Vice President Kamala Harris is relying on a small and intensely private transition operation to help her prepare for what would be the first transfer of power from a sitting president to his vice president in more than a quarter century.
But as Harris makes a final push for the presidency, the secrecy surrounding her transition’s personnel and policy decisions has driven anxiety among Democrats on the outside still unsure what her administration would look like, who might influence her priorities — and how significantly, if at all, her presidency would diverge from the last four years of President Joe Biden.
On the campaign trail, Harris has wavered between distancing herself from Biden and standing by him and his record. And speculation is already rampant among Democrats over which jobs will go to “Biden people” already in government versus newer “Harris people” closely allied with her on the outside. So far, Harris and her transition advisers — a mix of Biden administration veterans and close Harris aides well aware of the chatter building around them — are doing little to tip their hand.
“It’s going to be a hell of a fight,” one Democratic operative said of the coming battle over personnel and policy priorities between different factions of the party. “There’s a whole lot of Biden people who are really wanting to stay — and a whole lot of other people who really want them to leave.”
Harris’ lean and low-profile transition planning is sharply different from the expansive team that Biden relied on four years ago for his takeover from Donald Trump, a reflection both of the very different circumstances of this election as well as Harris’ late entry into the race.
Biden built a massive transition apparatus, recruiting scores of allies to revitalize a federal bureaucracy demoralized by the Trump administration and help respond to a once-in-a-century public health crisis then raging out of control. He telegraphed his top appointees well in advance of the election, bringing on a range of staffers and even some political rivals in an effort to unify the party following a contentious Democratic primary. And he prioritized speed, lining up senior officials for some Cabinet agencies to start work on his agenda well before their bosses were confirmed.
Harris, by contrast, does not need to respond to an urgent crisis, and would be taking over an administration already staffed with members of her own party and largely aligned on her policy priorities. As a result, she is relying on a far smaller operation that’s expected to proceed more deliberately, according to a dozen Democrats familiar with the matter, most of whom were granted anonymity to discuss the internal preparations.
Yohannes Abraham, who ran Biden’s 2020 transition and is leading Harris’ effort, began planning the transition in August, shortly after Harris became the Democratic nominee.
Former senior Harris aides Josh Hsu, Rachel Palermo, Gabriela Cristóbal and Erica Songer are among those central to the effort, alongside former White House counsel Dana Remus. The team has also been in touch with a handful of other former administration officials about roles on the transition, two of the Democrats said, including top Treasury adviser Jacob Leibenluft and Leandra English, the former chief of staff for Biden’s National Economic Council.
The transition has additionally begun mapping out plans for the review teams that would be assigned to manage the changeover within individual federal departments. Those teams — which can serve as springboards into administration jobs for some — are expected to be smaller than the squads that Biden relied on in 2020, some of which exceeded two dozen people.
Former top Office of Management and Budget staffer Michael Linden, former senior Health and Human Services Department official Anne Reid and former senior Treasury official Anna Canfield Roth are among those who have been in discussions about aiding that effort or the broader transition, said two of the Democrats.
A transition spokesperson declined to comment on specific appointments, but said no official decisions have been made and that the team has “not designated agency review captains.”
“There is no transition without a successful campaign and that is the top priority right now,” the spokesperson said. “The transition is focused on setting up the infrastructure necessary to be ready for the post-election period.”
The team has kept much of that setup work confidential, offering little hint for how it plans to construct a Harris administration. Top Democratic allies have gotten minimal outreach or been told outright not to offer personnel suggestions until after the election. Even some White House officials have struggled to figure out who among their former colleagues is working on the transition.
“It’s excessively quiet,” said one Democrat who has been in touch with the transition. “They’re telling everybody they’re listening but not ready for lists yet.”
Yet should Harris win, the transition effort is poised for a rapid expansion, touching off a sprint to Inauguration Day that could determine how Harris’ presidency will carve a distinct path from that of her predecessor.
“The day after Election Day, she will want to start to show those changes,” said one senior Democratic official who has worked on prior transitions. “That’s part of what they’re trying to do. In each area, how does she show that this is not a second Biden term?”
Unlike Biden’s transition, which needed to quickly fill hundreds of open administration roles with as much talent as it could find, Harris would face a different challenge sure to generate close scrutiny: determining who should stay and who should go.
Several senior Biden aides have already been floated for top jobs in a Harris administration, including chief of staff Jeff Zients or former NEC chief Brian Deese as Treasury secretary and CIA Director William Burns as a candidate for Secretary of State.
With Harris also likely to face a Republican Senate majority if she wins, her team would likely need to hold over some officials from the Biden administration who have already won Senate confirmation — further winnowing the number of open spots, and ramping up debate over whether her administration will effectively amount to Biden 2.0.
That will likely be compounded after the election, as outside groups on the progressive and establishment ends of the Democratic Party vie to shape the new administration’s priorities. It’s a delicate dynamic that risks fracturing the party’s unity even before Harris takes office.
“It’s the classic example: You’re trying to build the plane while you’re flying it,” said Dennis Kelleher, who leads the financial watchdog group Better Markets and worked on Biden’s 2020 transition team. He added that the Harris team must be “hyper-sensitive to making sure that they bust out of their bubbles, both on the policy and personnel side, or they’re going to run into problems down the road.”
Transition officials, wary of appearing insular, have privately stressed that it will likely need to draw on talent well beyond Biden alums and longtime Democratic hands, viewing a Harris administration as a generational opportunity to elevate fresh voices within the party, one of the Democrats familiar with the matter said.
The small group has focused much of its pre-election energies on vetting personnel, rather than crafting policy, so that it can draw on the widest net of candidates should Harris win. It’s kept its footprint small thus far in part to allow for the rapid addition of staffers from the Harris campaign and elsewhere after Nov. 5.
Still, the silence surrounding the transition preparations has done little to quell the tea-leaf reading among Democrats angling for jobs — or simply desperate to distract themselves from the neck-and-neck presidential race.
Some Harris allies have privately questioned whether the reliance on prominent former Biden aides will stack the deck in favor of current White House aides seeking to move up within the administration, even as others cited the presence of close Harris aides as evidence her election would open the door to a new generation of Democrats.
The prospect that some Biden officials could return to lead agency review teams, meanwhile, helped blunt some concern in progressive circles that Harris’ administration would chart course back toward the political center.
But there’s broad acknowledgment that clear answers about where a Harris administration would go — and who would lead it — won’t come for at least a week. First, she needs to win.
“It’s all about teeing up decisions that would have to be made,” one of the Democrats familiar said of the transition’s current role. “But not making them pre-election.”
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