In between election day and squaring in the next president on January 20th, the following year, is a vital period. And today, we’re gonna be talking about transitions and political appointments. We’re glad you’re joining us. In the eyes of many in the world, this every 4 year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle. In America, we understand that a nation is only living as long as it is striving.

Only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive, and will prosper. Whether we go forward together with courage or turn back to policies that weakened our economy, diminished our leadership in the world, America’s future will be in your hands. Welcome to presidential transitions and appointment hiring. My name is Ed Corrigan.

I’m the president of the Conservative Partnership Institute. And during the 2016, presidential transition, I was the director of domestic policy appointments. Today, we have also Rick Dearborn, who is the executive director of the Trump transition in 2016, also worked on the Trump campaign. So, Rick, why don’t you introduce yourself? Thanks, Ed.

Rick Dearborn, great to be with you today. We’re gonna cover a interesting, set of issues and topics about a transition. You wanna become a political appointee. How does a transition work? How do you get Taft as a political appointee?

So we’re gonna kind of walk through all of that. Worked on Capitol Hill for 30 some odd years, have worked in 2 administrations, was on the Trump campaign team early on, probably one of the first 15 folks hired, set up the DC office, so that we could start connecting with, the federal government, get to know members, work on endorsements, work through, the primaries. We wound up working at the convention on the platform committee, as well as the rules committee. All of that I thought was very informative as we started to look at how to do the transition. My first role in the transition was actually heading up kind of the congressional affairs piece of it.

After the election, president-elect Trump and president vice president-elect Pence, had discussions about how best to move forward with the transition. And much like almost every other transition prior to, the vice president was tapped to lead the transition effort. As that happened, and they still ask Chris Christie to remain on that board, of advisers for the for the transition. The president and his team turned to me and asked if I would be executive director. I didn’t have much of a choice, and so I said yes.

And I wanted to do it, but it is it was a unique experience. We’ll talk a little bit about how Ed and I connected up in his role as he came in doing political appoint appointments, but I was fortunate that, I had Ed Corrigan, who’s been a friend of mine for a very long time, help us get through the process. So presidential transition goes, very far back in our country. They had been informal for multiple generations, many decades through multiple presidents. In 1963, they did pass a transition act.

It did coincide with, the assassination of John f Kennedy. And from that point forward, there were there was a federal government role in establishing the peaceful transition of power between 1 administration to the next. There was more meat on the bones put put to a transition after the 2,000 election between George w Bush and Al Gore because of the uncertainty that created the fact that it went all the way up to the Supreme Court. Of course, we had hanging chads in Florida, and the outcome of that election was uncertain for for a good period of time. There was a concern both a national security concern and just a general con continuity of government concern that we shouldn’t have our government in that position again when we’re trying to transfer power from one administration to the next, no matter who’s gonna win.

So they passed yet another piece of transition legislation, that established a federal role, federal funds, federal, involvement, staff related support, building support, offering up office spaces here in Washington so transition teams could start their work well before the actual election. Fast forward to 2019, they beefed it up yet again. They they asked, the transitions to be even more organized. And if you fast forward that to the 2016 election, one of the interesting things, I think, that came out of the 2019 act is they allowed congressional staff to be detailed to a transition. I think on our transition staff, we had maybe 2 or 3.

It was a new concept. It cost a lot of money. We had to be thoughtful about the budget, but once the vice president was tapped as the head of the transition and 3 days after the election, they turned to me and asked if I would be the executive director of the transition. And like I’d said previously, I started off working on the congressional affairs piece, but becoming the executive, director of the transition had a whole new slate of of responsibilities and issues that I had to work on and process. So, could you talk a little about the different phases of a transition you had, the phase when you were working on the, the campaign, and it was very informal.

We were having sort of, you know, confidential conversations about what the postconvention transition would look like and then how that feeds into the the, what happens on election day and after, and then, of course, going all the way up to the, inauguration, which we can talk about. Absolutely. I I’ll I’ll take you up till, about mid November because that’s when I think you officially kind of flowed in and were a really large part of the political appointments piece. So at the beginning of that year leading up to the election, every Republican presidential candidate that had raised a certain amount of money was was deemed eligible to have a transition representative, but at some point between the primaries and the convention, they provide you even greater support. They start talking about your budget.

