The “designated survivor” has long been one of Washington’s favorite parlor games—imagining what America would be like if a catastrophe befell the capital during a State of the Union and the most powerful office in the land were delivered unwittingly to the cabinet official who had been hidden away as the president-of-last-resort. What would America have looked like under President Jeh Johnson (2016)? President Ernest Moniz (2014)? Or even President Alberto Gonzales (2007)? And then there are the weirder examples: In 2001, had a catastrophe occurred during the inauguration, Americans expecting Republican President George W. Bush might have instead found themselves with a Democratic president named Larry Summers.

The idea is startling enough to fuel a new Kiefer Sutherland TV drama, Designated Survivor, in which the 24 actor plays a hapless Housing and Urban Development Secretary who finds himself ushered into the White House after a catastrophic attack on the Capitol.


You might assume that for something as important as presidential succession, the world's most powerful nation has it down to a science. That’s the scenario that Hollywood lays out in the show premiere tonight: Sutherland, who just minutes before had been headed to political obscurity in a low-profile ambassadorship, is instead ushered into the White House by an efficient set of government minders.

But in reality, the system is far less clearly delineated, and dogged by questions that are likely to begin the moment it’s pressed into action. I’ve spent the last three years researching a forthcoming book on the government’s doomsday plans, and one fact that emerged starkly is just how uncertain the whole process is. The system of presidential succession is relatively new, and in many cases it's surprisingly unclear who becomes president. As legal scholar Akhil Amar, who had long studied the legalities of succession, told Congress during one hearing after 9/11, “The current Presidential succession Act, 3 U.S.C. section 19, is in my view a disastrous statute, an accident waiting to happen. It should be repealed and replaced.”

Indeed, the presidential succession plan is the rare Washington story that’s even stranger—and contains even more unexpected twists—than the Hollywood version. For one thing, the system, known as “continuity of government,” is vastly larger and more complicated than most people realize. While attention usually focuses on the main presidential successor, during high-profile events a much broader shadow government often waits in secure undisclosed locations. During President Obama’s inauguration in 2009, when Defense Secretary Robert Gates was the designated presidential successor, James Clapper—then the undersecretary of defense for intelligence—waited out the swearing-in at the Pentagon’s secret Cold War bunker in Pennsylvania known as Raven Rock, ready to step into Gates’ role as defense secretary if the need arose.

But the even weirder thing is what might happen after a disaster. In fact, had Gates emerged from a cave to claim the presidency on January 20, 2009, it might’ve only marked the opening gambit in a legal drama that could have played out for days, weeks, or even months as a variety of officials from all three branches of government argued over who could rightfully claim the presidency.

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For about three hours the designated survivor teeters on the edge of becoming the most important person in the world. That moment in the spotlight—or, more accurately, far from the spotlight—can be brief. The night in 1997 Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman served as the “designated survivor” during one of President Clinton’s addresses to Congress, Glickman went to New York for the night, with a security detail and the nation’s nuclear codes in tow, only to find that as soon as the speech was finished—and the need for a successor over—the security apparatus abandoned him, leaving him in the rain to catch his own taxi home.

The idea of a “designated survivor” was formalized by the Carter and Reagan administrations, as White House officials worried about nuclear missiles aboard Soviet submarines that lay off the Atlantic Coast and could have devastated the capital with barely 10 minutes’ notice.

President Carter’s White House Military Office in April 1980 had instituted new procedures with FEMA to monitor the attendance of all presidential successors “at major, publicly announced functions outside the White House complex.” While such gatherings of the U.S. leadership had been commonplace in the past—at inaugurations, states of the union, state funerals and the like—the rising tensions of the Cold War made government planners questions their wisdom. “The situation provides an inviting target to enemy attack or terrorist activity, and represents an unnecessary risk to national leadership,” the White House Military Office wrote, outlining the new procedures.

The 25th Amendment—itself a modern relic of the Cold War and fears of nuclear attack—lays out a seemingly clear line for presidential succession. It flows from the vice president to the House speaker to the Senate president pro tem, then through the cabinet in the order in which the departments were created—a quirk that itself makes the Department of Homeland Security secretary, one of the people best qualified to actually assume the presidency in a disaster, actually last in line.

