When Howard Lutnick, the pugnacious CEO of the financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald, strode on stage at Madison Square Garden in the presidential campaign’s waning days, he looked all-powerful. The billionaire told the New York City rally that victory was near. “Donald Trump is going to build the greatest team to ever walk into government,” he shouted.
Lutnick was right about the Republican nominee winning, and, as co-chair of the Trump transition team, he was engaging in a bit of subtle braggadocio since he was the one building that team. In September, he’d split transition responsibilities with Linda McMahon, head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, a former GOP candidate for U.S. Senate in Connecticut, and the spouse of wrestling impresario Vince McMahon. She was in charge of policy while Lutnick controlled the vast staffing portfolio. This meant sifting through the resumes of potential cabinet and White House picks, carefully evaluating who was most qualified and, he clarified in interviews, most loyal to the incoming president.
But news that a crucial staffing decision was made ad hoc aboard Trump Force One earlier this month could have made one wonder whether Lutnick had lost control of the transition process or had never had it at all, given the 45th and 47th president’s mercurial decision-making. (I wonder because I’m a scholar of presidential transitions, and this one seems unusual, even by Trumpian standards.) Matt Gaetz boarded Trump’s plane in Florida for a flight to Washington as a Republican member of the U.S. House facing ethics charges. As flight attendants put it, he deplaned as the president-elect’s nominee to be Attorney General. His ethics charges vanished since he was no longer a House member.
If Gaetz’s job offer was an anomaly, you might worry less about Lutnick’s transition handling, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Similar seat-of-the-pants choices on Defense and Intelligence and a jobs free-for-all at Mar-a-Lago suggest the transition’s staff may have lost its way. For instance, the appointment of Robert F Kennedy Jr. to run Health and Human Services happened just weeks after Lutnick claimed on CNN that the famous political scion wouldn’t get that job. Along the way, Lutnick was selected as the next Commerce Secretary, reportedly a consolation prize for not getting Treasury. Meanwhile, McMahon, who, according to news accounts, wanted Commerce, was selected to be the next head of the Department of Education, which Trump has vowed to abolish.
This isn’t how it’s supposed to work.
Just four years ago, the Biden-Harris transition deployed a massive personnel team, leading it to make a remarkable number of pre-inaugural appointments. Though a complete list was never published, some rooting around on LinkedIn showed at least 100 people involved in various aspects of transition staffing in 2020, and the entire team was probably much larger than that.
The Biden-Harris transition staff was divided between those managing presidential appointments and those managing nominations to the U.S. Senate. The appointments and nominations team was also broken up by function and agency. Some volunteers organized virtual job interviews, and others prepped nominees for confirmation hearings. Dozens of lawyers vetted applicants and weighed ethics issues. A vetting attorney I interviewed, who regularly worked until 3:00 am during the transition, said, “No one wanted to be the person to miss anything.” Much of this effort was overseen by Gautam Raghavan, who ran the White House Office of Personnel after the transition.
Working from home during the pandemic in the autumn and winter of 2020-21, those vetting potential Biden-Harris appointees combed through candidates’ past social media postings, looking back two to three years to keep the work manageable. One person I spoke to who researched potential appointees for the Biden-Harris team said they’d look for anything “that Ted Cruz could use in a confirmation hearing.” Any list would be narrowed to three candidates, who’d then be interviewed several times by people at different levels of the transition team.
The massive and thorough personnel effort in 2020 paid off with relatively pain-free Senate confirmation hearings for Biden’s cabinet, despite the January 6 insurrection, a 50-50 U.S. Senate majority, and many Trump-controlled agencies refusing to cooperate with the handover. Subsequently, cabinet and White House staff turnover was low after the first year in office, particularly compared to the previous Trump administration. Even after four years in office, the Partnership for Public Service found Biden lost just 1 in 10 political appointees compared to 1 in 4 during Trump’s first term.
What we observe during Trump’s second transition bears little in common with the Biden-Harris efforts. We’ve seen a few transition team members named and know little about their work. It’s not taking place at the General Services Administration offices in Washington, D.C, despite the facilities being ready and waiting. Trump’s team has yet to sign the paperwork to open those rooms and millions of dollars of federal support and other aid. Such signatures would also include signing various ethics and conflict-of-interest disclosures.
This leaves Lutnick’s clout in doubt since the Gaetz deal was reportedly forged out of earshot of incoming White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who was on the plane, and without Lutnick’s foreknowledge. To understand what’s going on in the transition, we’re reduced to Kremlinology. Last week’s news that the 63-year-old financier dined with the President-elect and his 17-year-old granddaughter, Kai, seemed to buttress his standing, but word of his failed bid to become the next Secretary of the Treasury and ending up at Commerce renders doubt. A cabinet post that has little to do with his expertise in financial markets and much more with international trade, running the decennial Census and managing the NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, seems like a bit of a reach for a man who ran the financial firm most devastated by 9/11. (Over 650 Cantor Fitzgerald employees at the World Trade Center, including Lutnick’s brother, died that day.) Running the Department of Commerce is not what one would have predicted for the Haverford College graduate at October’s Madison Square Garden. By comparison, the 2016-17 transition from Barack Obama to Trump seems calm. Back then, the biggest drama came when Trump unceremoniously dumped his transition head, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, for Vice President-Elect Mike Pence in part at the reported urging of his son-in-law and incoming counselor Jared Kushner, whose father had been prosecuted and convicted by Christie when he was the U.S. Attorney in New Jersey.
Four years ago, a volunteer army staffed the incoming Biden administration. Given that the transition’s vetting team missed a sexual misconduct allegation against Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, it’s reasonable to ask whether Lutnick has much help this time. And, even if he does, that team may not stand a chance when the next pick is a plane ride away.
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