There’s money that’s provided to both the Republican nominee and the Democratic nominee. It’s somewhere around $9,000,000, I think, for each, and you start building up your resources, utilizing the office space. Convention comes, and though the transition doesn’t have a role per se at the convention, some of the players at the convention have a role with the transition. In my case, I was the congressional affairs liaison for the campaign with the transition and had been tapped at the at the convention to represent the Trump campaign on the platform and to work with Don McGahn and others who were ultimately part of the administration, but at the time, the rules committee work that was going on for for the convention itself. So post convention, Chris Christie and his team with Rich Bagger, who was the executive director, Bill Pal Tucci, who was the general counsel, and a a host of others, would start to meet more regularly and have the office space to do so to start planning out what the transition to a Trump administration would look like.

Again, this is prior to the general election. So that takes you through the summer. In the fall, I’m going to more of these transition meetings. Rich is having good organized meetings and walking through what we need to prepare for. My my role is the congressional affairs piece and talking about some of the needs that I was seeing from members of the house and members of the senate on the republican side.

The election happens, and at that point, 3 days afterwards, I was asked to be, the executive director because of the decision that the vice president was gonna be put in charge of the transition. So because of that, they also wanted to change, I think, the leadership of the transition at that point, and still keep governor Christie engaged. So we made that change, and then I’d say somewhere around a little bit before Thanksgiving or maybe right afterwards, gave you a call about political appointments, which is one of the biggest sections of the transition team, and asked you, I I think I asked you to pack up and and come hang out with us for a little bit, but it turned out to be a little bit longer. Yeah. But let’s go let’s let’s let’s walk through how that played out and what your role was.

I was an employee at the Heritage Foundation at the time, and so, that was that was kinda my role. And one of the things about this is that when you work for a nonprofit, there is the ability to work on on a transition team without leaving your current job. And so that’s a lot of the folks on the transition team work for organizations like Heritage, while they were doing their their their work for the government. But, no, you give me a call. I think it was the day before Thanksgiving and said, I need you to come up on Friday after Thanksgiving, to New York to help out with the transition.

I was, of course, excited. You know, I would love this as, you know, Trump was, had been, elected, and so this was I was just praying you’d say yes. And I was I was and so I was excited to go up there. I said, okay. Well, when, how long do you think it’s gonna be?

We’re like, maybe, I don’t know, a week or 2. And I was like, okay. So I packed enough for a week or 2. As soon as I got up there, I realized I live in New York right now. And I wasn’t gonna tell you that.

I needed you to think it was temporary. But it was fun. I mean, it was it was it’s like you’re working on a campaign or something, and we all kinda were working around the clock. What was exciting about that time is that you’re you’re taking so much incoming in terms of people who really wanna serve, and so the question is how do you sort that out? And I think that that process really informs if you’re a job seeker, somebody who really wants to be a part of this, process, wants to serve in the administration, how do you engage with that with that system?

I will tell you my I had about 10 departments under my portfolio. They were the domestic policy departments. And, basically, what we, what we were really looking for, there was a, you know, unlike the pre, the pre election, transition, this this phase really started to heavily involve people who have been previously occupied by the campaign. Really, when you’re in the middle of a campaign, you don’t wanna distract your campaign staff with focus on the transition. Right.

And so, but now you had a lot of these senior players, Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, and so forth, really involved and heavily involved in in this transition process. And so, in in our team, we had a small personnel team. Bill Hagerty, who’s now a United States senator, was our leader and and, and really had a heart for for this this idea of personnel and placing good people in in these roles. And so we had it divided up into different, disciplines, but really what we were doing was being a bottleneck that filtered, the recommendations from, outside organizations, from Trump allies and and folks who were who were lieutenants on the campaign. And what you were really looking for is what kind of people are gonna be strategically aligned with the president, somebody who’s who’s philosophically aligned.

