While Donald Trump dines on frog legs with Mitt Romney and meets with a parade of lawmakers and governors in his gold-plated Midtown skyscraper, most of his transition staff are hunkered down in Washington, D.C., writing detailed governing plans for his first 100 days.

But so far, Trump and his inner circle have largely ignored those plans as they focus on top appointments and lean on the advice of politicians, CEOs and donors, rather than on their transition staff, say sources close to the transition.


The president-elect, meanwhile, has been more likely to set policy on Twitter than through consultation with his D.C. advisers.

“The senior people are all focused on Cabinet appointments,” said a Republican official involved in past transitions. “I wonder how much time, attention and decision-making is being allocated to the rest of the government. … It is not a recipe for smooth governance."

The New York-D.C. transition divide reflects Trump’s tendency to focus on personnel and, especially, personality, over policy. Experts say that bent, combined with his improvisational style and the divisions between the teams will complicate his transition to the White House, making it less likely he’ll have a cohesive roadmap for governing on Day One.

Lisa Brown, a former top official for the Obama-Biden transition, warns that failing to engage on policy could hamper his administration's governing efforts.

“It is hard to get the government to do things. It’s not like you flip a switch,” she said. “Even reversing regulations, as Trump has said he wants to do, is a long process.”

Indeed, some Obama administration officials worry the Trump transition is far behind in coming up with department-by-department transition plans. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, for example, told reporters on Monday that her agency has had only one visit from one person from the transition team.

A Trump transition official disputed any divide between New York and D.C., or that the transition is falling behind, saying the senior team is “providing clear guidance for New York and D.C. every single day. … The operations are seamless and working well.”

To be sure, past transitions have also suffered from geographic divides. Barack Obama spent much of his time in Chicago ahead of his inauguration and Hillary Clinton’s close aides were also largely based in New York City. The influence of lower-level transition policy staff has always paled in comparison to those aides who have the president-elect’s ear.

“Any transition team only has the power to make recommendations, unless someone on that team ends up in the government,” says Charlie Black, a long-time GOP operative and lobbyist, who is not working for the Trump transition.

But former transition officials say Trump’s operation is unusual in the way it’s leaving so much of the policy and second-tier personnel appointments to D.C. transition team members, many of whom are volunteers with little power and no connection to Trump’s key advisers.

On the Obama transition team, for instance, John Podesta ran interference between the president-elect and the massive D.C. transition operation and kept a tight rein over it. While Vice President-elect Mike Pence is technically doing this job, he’s also the governor of Indiana and vice president-elect, responsible for advising on Cabinet picks and reaching out to Capitol Hill.

“Personnel is so important in this administration because they don’t have a clear roadmap for policy,” said a Republican official involved in past transitions. “Whoever they pick at Education or as the domestic policy chief will be writing a lot of it.”

That official noted that if they had, say, a well-defined tax plan, parts of it would already have been shared with the Joint Tax Committee or Congressional Budget Office to see how much revenue would really be lost. “For this gang, I don’t think this stuff matters very much,” he said.

People close to Trump say they expect him to rely heavily on Pence and other policy staffers once he enters the White House, freeing up Trump to stake out a broader strategic and political vision.

"I don’t necessarily think he’s saying, 'Boy, I’d really like to breathlessly wait for the Ways and Means subcommittee to put out the first draft of the tax reform bill,’" said one person close to Trump's transition team.

Trump has few real ties to Washington’s network of Republican policy wonks and is much more likely to take advice from son-in-law Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon, Trump’s incoming chief strategist, than from veterans of Republican presidencies.

“There is an expectation that Trump will adjust to Washington, but I keep telling people that Washington needs to adjust to him,” says a lobbyist close to the transition. “There is less influence from Washington than there is from the orbits directly around him.”

Still, it is the D.C. transition staff that will build the bridge between the Obama and Trump administrations. It is assembling the all-important “beachhead” teams that will enter federal agencies on Jan. 20 and run things for several months if need be while Trump’s nominees are awaiting Senate confirmation. The teams will consist of appointees who don’t require confirmation, like chiefs of staff, who will work with existing career employees to ensure a seamless transition, two people familiar with Trump’s transition told POLITICO.

Right now, though, the only access the D.C. staff has to Trump’s inner circle is through Pence and his top aides, creating a “bottleneck” of information, says one lobbyist with transition ties. “Everyone is inundating him and his people with their content. He only has so many asks himself.”

One D.C.-based transition staffer said he gets most of his information about what’s happening with the transition from watching the comings and goings at Trump Tower on the news. “It’s pretty secretive,” the person said. “What you all know is about what I know. All the work that’s being done on personnel is literally being done out of New York, not here.”

Rick Dearborn — a former aide to Jeff Sessions — is running the transition day-to-day, but he is not a part of Trump’s core inner circle, which besides Kushner, Bannon and Pence includes Reince Priebus, Trump’s incoming chief of staff, and Kellyanne Conway, his campaign manager and pollster.

Dearborn did not respond to an interview request. A transition official would not comment on whether Dearborn spends the majority of his time in New York at Trump Tower or D.C.

Much of the big-picture policy work for the first 100 days is being led by a former aide to Sessions (R-Ala.), Stephen Miller, who splits his time between New York and D.C., according to a transition official.

Transition staff told POLITICO that communication between New York and D.C. is improving now that Pence has assumed control. Pence has made regular visits and calls to the D.C. office, and he is likely to take a leading policy role in the administration.

But as the transition team grows in size, it’s becoming harder for policy experts to get the attention of Trump’s inner-circle. Recently, the transition team has added a new layer of top advisers — more than a dozen business executives — putting even greater distance between the president-elect’s top advisers and the people making the majority of the policy suggestions.

“The executive team is doing high-profile vetting, recommendations and recruitment,” said Rep. Devin Nunes, part of the transition’s so-called executive committee. “They’re not asking what our policy is going to be on X, Y, or Z.”

Multiple people close to the transition said the best way to influence Trump’s policies is to talk to his core advisers in New York. “New York is the fun and the TV cameras, and D.C. is the people who are going into the Pentagon and Labor and Interior. It is not the glamorous end of the stick,” a GOP strategist added.

Transition staff in D.C., many of whom are well-respected in their fields and have direct experience working in federal agencies, have been told not to expect jobs in the Trump administration. Two sources, one inside the transition and one close to it, told POLITICO that transition leaders have said that members of the agency landing teams will not be tapped for Senate-confirmed jobs — an edict that immediately relegates them to those with less pull and stature.

One transition official said she was not aware of any such policy and that most of the landing team members are volunteers, adding that “every citizen is allowed to apply for these jobs."

In another sign of the D.C. team’s lesser influence, one Republican lobbyist said he declined to give up his clients and join the transition team because the D.C.-based staff have so little control over Trump’s agenda.

The D.C.-based transition operation has several teams preparing for the hand-off of power, and the heads of all of these teams talk on a daily phone call, a transition official said.

Policy implementation teams are focused on broad policy themes like immigration, energy and health care. Agency-action teams are focused on charting out an agenda for dozens of federal agencies.

And the landing teams, a sub-group of the agency-action teams, are tasked with going into federal agencies and figuring out the logistics of the transition from inside the government.

But little coordination is occurring between the so-called landing teams that go into federal agencies on behalf of Trump and his multiple layers of top advisers. “It’s not clear how much synergy the landing teams have with the folks who will actually be taking in these Cabinet positions,” said one source who’s met with transition officials multiple times.

“If I am on the Treasury landing team, and I’ve never met Steve Mnuchin, how much sway am I going to have?”