Donald Trump is beating President Barack Obama on the pace of splashy Cabinet announcements, but the president-elect is lagging his predecessor when it comes to other transition efforts critical to fulfilling his campaign promises.

The slower pace applies not only to key appointments throughout his administration, but also to Trump’s lower-profile agency review teams, whose nitty-gritty work with Obama’s career bureaucrats could make or break Trump’s pledge to get his presidency off to a barn-burning start.


Obama administration officials assigned to the transition say Trump’s representatives have been AWOL at some agencies, leaving them sitting on binders full of briefing materials that have been amassed since March.

The slower pace of agency-level transition efforts could have a real impact on Trump’s ability to quickly tackle big issues such as Obamacare, infrastructure and immigration reform.

“I’ve just been hearing all’s quiet on the western front, that sort of thing,” said Bill Valdez, who as president of the Senior Executives Association represents the high-level career employees assigned to help introduce the Trump teams to their agencies. “One of my colleagues worked at Department of Labor, and they’ve seen one person there — very low-level staffer — who has basically just come in and said, ‘Where are the keys to the men’s room?’ And then the rumor was that somebody at a higher level was going to come this week, but so far nobody’s shown up.”

A source within the Department of Labor said that this week the third of three Trump team members made it into the building — after a fourth member was named only to be removed days later.

The halting communication with the agencies is causing consternation among Obama administration officials — both the political aides who will resign as of Jan. 20 and the career public servants whose employment spans presidencies — tasked with helping facilitate a smooth transition. In some cases, such as at the U.S. Agency for International Development, they haven’t heard from anyone in Trump world.

Frustration started spilling out into public view earlier this week when Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy told reporters on Monday that the agency is ready and willing to help, but doesn’t have anyone to hand off information to.

"We’re most anxious to have the transition team around,” McCarthy said. “We have had one individual who came the day before Thanksgiving, and we have not heard from anybody since.”

A Trump transition spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.

That’s not to say that the president-elect is coasting on his way to the inauguration. He’s been maintaining an aggressive meeting schedule at Trump Tower, and is well ahead of previous presidents-elect in naming members of his Cabinet, at eight. That number climbed to 10 with the unofficial news on Wednesday that Trump is expected to nominate retired Marine Gen. John Kelly to run the Department of Homeland Security and Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt as EPA chief.

By comparison, Obama had named only six Cabinet nominees by this point in 2008.

But presidential historian Martha Joynt Kumar noted that Obama had also named people to all but one of the 12 most important White House posts — and it’s typically those West Wing staff members who would help with the process of choosing other nominees.

Trump has appointed only four of those people so far.

“That’s your decision-making structure,” said Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project, about the West Wing staff. “There’s so much information for policy, for appointments and even for your publicity — there’s a lot that you need to assemble.”

There are major exceptions. One senior administration official said there were no complaints coming out of the Commerce Department, where aides were “pleasantly surprised” by Trump’s landing team. It includes about half a dozen people, some with prior Commerce experience.

Trump’s team is taking “solemn and serious stock” of Commerce’s different agencies, said the senior Obama administration official. But that’s only offering so much reassurance to career staff: Trump has named investor Wilbur Ross to run the department, and his strident calls to untangle the North American Free Trade Agreement seem in contrast to the more measured perspective of the veteran Commerce officials on Trump’s transition team.

President Barack Obama had named all but one of the 12 most important White House posts by this point in 2008. | Getty

Interactions with defense officials appear to be picking up steam after a slow start, as well.

There has been "one big meeting about Air Force issues" that included Air Force civilian and military leaders, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said in an interview with POLITICO on Tuesday.

"I know one of the transition team members, so I have kind of had informal discussions," she added. "It is going as planned. That's my take. If anything, the indication I get is the desire to increase the topline of defense."

The Department of Energy also has seen “several folks who have shown up and are beginning interviewing people,” said Valdez.

As for the National Security Council, there’s been progress, but obstacles remain. While Trump’s NSC landing team has been in place for weeks, not all of them have yet been granted the necessary clearances to receive classified information, according to a source close to the transition.

Trump’s halting pace is in sharp contrast to Obama’s running start in 2008.

“Our teams started going into the agencies the Friday after the election,” said Lisa Brown, co-director of agency review for the Obama-Biden transition. Even before the election, Brown said, Obama’s team had submitted all the names of its landing team members to the White House — major departments like Treasury, Justice and Defense had 12 to 15 people, even smaller agencies had around five members. They were all armed with a template of questions about behind-the-scenes operations — the transition had already looked up all the publicly available data before votes were cast.

All that organization helped drive Obama’s agenda forward. Valdez recalled that Obama landing teams asked bureaucrats in December to have lists of shovel-ready projects ready by Inauguration Day. They ended up being a major part of the economic stimulus, which passed less than a month into Obama’s presidency.

The names of Trump’s landing teams, on the other hand, are still dripping out.

“The bureaucracy’s just not getting that direction,” Valdez said.

Even as Trump has reportedly skipped intelligence briefings and eschewed the advice of career diplomats who are, as State Department spokesman John Kirby put it, “standing by” to brief him before he makes policy-reversing statements to world leaders, the White House has been loath to criticize.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest ruled out offering any sort of assessment of Trump’s effort from the podium.

“If I stand up here and sort of offer up a new assessment where, in my view, they may or may not have fallen short, that may not lend itself to the kind of cordial, professional, collegial relationships that will contribute to the most effective transition,” Earnest said Monday.

Indeed, the neutrality has been practically institutionalized, with standardized talking points that obscure disparate levels of engagement by Trump’s team.

Health and Human Services spokeswoman Marjorie Connelly told POLITICO that the agency “is now in contact with the president-elect's transition representatives and has begun the process of briefing those individuals. Communication between the two teams will move forward on an ongoing basis, but we will not be in a position to confirm each interaction or the specific details of those interactions.”

Education spokeswoman Dorie Nolt provided a near-verbatim statement about the Trump team’s interactions with that department.

But the relatively slow pace could be at least partially offset by new legislation and an Obama executive order that prompted the career officials to start compiling transition materials early this year.

“There’s so much that the government itself has done that any lateness that they may have is in part offset by the amount of information that’s provided that they would need on personnel, programs, budgets, schedules, ongoing actions, lawsuits,” Kumar said.

And while Trump’s pace is sowing uncertainty among bureaucrats, who are devoted to their missions despite their nonpartisan status, some say it’s fine for him to take his time.

“The longer it takes to get the Trump folks in here,” said one career staffer tasked to an Obamacare project to expand coverage, “the longer we'll have to work on our reforms.”

Bryan Bender, Dan Diamond, Marianne LeVine, Michael Stratford, Nahal Toosi and Eric Wolff contributed to this report.