Does our presidential succession process undermine effective governance and national security? Two members of the 9/11 commission say that it does and suggest that each party's candidate should be more closely tied into the outgoing administration and more up front about who they would appoint to their cabinets in order to streamline the transfer of power:
One of the observations of the 9/11 commission was that the deeply flawed presidential transition of 2000 and 2001 created a dangerous period of vulnerability.
As always, the crowd coming in was dismissive of the concerns of the crowd going out. There was a mismatch between the concerns of the Clinton national security team and those of the incoming Bush team. While there were briefings between the election and the swearing-in, there was no trust — and thus no effective dialogue — between the members of the two administrations.
In addition, President Bush took too long to set priorities and direction for his national-security team. This was a result partly of the prolonged battle over the 2000 election, but it also reflected a basic problem in how we populate our government agencies — we do so much too slowly. Neither nominations nor confirmations come fast enough.
The 9/11 commission worried that terrorists would take advantage of our weakness during transitions, just as Al Qaeda did when it attacked Madrid just before Spain’s elections in 2004.
The lessons learned from the Clinton-Bush transition should inform what the candidates and the president do right now. The only way for a new administration to make important decisions in a fully informed way is to organize the transition into office very differently. The campaigns of both John McCain and Barack Obama are reported to be compiling lists of potential national-security nominees to speed the confirmation process next year, but that is just the beginning of what needs to be done.
But one wonders whether narrow partisan concerns would trump the greater interest of effective policy making. It almost always does.