Right. You know, you’re looking for, particular expertise. But, basically, that was our job was to then filter it up. And what I would be interested in you talking about, Rick, because I was in this sort of little war room putting together these these lists together that would then make their way up to the, to what we call the executive committee. But then, Rick, you were you were the executive director, so you were in these meetings.

Like, what did that look like when when these big notebooks are being presented with all these different positions? How does that all like, what are those meetings like? Is it in this big conference room in Trump Tower? A glass conference room. Happy to happy to talk about that.

I do wanna I’m gonna I’m kinda going back and going forward at the same time. I do wanna make sure and be clear that, as you’re watching this, we we want you to get involved in a transition. If you wanna be part of an administration, getting involved in that transition early on is important. Yeah. So political appointments is a piece of it.

I’m gonna circle right back and talk about how that how that played out when we were having the meetings with then president-elect Trump and president and vice president-elect Pence. But there’s different components of a transition. Political appointments is is really critical. You’re tapping all the leaders for your government, all of your all your cabinet heads, all the key agencies. There’s an agency action section.

How would you create the department of agriculture and run it, and what would the policies be, and what do you need from personnel, what would happen on day 1? You build those plans out. There’s a public relations segment to a transition. There’s a congressional segment that I was part of. There’s the leadership piece of the transition that I wound up moving from congressional affairs to executive director.

So there’s a lot of different places to get plugged in and to join. My best advice to you, I think, Ed, would agree is just volunteer and do it. It’s worth your time. It’s a lot of time. It’s a lot of hours.

You’ll probably be in the building that’s down here in Washington DC. There’s a chance you might be pulled up to whatever the home state is of that potential or that that particular, nominee, once once they’ve been elected, but getting on the ground level of transition is important. But talk about how this played out. You mentioned political appointments in the war room that you and Bill had. Well, after you put all your materials together, Bill came to me and said, okay, I think we’re ready to talk about a lot of these candidates.

I mean, we wanted to get every possible quality candidate that we could and then organize that and put it in front of the president, which is what you did in the political appointee section. So those were the kinds of things that we were doing in that room and you would walk through a whole list of individuals. We did that with the entire cabinet. I mean, it was hours and hours and hours of work, so we’d schedule time to meet with him, talk to him about the candidates. So he was incredibly attentive, asked fantastic questions.

We gave him great information, and he used that to then select his cabinet. So one of the things that, when we think about, how do you get involved in the transition, and and there’s different roles. Obviously, we were I was involved in the personnel. You were the executive director, but then you had these, you know, the the the policy formulation teams, agency action, regulatory, reform. There were legal teams.

There’s a whole bunch of different sort of facets to this, that that I’d be curious of. Because if you wanna serve in the administration, the goal is to be a part of this transition. Right. And so, like, what are some of the different aspects of the transition in addition to personnel? Look.

I would say that agency action was pretty important. There’s a lot of dedicated work placed in that section. Of the several floors that we had in that building, I think there was at least 1 to 2 floors dedicated to agents or at least an entire wing dedicated to agency action. And we say agency action, kind of talk a little about what was that is that, like, memoranda on how the agency’s gonna gonna function? You’re yeah.

You’re building out the blueprint that in a perfect world, this next president, as as guided by the transition team, which had members that were close to the president, how would the next president run NASA? How would the next president run the Department of Agriculture, the State Department, DOD? And you go out and find experts and individuals who have some experience in these areas. So if you’re if you’re living right now in Omaha or Kansas City or you live in New Jersey or or North California, and you’ve done some work on the environment, or you’ve done some or you’ve had some experience with the Department of Agriculture, and you really wanna get involved in a transition, why not apply and see if you can come in, and and you’ll be both learning and helping folks who may have worked in those departments for years, are good, strong conservatives, are looking for someone just like you to help them to be part of the team. So if you sign up for if you sign up for the database to get involved, the next step for you is to really be active in the transition, but agency action is building the the the the blueprint for how you would run all the agencies.

