversation. One thing you talked about is the close relationship between Governor Leavitt and Governor Romney and how important that was to setting the right tone between the transition and the campaign. And you’ve talked so much about the kind of integration of thought across the different arms of the [00:30:00] policy work. So, I think everybody wants to know right now how prepared both teams are to be ready to govern, because there’s certain things that are different than the good model set in 2012 by the Romney team. 

Just starting with the fact that both candidates for different reasons announced their transition leadership in August, which is later than the modern norm. So, do we think that’s a meaningful distinction at this point that they officially kicked off in August? Or are there different factors that mean that they might be just as prepared as they need to be? 

Lanhee Chen: Well, you always want more time, so having more time and having a process like we did that was extended over several months is always, I think, a positive, but that doesn’t mean that because you have a compressed timeline, you’re going to end up with a disastrous transition. That’s certainly not the case at all. 

And particularly in this case, you have two candidates whose [00:31:00] transitions are a little bit unorthodox in the sense that you have a former president, in Donald Trump and officials from a former administration who were in, who knew exactly what the ins and outs of being in that position were many of whom I’ll say are involved in this year’s transition as far as I can tell. And that’s a very positive thing, I think.  

This year’s Trump transition is a lot better equipped and a lot further along than the 2016 transition was, because I think for a variety of political and substantive reasons, this year’s transition is much further along on all dimensions. So, I think that’s a great positive. 

On the Harris side, you’ve got a sitting Vice President, and some amount of continuity that comes from the current administration. There’s definitely gonna be change, obviously, in personnel and in policy direction in some cases, but having people who are in the chairs now or who were in the chairs recently as part of that transition will also help to effectuate, I think, a relatively smooth transition.  

I think, in some ways the Harris team has a tougher task because their candidate came online a lot later, [00:32:00] and the ideas were being formulated and all the rest, but look, I think both sides will be fine. I really think that I have confidence that whether it’s a president elect Trump or president elect Harris, that both sides have, first of all, people who are strong leaders who understand the need for an effective transition. And second of all, the experience necessary to get it done.  

Obviously, I’m biased. I think that the Romney 2012 standard is the gold standard, and I’m not sure anybody’s met that since then, but hopefully there are elements of what we learned and what we did that can be drawn on. 

Valerie Boyd: Yeah, it is fair to say that both candidates and their teams are approaching this with an unusual amount of knowledge compared to a typical cycle where they have not been so close to the presidency so recently. You also talked about the importance of a transition staying quiet before the election itself and deferring to the campaign. And we certainly see that seems to be a model that’s being [00:33:00] followed in this cycle as well.  

Lanhee Chen: Yeah, it’s important because there’s a political idea that you don’t want to be seen measuring the drapes. But there’s also the very literal kind of interference that can happen. There’s only one campaign at a time, and there’s only one transition at a time. 

And, it gets a little messy when the two start to interfere with one another as it were. And I do have to say, so far at least, I think it’s been pretty orderly for both Harris and Trump, and that’s encouraging because it means that there are mechanisms in place, there are strong sort of leaders on both the campaign side as well as the transition side who are making it very clear that there really can’t be too much cross traffic between the two. And I think those are all good things.  

The only challenge in these situations of course, is that, and this was the case back in 2012 too, you’ve got some folks on the campaign side who very much would like to serve in an administration and maybe feel, if they’re working on the campaign side are they getting left behind because they’re not part of the transition. 

 So, part of my role, as well as the [00:34:00] role of senior leaders in our campaign was to make sure that our teams knew that their work was respected and that they were valued and that when the time came to staff an administration, they’d be given full consideration for that.  

And that’s a message that the campaign has to convey, and I think it’s very important because that’s one of those things that can ruin morale and can create a challenge. But I think we dealt with that pretty well in 2012. And I think it’s going to be a challenge for campaigns and for transitions to come.  

Valerie Boyd: Yeah, well said it’s a tension that has to be managed, no matter what the dynamics are for that particular candidate. 

 What do you think is most important for each team to have done before election day and ready to go before this post-election transition period starts?  

Lanhee Chen: So, I would divide it into policy and personnel. 

