Campaigns Go On, but the Transition Is Around the Corner

Even though the McCain-Obama battle is just getting started, it is not too early for their political teams to start thinking about the transition to the White House. It might even be too late.

When it comes to organizing a new administration, history "tells us that any winning candidate who has not started at least six months before the election will be woefully behind come the day after Election Day," John Kamensky wrote on his blog last year, before the Clinton-Obama sprint turned into a marathon.

Kamensky was a "reinventing government" aide to then-vice president Al Gore. Now a senior fellow at the IBM Center for the Business of Government, he posts transition updates and related information at least twice a week at http://www.transition2008.wordpress.com. Kamensky's goal is to pull together what different think tanks, nonprofit organizations and other groups are planning or doing on federal management issues that likely will require the attention of the next president.

Most federal employees usually feel somewhat removed from transitions, unless they have a headquarters job that puts them in contact with political appointees assigned by the winning candidate to scout out their agency.

But a larger number of federal employees may feel the tug of the transition this time because the 2009 transfer of power will be the first in the post-9/11 era, prompting concerns on Capitol Hill and in the administration about possible increased risks of terrorism and other threats to national security.

The Department of Homeland Security, which didn't exist during the last transition, has been taking steps to ensure that career civil servants are in high-ranking positions to provide continuity between the outgoing and incoming administrations.

As the Kamensky blog shows, the Internet will make it easier for federal employees to watch the transition unfold, compared to previous efforts.

The nonprofit Council for Excellence in Government, for example, will lay out the management qualifications and skills required for the 25 toughest jobs in the next administration. The council ( http://www.excelgov.org) also plans to organize online communities to share insights and information and provide links to Web sites that track the transition.

Another nonprofit, the Partnership for Public Service, is joining with Young Government Leaders on June 26 to host a discussion, "Surviving the Presidential Transition." Information about the event is at http://www.ourpublicservice.org.

The Partnership also plans to launch a campaign to get federal management issues at the top of the transition agenda and will issue a report this summer on federal workforce management in the next administration.

And from the world of academia, University of Pennsylvania Professor Donald F. Kettl is tracking the campaigns at http://www.thenextgovernment.com, where he describes candidates' plans to improve the performance of federal agencies and programs.

Martha Joynt Kumar, a political science professor at Towson University, is co-director of a project on transitions that began in 2001 and relies on presidential scholars to write essays on how various White House offices operate and have been organized by past presidents. The essays are at http://www.whitehousetransitionproject.org. New ones will be added this year, including a paper on the office of the national security adviser.