Congressional affairs, probably better if you’ve had some congressional experience. Maybe you’ve had it at the state level with state legislatures. Maybe you’ve had it at the federal level with the senate and the house, but working with congress is something critical to the executive branch and kind of setting up those relationships and working through it. There is a designated office of policy. What is the policy of this president?

Now if the president-elect, president-elect, in in 2024 and going into 25, is a prior elected official that has had a record, they’re gonna have certain policies that they believe. In 2016, our policy was built on writing down every speech that Donald Trump had ever delivered during the campaign and each policy was cataloged and we used that to develop what the policy was, at least at the ground level. I mean, he built on all of that. Some of it he changed to some degree, but he was pretty consistent. I think much more surprisingly conservative than people ever gave him credit for and carried through, which is I think the reason why, at least for him, he was, so popular that he actually did what he said he was gonna do.

So one of the things that, on the personnel team that that we focused on was, so the cabinet, got gets picked first, then you’re looking at each department has a deputy, deputy secretary or deputy administrator, what, deputy attorney general. And so we’re focused on those. But talk talk talk a little bit about how you went about that and how these folks would plug into that effort. So so the the different layers to these positions, you have your your, these would be PAS appointments. Right?

Presidential appointee, senate confirmed. The s is senate confirmed. So the cabinet, the, the deputy secretary, and the assistant secretaries were to be typically PAS appointments. And so the way we would basically, put these lists together was we were getting recommendations from many of them come from members of Congress. They would be coming from people who are senior, executives in the campaign, allies of the president, anybody who would be, important VIPs that whose name would matter, to to the president-elect, that would be a pipeline for names.

And then and then some of these, you know, folks who come from nonprofits and things like that, we might just identify somebody. I might know this person and say that this person should be, considered even though they’re not specifically recommended by somebody. But on the on the sheets, there’s very brief information that was presented to the executive team. Those sheets would would always include who what name is behind this person, who is recommending this person. This person is recommended by Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway and Jared Kushner, whoever that was, or congressman, you know, Jim Jordan.

And so that that helps the executive team to say, okay. Like in any hiring process, you wanna know who vouches for this person. And so that that ended up being a big, thing for for, for us. And so if you’re looking for a position in the administration, you wanna be thinking through each each of these little each of these appointments is is its own little mini campaign. Absolutely.

If you wanna get somebody into the deputy, secretary or assistant secretary of some department, You wanna get as many people vouching for that person. You don’t just go on, whatever the website was and put your stuff in and think that that good things are gonna happen. You need to have this coming in from all kinds of different, sources. And so that was, what we were doing was kinda collecting that information. So, Ed, can I just Yeah?

Go ahead. It’d be like looking for a job. Right? So you’re I mean, it is a job. You’re trying to get on the transition.

You wanna work in government. You wanna work in the administration. Even if you’re in the private sector looking to try to start that first job, who do you know? Who can vouch for you? How can that individual help influence the folks who are gonna make a decision of of whether to bring you on board or not?

So your network, your ability to tap into the folks that can vouch for you and and know you well, and having them weigh in on your behalf is really critically important. And let’s face it. I mean, politics is different than the machine shop where you’re building widgets. I mean, politics is all about networking. Right?

I mean, it’s it’s all about connecting with people. That is the art of politics. So if you’re watching this right now, you probably have some skill in that regard anyway. You need to continue to develop that and think through who might be able to vouch for you if you wanna go work at NASA or Department of Agriculture or a independent commission Right. Agency.

Right? So yeah. And and, basically, what when depending on what position you’re actually interested in, you might have different strategies. So if it’s a PAS position, what that means is you can’t serve in that position until your senate confirmed. And after inauguration day, the senate only has so much floor time to consider, confirmation.

So if you’re being appointed to the the assistant secretary of of, you know, commerce or HHS, it’s gonna be a long time before you’re actually getting across the senate floor unless you’re you’re, there’s a, you know, unanimous consent, which there that, you know, is not as often anymore. Plus you have a 100 people that are gonna vote on you. So that connectivity with those individuals is important too. Having 1 or 2 senators or their key staff that know you, that can vouch for you with their with their colleagues is is gonna help how you get scheduled, you know, when you get scheduled, if you’re going to get that vote, how the hearing goes. So you need to be thinking about, like I think Ed said it best, you run it like you would run a campaign.