I think on the policy side, understanding what the key promises are from the campaign that the president elect has made and having a good sense of what the pathway looks like to [00:35:00] effectuating those promises in the first 100 or 200 days, whatever they might be, but having a plan around how to translate those promises and those statements into policy in an administration, I think having that work done is important.  

And then on the personnel side, it’s not even about having the key appointees because I think you’ve got some time for that. Although you do want to make sure that you’re naming your key cabinet officials and your key senior White House officials early enough to facilitate the confirmation process in the Senate, working with congressional leadership to make sure that there’s a strong pathway to getting folks confirmed early on, particularly key personnel.  

But really those agency review teams I talked about, having the teams of people, the landing teams who are ready to go in pretty quickly and gather information, gather intelligence and formulate plan, that will make the 1st actual few weeks of the new administration as smooth as possible. I think having those plans set ready to go before the election are [00:36:00] good. I don’t think that they’re absolutely imperative, but I think it puts you in a much better position if you can have all that stuff ready to go. 

Valerie Boyd: Yeah. As we’ve been looking at the timing for previous personnel announcements from previous presidents elect, they tend to take place before December 25th. So that the confirmation process is ready to go when that new Congress assembles in January. 

Lanhee Chen: Yeah. Well, we have to also remember that the challenge is that you have the holiday period also and you’ve got Congress with its lame duck session. They’ve got their own priorities that are going to occupy them for the month of December. There’s so much stuff going on that you want to make sure that you have as much prepared as you can, because things will come very quickly.  

Valerie Boyd: Yeah, and they’ll be looking at funding the government and other really big picture issues. 

Not to mention that we might be in an unknown outcome for some time, but there seem to be so many scenarios that could face us in terms of [00:37:00] personnel announcements coming from both teams, potentially.  

Lanhee Chen: Yeah.  

Valerie Boyd: On that note, we are speaking the day before the election and it is a razor thin margin right now. It looks so close so, I think the right way to ask this question is, what should both candidates do during the transition phase and the early months of the next administration to move the country past any divisions? To move towards unity after seeing an election cycle that is so very close right now? 

Lanhee Chen: Yeah, I’m not sure that any single action can achieve the result of bringing us together. I do think the combination of things, you know, thinking through, for example, are there appointments of people who politically have affiliated with the other party, who are people who have been committed to public service and not party first? Are there people like that who could serve in a new administration? 

Maybe really thinking through campaign promises and policy priorities and putting in place a system to [00:38:00] look at issues where there’s a lot of consensus and to start with those, you’re always going to have some disagreement on any given issue, but really looking for consensus in driving the first few actions of an administration. 

I think those are the kinds of things a new president or president elect can do to bring us all together. But. We are such a divided country and for so many reasons. It is a difficult time.  

Valerie Boyd: The way we’re ending every episode is to ask our guests, what gives you hope for a peaceful transfer of power and a smooth transition process? 

Lanhee Chen: We have remarkable institutions in this country. I think by and large, those institutions are populated with people who respect and understand the value and role of those institutions. 

And so that’s really what gives me hope is that we have these institutions, whether you’re talking about people who are in the civil service, people who serve in the legislative branch and understand their unique responsibility, the judiciary’s unique responsibility. And yes, those who are in the executive branch, who take care to faithfully execute the laws. 

I still believe that we have a strong institutional base. And that is something that gives me hope as we think through a period that is very fraught and that does have the potential for great division, that these institutions are enduring and will last beyond any single election, certainly this one.  

Valerie Boyd: First, I love that answer. And I think some of our listeners might’ve entered this episode thinking, do we still have lessons to learn from the 2012 Romney transition? And I think you’ve proven that we, first of all, we absolutely do, that that gold standard continues to set an example for how a candidate’s team can be prepared to govern. 

Secondly, I think it’s really important to hear your endorsement that both teams are ready by that standard. I think that should be reassuring to a lot of people. And finally, a lot [00:40:00] of people are nervous this day before the election as we’re taping. And I think your point that we have strong institutions is a very reassuring one for whatever the next week or few might bring. 

So, thank you for being here Lanhee.  

Lanhee Chen: Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity and everything that the partnership is doing. So, thank you. 

Valerie Boyd: Thank you