When all those in the line of succession were gathered in a high-profile setting, FEMA was to notify the White House and an aide would recommend to the president which qualified cabinet successors should skip the event. (Constitutionally, foreign-born cabinet secretaries, like current Interior Secretary Sally Jewell—a Brit!—don’t serve in the line of succession.) It falls to a little-known branch of FEMA, the Central Locator Service, to track the whereabouts of the successors daily, and once a month, after the fact, audit a single day to determine whether it had correctly known where each cabinet member was.

The new White House and FEMA procedures got their first test at Reagan’s inaugural. The incoming and outgoing administrations had agreed that Carter’s outgoing defense secretary, Harold Brown, would remain in office past the standard noon departure and ensure that there was a national leader in case something catastrophic happened at the ceremony. “Both sides agreed that something should be done,” a FEMA official explained later. Brown only resigned later on inauguration day once the Reagan team was firmly in control of government’s levers.

The “designated survivor” program would grow more formal in the years to come—the chosen Cabinet member would receive a Secret Service detail for the length of the event and a White House military aide would arrive for the evening with one of the emergency briefcases known as the “Football,” which contain instructions on how to access the nation’s nuclear weapons codes—in case the unthinkable happened and the designated survivor needed to be ready to launch an attack.

The “designated survivor” program, though, raised a new problem: How would the “designated survivor” prove he or she was actually now the president? The government lacked simple procedures for figuring out how to double-check that person’s identity after a decapitation event. Is the person at the other end of the phone really Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack (State of the Union 2012)?

“One of the things we discovered is that there was no authentication system,” Reagan’s first FEMA head Louis Giuffrida said in 1981. “If a successor got on the horn and said, ‘I’m the successor,’ and somebody said ‘Prove it,’ [no one could]. So we’re working on that, and FEMA will be the authenticating mechanism to say, ‘Yeah, this guy’s for real. The president’s gone and we don’t know where the vice president is…and this is the man.’”

In the years ahead, FEMA and the White House worked out an elaborate (and classified) system through which a successor would be able to confirm his or her identity, and in subsequent years the “designated survivors” became a common part of Washington lore, and often yielded amusing stories from those who served. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala recounted the story of how she watched the 1996 State of the Union from the White House and ordered pizza. “I took my staff with me and I ordered pizza for them in the Roosevelt Room,” she said years later. “I went to the Oval Office and for one minute sat in the president's chair and then I got up respectfully and went to watch the speech with my staff.”

Yet, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, a bipartisan commission examining the nation’s succession planning found that odd—and troubling—quirks persisted that could lead to serious constitutional quandaries in just the sort of situation that Kiefer Sutherland’s character, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Tom Kirkman, experiences in the TV show.

As clear as the line of succession may appear on paper, legally it would likely prove a much messier proposition the further down the list you go and cabinet officials become involved. And it could get particularly tangled if the president or vice president is only “incapacitated,” rather than killed outright.

It’s not entirely clear, even, that the House speaker or the Senate president pro tem could legally serve as president. Republican Senator John Coryn raised the question during the debate in the early 2000s of what would happen if a speaker of the House or Senate president pro tem ascended to the presidency—and then was challenged by the secretary of state who argued that the legislators didn’t count as constitutional officers, making them ineligible to serve in the presidency. “Believe it or not, the secretary actually has a rather strong case, in my view,” Cornyn said. No less an authority than James Madison himself had argued that the congressional leaders were legislators, not constitutional officers, and thus ineligible to succeed to the presidency. As Cornyn said, “Who is the president? Whose orders should be followed by our armed forces, by our intelligence agencies and by domestic law enforcement bureaus? If law suits are filed, will courts accept jurisdiction? How long will they take to rule? How will they rule? And how will their rulings be respected?”

