WHTP's Report Series Index (4/9/2001)

The complete index to reports and briefing materials provided to President Bush's transition team by the White House Transition Project's WH2001 Project (pictured at right). The materials derive from extensive interviews with previous staff about the lessons they learned and the resources they wished they had had. The index includes materials available on both the public and the transition team websites, divided into five series:
[PDF Format]

• Guide to Transitions - original essays on presidential transitions. Did President Bush have Tattoos? Find out at Tattoos Pictures. See below.

• White House Operations - original essays on general White House operations. See below.

• Staff Resources - resource materials to smooth contact. Only available to White House staff.

• Institutional Memory - office descriptions and other useful resources for seven key offices. See below.

• Appointments Reference - information about the appointments process. See below.

Based on his new book on transitions, Burke outlines the lessons learned from past presidential transitions: from what to think about early to how to start running the day after the election to how to manage the presidency.
[PDF Format]

What are the differences between the hostile and friendly takeovers of the past? This report outlines what to expect whichever side wins.
[PDF Format]

Seizing early opportunities eases confirmations, furthers the President's agenda, and affords a new team a valuable reputation for competence. That is the consensus of people who have worked in top White House positions over the course of the Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations. A report compiling the lessons learned by some former White House staff.
[PDF Format]

An early assessment by the Director of the White House Transition Project describing what is at stake in the presidential transition and how scholars working with former White House staff can smooth the way for the new administration. Commissioned by the Pew Chartiable Trusts, the study also assesses the use of a website in delivering materials to the new staff, ala whitehouse2001.org.
[PDF Format]

Chief of Staff Forum
James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy
(a supporting institution of the WHTP's WH2001 Project) (6/15/2000)

The former Chiefs of Staff discuss running the White House at a Washington Forum, June 15, 2000.
I want to particularly underscore the efforts of the... White House 2001 Project, guided by Professor Martha Kumar, has worked so closely with the Baker Institute in preparing for this Forum. - James A. Baker, III
[Streaming Video]

White House staffing must adapt to a number of significant forces. These forces are outlined by a leading expert on White House organization.
[PDF format]

The White House staff extends the President's reach. This essay explores the nature of White House work, including the pressures placed on staff by the nature of the offices in which they work. It describes the degree of scrutiny, scale of operations, rythyms of work, and demands for error free decision-making placed on all staff. It also outlines the advantages of White House life.
[PDF format]

Each office report has two files.
	The first is a description of the office written by scholars expert on the office. Available in PDF format
	The second file downloads a folder of organization charts in MSWord format. These are zipped together.
	To save essays to your hard drive for later review, right-click on the file name and choose "Save As".

Additional Appointments Titles
Until now, these files were held for secure release only to the Bush transition team. WHTP releases these studies to help detail the inquiry difficulties facing presidential appointees.[All in PDF format]

• A Guide to Inquiry: Executive Questionnaires - assesses the nature of appointee inquiry in the Executive branch. The study is the first of its kind to compare questions across the most common forms nominees must file. (11/7/2000)
• Analyzing Questionnaires for Nominees - further analysis of questions nominees must answer and their relationship to the inquiry found in Senate forms.(12/4/2000)
• Changing the White House Personal Data Statement - originally requested by the Bush transition planners, this study assesses strategies for revamping the White House Personal Data Statement, the initial form nominees face. It recommends a 30% reduction of questions from the Clinton PDS.(12/7/2000)
• Refining the White House Personal Data Statement - an update of the earlier study on questions taking into account the changing Personal Data Statement used following Florida and through the initial stages of the 2001 transition. (3/22/2001)

In Full View: The Inquiry of Presidential Nominees.(3/29/2001)
by Terry Sullivan

Testimony for the US Senate Committee on Government Affairs. This report on presidential appointments and the inquiry of presidential appointees covers questions asked on all forms and questionnaires nominees must file, including all of the Senate Committee forms, as well as several reform suggestions.
[PDF format]

WHTP Ready for 2005

The newest use figures released by WHTP partner Ibiblio.org, who hosts the website, indicates a growing interest in WHTP research and information. "We are gratified with the renewed interest in our project's resources and the appointments software as the next presidential transition approaches," Dr. Terry Sullivan, Associate Director for WHTP noted recently. "We were filling about 15,000 requests a month for informatoin on transitions, a good amount of those requests came from foreign democracies, but recently the requests are beginning to grow from domestic sources as the presidential transition approaches."