And and for those of you that are engaged in politics, you probably ran for for class president, student council representative. It’s the same kind of thing, a little bit on steroids, but you’re trying to get a lot more folks active and behind you in talking about your qualifications and why you would be the right conservative candidate for that particular position. Yeah. And so what what I would say on on the, the PAS positions, especially in this early phase right after the transition, there is, there’s 2 additional levels that we were focusing on, during the transition that are that are appointments. One is called the landing teams, and the other one is called the beachhead teams.

And I’ll have you know, ask Rick to talk a little about the the details of of what these positions are for and and how, how do you get selected. But these are, the landing teams typically will go in. It’s it’s during that that time before inauguration when there’s a president-elect and you’re working inside the department. That’s right. Explain the landing team for a minute.

Yeah. So the landing teams go in beforehand. You know, our our government, our system, our federal government’s an amazing thing, but it’s, it’s it’s massive. And, on January 20th at noon, precisely at noon, the next administration takes over. So leading up to that point, you want people landing in all of these major departments and being introduced and receiving briefings from the folks in that department.

Now some of the political appointees will be happy to talk to you. Some of the careers will be brought in to talk about, you know, these are the programs we’re in charge of. Here’s our jurisdiction. This is what we’ve done to date. Here’s everything that’s pending.

These are the rule makings that we’ve been working on. You would always hope that every administration is thoughtful with the with the administration that comes in. Look. I’m gonna be honest. When we met with the outgoing Obama Obama administration, couldn’t have been more helpful.

I had meetings as the executive director, the transition team in the White House with the chief of staff. Denis McDonough was fantastic, sat down, said, look, the the government’s at your disposal, send your landing teams in. I wanna say landing teams went in sometime in early December, early to mid December, depending. Some departments were ready to receive them and others weren’t. A lot of it had to do with where do we house them, because they’re gonna come in the morning, they’re gonna get briefings.

A lot of it was them taking notes and being prepared, for the more permanent team that would come in. So the the landing teams go in early mid December. They they like like I’d mentioned prior, they come in. They they set meetings, get briefings, figure out kind of the levers of power, who’s responsible for what, what the jurisdictions are, getting some sense cataloging, the things that are in action currently. Now the beachhead team is gonna come in after that, and they’re gonna be the group that really is, full of the experts for that department that will be there permanently.

The landing team, some subset of them, will be part of, the administration’s group of people that would be in that department down the road, but they normally come in and basically just try to understand, alright. Where are you in the process? What’s happening in this department now? Beachhead comes in, closer to the transition of power, and they wind up basically taking the the information developed by the landing team and then, deploying their people throughout the building, because it’s gonna take some time before that first cabinet nominee is confirmed by the senate. Right.

So you’re running the department predominantly with career staff. All of the political staff from the prior administration will be asked and to a person will offer up their resignation, because they’re no longer working for the new president. They worked for the prior president. And so those beachhead teams that are gonna get the information from the landing team then start to fan out across the department and start to grab the levers of power, look at what reports are due due, what the rule making processes are, what’s expected of them, everything from their grant programs to their mandatory programs, how are they functioning, meeting with all the career staff to understand what’s expected of the department of energy before the end of the week. What are we doing this month?

Mhmm. But getting all of that down so that when the secretary is confirmed, you can really start implementing all your plans. It’s not that you can’t, but that secretary has to be careful. They can’t go before a senate committee and act as if they’re going to be the secretary, because they’re trying to convince that group of senators that they would like to be that secretary, and they have to be confirmed by the senate. That might be an interesting thing to talk about.

You’ve worked a lot on those senate nominations and what it’s like. And and and to make a a a finer point on on what you what you described about that that period of of confirmation, not just at the secretary level, but at the deputy level and the assistant secretaries, that you you may be, appointed as a deputy secretary or as a secretary of a department, and you may wanna have a say in who gets to work in that department, but you’re not confirmed yet. And so it’s it’s a little bit of a difficult and and tricky dance, because they don’t wanna be acting, in a way that’s gonna annoy the senators, and and basically, maybe, compromise their ability to, to get confirmed. But meanwhile, the government has to run, the new the new president has to take the reins of power, and this is where the beachhead teams it is a very messy process. Yeah.

