Q&A With Obama Transition Team Director John Podesta

Excerpts from Lois Romano's interview with John Podesta, director of President-elect Barack Obama's transition team.

Q: Will President-elect Obama eliminate middle manager jobs and redistribute personnel resources, as he suggested he would?

Podesta: He put an emphasis during the course of the campaign on performance and reform, on getting real results for the taxpayers, and trying to create a structure in the government that will produce that level of performance. Ultimately, it will be the job of senior managers in the agencies, and structures they build. I think that as Senator Obama noted he wants to create a chief performance officer, and we're working out the best way to implement that. We have a number of models that governors like Tim Kaine and Martin O'Malley have used in states to focus on performance. I think he will put a big emphasis on performance and reform, and giving people clear direction, clear accountability. He wants to concentrate on things that will produce the highest return for the public and the taxpayers and weed out the programs that don't meet that standard.

Q: Are you working on reforming the government contracting systems?

Podesta: There's a large agency-by-agency review process that is ongoing.People are in those agencies -- and individual agencies present different issues and different problems with regard to contracts. The commitment he made to the public in the course of the campaign is that the process will be more transparent ... By being more open, disclosing more information, it gives a level of accountability that will pay results in the long term.

Q: How different will it be from the Bush contracting structure?

Podesta: There's a lot of sole sourcing of contracts in the Bush structure that even infected the grant-making process. There's a lot to clean out of the barn there. When was the election? Less than two weeks ago? We haven't gotten all that done yet."