In the years after 9/11, the so-called “Continuity of Government Commission,” pushed by American Enterprise Institute scholar Norm Ornstein, who has assumed the role of Washington’s succession Cassandra and has spent much of the last 20 years raising troubling questions about the 25th Amendment’s ambiguities, confronted one of the strangest and most nettlesome phrases in “COG” operations. It’s a seemingly unnecessary aside in the language guiding presidential succession known as the “supplantation clause,” which held that a “prior-entitled” presidential successor, that is someone who ranks higher in the official line of succession, could supplant a lower-level Cabinet official who was serving as “acting president.”

For instance, in a situation where the president and the congressional leadership was killed, but the vice president only incapacitated, the secretary of state would presumably serve as “acting president” until the vice president was able to resume his or her responsibility and become the president. But the “supplantation clause” inserted unhelpful ambiguity: Could, after Congress reconstitutes itself, a newly elected speaker of the House or Senate president pro tem insist on replacing the secretary of state even after that person had assumed the office of “acting president”? Could a newly elected speaker supplant a president pro tem? Might the presidency swing wildly in a few days, at the height of a crisis, between different officials and different political parties?

The Continuity of Government Commission tried also to tackle an ongoing problem with presidential succession that had dogged the debate for decades: Even with the idea of designated survivors for major high-profile gatherings and all the evacuation systems in place, on a day-to-day basis everyone in the presidential line of succession lives and works in a tiny radius extending a few miles around the White House and the Capitol. “In the nightmare scenario of terrorists detonating a nuclear device, it is possible that everyone in the line of succession might be killed,” the commission’s executive director, John Fortier, told Congress during one hearing. “Imagine the aftermath: a parade of generals, governors, and under secretaries claiming to be in charge.” It would be the chaos of Al Haig’s “I’m in control here” statement during the Reagan administration writ larger and more fraught.

One proposal, floated during the post-9/11 discussions, would have created a “First Secretary,” a Cabinet official who would have been first-in-line to the presidency after the vice president and whose sole responsibility would be to remain outside of Washington and be the designated survivor to head the shadow government if a catastrophic event destroyed the capital. It would be a job, in essence, to remain in an “undisclosed location” until the worst moment of American history.

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Such questions make the nation, under existing rules, particularly vulnerable during presidential inaugurations. The terms of the president and vice president constitutionally expire at noon on January 20th, but their cabinets remained in office until either a resignation is tendered or a successor is confirmed by the Senate—which usually doesn’t happen for hours or even days after an inauguration.

In 2001, as Fortier, the commission leader explained, a terror attack that targeted George W. Bush’s inauguration, might have left the nation with a president carried over from the previous administration who would then serve until Congress had a speaker or president pro tem who would “bump” out the president and serve the rest of the four-year term of office. Fortier said, “A country expecting Republican George W. Bush to take office would have found themselves with a Democratic President Larry Summers. As secretary of the treasury, Summers was the highest-ranking Clinton Cabinet member eligible to serve as President.”

In 1989, at George H.W. Bush’s inauguration, the situation would have been even more confusing, with the same strange outcome: Michael Armacost, the number three official at Reagan’s State Department, would have been elevated to president of the United States, for the outgoing secretary of state, George Shultz, and deputy secretary of state, John C. Whitehead, had both resigned before the inauguration. Then, with the House in Democratic hands, a newly chosen speaker could have bumped Armacost and given the nation four years of Democratic rule immediately after it elected a Republican president. In fact, given that the Senate took five days to confirm James Baker as secretary of state after Bush’s inauguration, Armacost remained fourth in line to the presidency for the better part of a week.

Armacost went on to serve as president of the Brookings Institution and Summers went on to serve as president of Harvard University, so both men ended up with the title of “President,” but—had an unprecedented crisis summoned them to lead in 1989 or 2001—it’s hard to imagine that the ascension of either man to the American presidency would have proved reassuring to the nation in its moment of need.

Unless Kiefer Sutherland’s drama reopens the debate, there are no plans to fix any of these—or a host of other—problems with presidential succession. Congress tabled and ignored the fixes on the table a decade ago, and except for a few lonely congressional voices in the years since, like Rep. Brian Baird, there’s been little attention since.

So, as you tune in to watch Kiefer Sutherland heroically step in and lead the nation on TV, know that you’re perhaps watching the ultimate Hollywood fiction: The idea that the government’s Doomsday plans would actually work.