There’s a lot of these people mostly in this in this agency that don’t have signing authority for much of anything. They just work there, but they have de facto power and that the, the the couriers understand that they’re gonna be in senior positions. But, it’s it’s a it’s a tricky it’s a tricky discipline. There are certain positions in the agency that will be appointed early on that that carry a lot of weight because of their connection to the White House. Those are are typically the White House liaisons.

Right. And so, we can talk a little about what what the White House liaison is, and and how they interact with the with with the White House in each department. These are embedded, people that are in the the departments, but they have, usually the blessing of the White House to sort of, make recommendations particularly on personnel. But if you’re looking to get into an agency, a lot of people are gonna have their sights set on a specific job, and that’s and that’s good. You wanna basically kinda know where you wanna land.

But, ultimately, to get there, it may not be a straight path. It may not be, I’m gonna stay in my in my law firm until I get confirmed as the assistant secretary. Well, that’s possible. That may never happen. Right.

But sometimes if you can if you’re willing to take, to take the maybe a pay cut, right, most people are gonna get It it will be a pay cut. There’s there’s usually pay cuts coming on these things, especially if you’re in the senior role, with a with a law firm or something. But you’re willing to go in on a beachhead team and just embed yourself somewhere. You don’t necessarily have a guarantee of a particular job, but you’re in the door, you’ve got a desk and a phone, and you can basically, start start kind of building those relationships. I feel like that’s a real big part of this.

Get yourself to be involved in the transition. Get yourself to be, in theory on a landing team. The landing teams will typically be people who have a certain level of expertise in the discipline. Some of those may or may not end up wanting to work in the administration. But most importantly, I think, get yourself on a beachhead team, because that’s where, the the the highest volume of people will go in on day 1.

They’re basically they won’t have any specific appointment yet. Some will. But I think, for the most part, a lot of them are just trying to figure out what’s going on in this department and and and sort of meet with the careers. Yeah. I I I’d tell you that the the landing teams were a combination of folks with expertise and the warm bodies that we needed.

Yeah. We were, the the the Trump administration, especially early on, was very unique, and it it was tough. I mean, what we’re doing right now is gonna be so important to the next president, because establishing all of this, providing the expertise, looking at a database of of folks that can be part of the administration, talking to you like we are right now about what is the transition about, what do I wanna be engaged in it, what would my role be. That’s a luxury that we didn’t have. We were trying to fill fill a lot of positions, and early on, it was it was hard to get everybody that we needed kind of in the door and in the right spot.

The bulk of you won’t necessarily be up for the secretary’s position at DOD. You may not even be up for an assistant secretary’s position, but there’s gonna be positions that may not be senate confirmable that you may wind up being up for, a lot of what’s called schedule c Mhmm. Positions. Those are political appointees that would work in the administration and running incredibly important programs that report up to, a presidential appointee that might be in charge of a larger program department, and you’re one of the sub agency pieces of that. There, I think, still is the Plum book.

It’s a government document that talks about all the different positions of government. If you get the chance to review that, it’s probably worth it. Think about what you really enjoy, what you wanna work on. The most important part of being a great federal government civil service career, person or political employee is being interested in and dedicated to what you do. At the end of the day, federal government is about serving the public.

Right? It’s not about serving the interests of government. The government is the public. So making sure that you’re going to follow what your interest is, whether it be science or in the department of defense or you’re a great lawyer and you wanna work in the justice department or you’re a great lawyer, but you’re really interested in environmental issues, so you wanna go to EPA or the department of interior or you have no law degree at all, but you’re really, really interested, in commerce and, export issues. So whatever it is that you’re interested in, think about how you could, prepare yourself and then get connected with the campaign of your choice.