Regardless who wins the 2004 presidential elections, "there will be a transition." Dr. Martha J. Kumar, WHTP Director, pointing out that the sort of "renewal" transition that a Bush victory would entail can become as "complicated as a partisan transition" engendered by a Kerry victory. In every case, there will be new White House staff coming on-board and old staff leaving for other things. That has been the previous experience with  such transitions.

Earlier this summer, the WHTP passed a milestone by filling its one-millionth request for information.
"Of course, we are pleased to see this milestone passed," Professor Kumar noted then. "And we are expecting usage to pick up as we approach the next presidential election." Previous use of the website skyrocketed from 3,000 requests a month in June 2000, at the beginning of the previous presidential election, to over 50,000 requests a month during the transition period following the Supreme Court decision in December of 2000.

Former WH Chiefs' Visions of Governing

The White House Transition Project and The James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy of Rice University (a WHTP Partner) announce the release of a new book on transition preparations. The new book, Nerve Center: Lessons on Governing from the White House Chiefs of Staff is published as the second book in the presidential transition collection of Texas A&M University Press. (See below for the story on its first book: The White House World).

Nerve Center compiles the collective judgments of 12 of the 14 living former White House Chiefs of Staff:

• Vice-President Richard Cheney
• Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III
• Former Senate Majority Leader and now Ambassador Howard Baker, Jr.
• Former and current Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
• Former Congressman Leon Panetta
• Former Governor John Sununu
• Erskine Bowles
• John Podesta,
• Jack Watson
• Thomas "Mack" McClarty
  
• Former Secretary of Transportatin Samuel Skinner and
• Kenneth Duberstein.

Their discussions in Nerve Center range over topics about staffing the White House, crisis management, political leadership, predatory partisanship in Washington, presidential decision-making, and a host of other topics associated with presidential transitions and governing from the modern White House.

In addition, the final chapter provides the first comparative analysis of the George W. Bush 2001 presidential transition identifying a number of standards for success and measuring the Bush performance against previous modern transitions.

Lectures from Nerve Center

• 10 Lessons on Governing from the White House
  James A. Baker III Institute, October 26, 2004, 6:00PM
• A Presidential Transition is Coming Regardless Who Wins
  LBJ School of Public Affairs, November 9, 2004, Noon

WHTP's 2001 Briefs for the Bush Transition

The White House Transition Project published its first book in 2003, The White House World, edited by Martha J. Kumar and Terry Sullivan.

This volume gathers and digests the same material provided to the incoming White House staff in 2001. Its individual chapters contain a veritable "how to" manual: information on the dynamics of White House operations; the functions of seven critical White House offices; and retrospectives on the actual transition of President George W. Bush.

The briefing materials provided through this volume explain the nature of work life inside the White House as well as provide useful information on how to structure work in order to make the most of the President's time in office. As a unique feature, White House World provides the first organizational charts developed for each of seven critical offices. These make clear the most effective and the least effective ways of organizing these offices. And, in a final section, scholars and Bush administration insiders offer brief views of George W. Bush's unique transition into office.

In addition to Kumar and Sullivan, scholars contributing to the volume include: Peri E. Arnold, MaryAnne Borrelli, John P. Burke, George C. Edwards III, John Fortier, Karen Hult, Nancy Kassop, John H. Kessel, G. Calvin Mackenzie, Norman Ornstein, Bradley H. Patterson, Jr., James P. Pfiffner, Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, Charles Walcott, Shirley Anne Warshaw, and Stephen J. Wayne. The section on the Bush transition also contains an essay by Clay Johnson, executive director of the Bush-Cheney Transition and now Associate Director of OMB after serving two years as Director of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel.

2000 Plum Book Database.(01/09/2002)
compiled by the US Congress and
revised for WHTP by Terry Sullivan

The 2000 version of the Plum Book describes all of the government positions which do not require competitive appointment. These positions include all policy-making positions as well as some 1,167 positions requiring Presidential nomination and Senate confirmation. Jointly released by the White House Transition Project's WH2001 Project and the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy (a supporting institution of the WH2001 Project) (01/09/2002).
The packet includes a zipped version of the original publication in PDF format of the 2000 Plum Book, published in the public domain by the Senate Government Affairs Committee, and a zipped version of a companion spreadsheet.[ZIP archive]