Your candidate may or may not win. If your candidate does bow out of the race, they probably support someone else. Maybe that’s the person you support. Ultimately, it could be that potential presidential nominee, and then that individual goes on to become, the president-elect. At that stage, the transition really explodes, and they’re gonna be looking for a lot of folks like you to get engaged, be on the ground level, and support that administration as it’s starting to lay out its plans of how it would like to govern once they come into office in January.

So you have from early November, at first Tuesday in early November, leadership for the transition getting itself set would already be ready to roll, and then soon after that, for the next 2 some odd months, you’re helping to build out what will be the governing group of individuals for the next president. And one of the things to to be thinking about as as this process goes forward is the different phases of this. You have your your sort of, you know, your beachhead teams trying to get in a beachhead team. When I was running domestic, policy personnel, I was trying to strongly encourage people to take beachhead team positions. Even people who wanted to take a more senior position, I was like, let’s just get you in the door.

And the reason is because on January 20th, when when the president puts his hand on the bible, everything changes. The transition shuts down and a new office of presidential personnel stands up, the cabinet secretaries are gonna start getting confirmed, and all of a sudden you’ve got a lot more voices in the room about whether who’s gonna get what position and the whole, process changes. So getting in the door early on, I think, is is, it it can provide you huge advantages. And I will say even, you know, on the beachhead team things, you have in every agency, you have a number of positions that are careers. Right?

These are these are, you know, civil servants that that serve and they’re not they’re not political, but then you have your political positions. And so, what we were looking at to try and fill out our beachhead teams was which departments have the most political positions. Right? These are the kind of theoretical beachhead teams. And so some people who may have said, okay, I really wanna work in the justice department, but I didn’t have that many politicals in the justice department, so I would put them in the agriculture department.

There’s a lot of political position in the agriculture. So we could, drop a bunch of beachhead team members in there. They can learn a little about the agriculture department, but then maybe move over to DHS or DOJ or wherever their ultimate, goal is to be. And so it’s just something to be creative and be open to different ideas as you’re trying to serve. Ultimately, the question is, do you believe in the person who’s elected president, and do you wanna serve that person?

And if you really do, you need to get involved in at every layer in this process because, once once that once as the process moves moves down the road very quickly, you get more cooks in the kitchen and more people asking, for their people to be involved. One other thing just to be mindful of is that for each of these positions, even at the Beachhead team level, there is there is a, a vetting process that goes on behind behind the scenes. There is, they will look at all of your social media, They’ll do background checks on you, you know, your normal FBI background checks. They’ll do, all those kinds of things. So if you wanna serve in the administration, be mindful of your social media.

Take a look at what you’ve put out there. Maybe maybe clean it up a little bit. I think, you know, it’s it’s it’s heartbreaking when you have somebody you know is a good person, but they may have said something. Maybe they were really heavily involved in the campaign and said negative things about the person who ends up winning. So if you’re on a campaign, be mindful of that too.

You don’t you know, sometimes in the heat of the campaign, you can you can get a little carried away with things, but understand that at the end of the day, if you wanna be able to serve, everything you’ve put out there publicly is gonna be looked at, so just, be prepared for that kind of vetting. Yeah. I would just emphasize that. I mean, we again, we had a small number of folks, when we first came in with the transition. It grew.

Vetting was incredibly important, but we had very few folks doing it. We tried to be as in-depth as we possibly could. Of course, there were people that were placed that, you know, would wind up doing something that got themselves in trouble. But whether you’re vetted or not, individuals can do that. The most important thing is for you to take care of you.

Be smart about it. You’re you’re serving the public good. You’re working for your fellow citizens. So you wanna make sure that, you know, you’re focused on the job that you wanna do. Try to stay off all the extracurricular stuff.

Any of the comments that you say that that you feel could, be be used against you will be. If they’re heated and hot, guaranteed they will be. So just be thinking about that. You’re in the public domain once you decide you’re gonna work in government, which means that the public is going to scrutinize you, and that means senators, and, it also means the administration members themselves as they’re looking to bring you in to work in the administration. So to recap the, the phases of the transition, you have, the the phase of the transition, which we’re in now, which is before, before the election, before the primaries really get up up and running.

You have the, the phase right before during the primary, but before, the, the convention, which is very informal, but a way to get involved in a campaign. The, after the convention, you’ll have the the most, a lot of people starting to to work on this formal, position, this government funded, transition team. The the phase after the election is when the campaign staff get involved. That’s when it gets real and when when the positions really start getting getting selected. And then you have that, and that’s also, after the inauguration when you have the, the landing teams will go into, working in in these agencies to just learn.

They’re not actually, formal, formally appointed, government employees, but they’re basically learning about the agencies and and so forth. Then after inauguration is when the beachhead teams go in and when the appointments start getting selected, and, and that’s when when people will actually get in to start serving. So to walk through what the different components are of a transition, you have a leadership team tapped by the president elect’s, senior team, the president-elect himself or herself, then you have different pieces of it. I know that Ed’s talked a little bit about what the different phases of the transition are. The political appointment section, which is a large part of the team, that’s all the personnel.

You got the beachhead and the landing teams that go with it, but you have an agency action team. This is a large number of people, probably the largest group in the transition. It’s broken out by each of the different departments and agencies, all designed to kind of walk through and capture what it is that you’re looking to do if you’re starting on that first day of the administration and carries out with 50 day plans, a 100 day plans, a 180 day plans. That’s part of the work that they do. What our project 2025 is doing is trying to provide a lot of those those elements ahead of time so that that agency action team can really take that information and build on it as they get ready for the administration in that following January.

You also have a public relations team. So if you’re into PR and messaging, a lot of the folks that get on the transitions public relations team also find their way into the public relations departments and a lot of the different agencies. So if you enjoy message and communication, could be everything from going into the communications department at the White House to any of the agencies that are out there. We try to meet with we try to meet with the, press corps on a regular basis. Sometimes it was daily.

We’d provide updates to the transition. The latest cabinet secretary that had been, tapped that was gonna be sent up by the president to the senate for confirmation, the latest piece of information on a hugely important issue that the president-elect was looking to try to focus on at the beginning of their term, a whole series of things and information about what’s going on with the transition goes through public relations shop. There’s a smaller congressional relations piece. These are individuals that probably have a little bit more experience. It could be in state legislatures where you’ve had experience working with members, of a state assembly or a state senate.

But a lot of times, it’s also folks who’ve had some experience with the US senate and the United States house, to just work with them, answer their questions. There’ll be a ton of meetings that they wanna take, and and and there’s gonna be a lot of requests from them to sit down with the president-elect or his or her team to talk about what they would like to see from the president going into the next term. It takes a lot of people and a lot of commitment to work with them on that, so that’s another component. There’s a a dedicated and established policy team. This team is trying to take everything that was made as a commitment by that president, now president-elect, and really focus on how they would break that out by each of the different departments and agencies.

What are the big key themes? A lot of that blueprint would be used in the White House. A lot of that blueprint will then be kind of divided up by the different agencies and departments that would then work to execute it once the president-elect is then sworn in that following January. Those are the largest functions of a transition team. The political appointments, Ed, I think, walked through very well.

Again, that’s that’s basically what you’re looking at, for a presidential transition. If you’re looking to work for a strong conservative, if you’re looking to work in government and try to serve your country, This is a great opportunity. Ed and I have been in this business for a very long time. Every single day you got up, you wanted to be able to solve someone’s problem. At the end of the day, if you actually had a chance to do that, it was the most rewarding feeling you ever had, and you wanted to get up the next day and do the same thing.

If that’s the kind of thing that drives you, then you’re gonna wanna join us and join the next president and be part of that person’s administration. Amen. Appreciate, all of you guys taking a taking a look at this, taking a look at serving your country as a part of an administration, and understanding this process as best you can, and and engaging with this presidential transition process, to, to to be involved as soon as you can and and at every level in in in that transition. So ultimately, you, you may you may land it may be a meandering path to get to where you wanna be, but ultimately, the the goal is to serve, not necessarily to serve in a particular way. Good to be with you again, my friend.

Alright, brother.