Just days before he ascends to the presidency, there are lingering questions about whether President-elect Donald Trump’s team is fully prepared to take over the sprawling federal government, according to more than two dozen interviews with Trump and Obama administration officials, lobbyists, experts and others close to the process.

A deep distrust has taken hold between Trump’s transition officials and President Barack Obama’s political appointees at a number of federal agencies, slowing down the handover of agency responsibilities on everything from meat inspections to drug pricing. There’s confusion over policy on several major agenda items, as Trump gives conflicting signals and often disagrees with his Cabinet nominees. And a number of federal agencies are far from having the staff they need to run on Day One, people close to the transition say.


While every transition has a feeling of disarray to it, some observers — Obama and Trump loyalists alike as well as others who are more neutral — say this transition is more drama-filled and inconsistent across federal agencies than some of its predecessors. And the disorder could have a real impact on Trump’s ability to quickly deliver on his ambitious agenda in the opening weeks of his administration.

“They look like they are designed for chaos,” said Stephen Hess, an expert on transitions at the Brookings Institution. “It’s just, there is no other word for it, weird for those of us who have been involved in government for decades.”

Trump transition officials insist that they are prepared. They say they have written detailed action plans for every major agency, adding they’ve even been charting a path forward at more obscure subagencies and departments. They note that securing the confirmation of their nominees is the most important near-term task and that they will soon announce hundreds of hires.

After a rocky start — both because Trump’s team didn’t expect to win and because of missteps by Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who was ousted as the head of the transition in November — they are now on a far quicker path, Trump transition aides say. Before Trump won, many establishment Republicans showed little interest in joining the transition and raising money, meaning the team started far behind previous ones, according to people involved and close to the transition.

Those people say Rick Dearborn, the former chief of staff to Sen. Jeff Sessions who is running the D.C.-based transition operation, has since instilled a discipline in the process, and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is something of a troubleshooter.

Trump’s team is hoping to install its own appointees on Friday who will run the agencies along with the existing career officials until the Senate confirms his nominees. The transition is assembling so-called “beachhead” teams filled with aides who don’t require Senate confirmation. Trump’s transition has instructed members of the beachhead teams to skip the inauguration and be at their desks the moment Trump takes office, sources close to the transition said.

“I’ve been through a lot of transitions, and this one is going well. There’s obviously a lot of confusion, and a lot of chaos, but that always happens in a transition because you have massive organizations that have to move quickly,” said former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a top Trump surrogate.

But others say that Trump’s transition at the agency level is more helter-skelter than those of his predecessors.

Unlike the George W. Bush and Obama transitions, there are few people calling the shots in D.C.; almost every major decision gets made in New York. One person close to several top officials said D.C.-based aides sometimes struggle to connect with their more powerful counterparts up north to discuss policy proposals.

There’s also confusion about the path forward on major agenda items. One senior policy official at the conservative Heritage Foundation said it is unclear what policies the transition team favors on issues like infrastructure because several different versions of a plan are circulating — and no one is sure who is empowered to sign off. Trump and his top aides have disagreed on how to move forward on removing Obamacare, causing concern on Capitol Hill and among his GOP allies.

Trump himself isn’t involved in much of the hiring below the Cabinet level but will occasionally weigh in, throwing the process awry. Some say the task of building out agency leadership would be going more smoothly if Trump made it a clear priority. One person involved in the transition said he believes the team would be more interested in quickly filling key roles, like assistant attorneys general and a FEMA administrator, for example, if the boss were more interested in those positions.

Trump’s team has filled 28 of the 690 most crucial federal government positions that require Senate confirmation, according to the Partnership for Public Service, which has advised the Trump transition throughout the process.

One of the core problems has been the persistent lack of communication between some of the federal agencies and the Trump transition officials on the so-called “landing teams” tasked with entering the agencies to collect information for Trump’s team.

Max Stier — CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, which also advised the Obama administration on its transition — called it “slow-going on that front, though it has varied agency to agency.”

“The landing teams going into the federal agencies have been uneven,” he said. “Not all of the landing teams have had much connectivity with the agency.”

Lindsay Walters, a Trump spokeswoman, pushed back against the idea of a rocky transition for federal agencies. “There is a robust transition operation in place that is ensuring that all teams are prepared and ready for Day One. We look forward to serving our great country,” she said.

Despite the feeling of disorder underneath the surface, Obama and Trump aides have been cordial in public, for the most part. Obama was impressed by George W. Bush's commitment to a smooth transition and Obama administration officials say he wanted to create a similarly drama-free process.

The White House organized a meeting last Friday with Obama’s Cabinet secretaries and Trump’s incoming nominees. The officials discussed contingency plans for crisis scenarios like natural disasters and terrorist attacks. In the aftermath of 9/11, former government officials have warned that the U.S. is uniquely vulnerable to terrorist attacks during the transition. And the government has taken extra precautions to make sure the incoming administration has a national security plan in place on Day One.

But behind the scenes, an undercurrent of distrust has marked many of the interactions between the Obama administration and the Trump transition, according to officials on both sides. While the meetings have been largely professional, Trump’s team has been warned not to share too many details with the Obama administration, having been burned by a series of damaging leaks that made public key transition memos. And they are angry with the Obama team for making a number of major policy moves during the transition.

Some officials have been speaking out.

“It’s going pretty smoothly because there’s not an enormous amount of it,” Secretary of State John Kerry said last week of the contact between the two teams. “There are some people who’ve been in the building for a period of time, but, you know, quite candidly, I think there has not been a lot of high-level exchange at this point in time.”

At the Education Department, one senior level Obama official said Trump’s aides made it clear they weren’t interested in talking to Obama political appointees. “They were very nice about it,” this person said.

Trump’s team was livid when federal employees leaked a series of transition documents to the press. One memo to the Energy Department asked for the names of any employees who have worked on President Barack Obama’s climate initiatives. Another memo to the State Department asked for details of existing programs aimed at promoting gender equality.

For the Obama team, the memos fueled fears that Trump officials will target holdovers from the Obama administration. And for the Trump team, the leaks signaled that Obama loyalists couldn’t be trusted.

Asked if there’s tension between Trump and Obama transition officials, one person on the Trump transition responded, “You mean other than leaking everyone’s requests?”

An Obama administration official countered, “If there is some skepticism on the part of those of us who are here it is because they came in guns blazing. It’s because you have transition teams coming in and looking more like congressional investigators.”

“They wanted to know what the politics were before the policy — and they wanted to know where the bodies were buried,” the official said.

People involved in the transition say Trump’s team is still trying to understand its power. One official at the Department of Energy carefully explained the department’s responsibilities to a Trump aide after the aide asked a series of questions that indicated he wasn’t quite sure about the department’s portfolio, a person familiar with the conversation said.

Trent Lott, a lobbyist close to several people on the transition, said the transition team was relying on lobbyists and others for lists of potential hires and policy recommendations. In some areas, like transportation, he said he was impressed by the hiring. And overall, he said, the team was “working aggressively, like a fruit basket turnover.”

But he said the team is still grappling with the sheer volume of work that needs to be completed in the coming months. “I talked to one person at the Pentagon, and he has to hire 400 people alone. They are really digging in fast, but I’m sure some of the agencies are going better than others."

The transition has largely ignored more obscure federal agencies, according to people close to the operation. One senior level Obama administration official said they were encouraging people to stay around and work hard in the upcoming months because Trump’s team was going to need the help and had thousands of unfilled jobs. Another official at a less well-known federal agency told POLITICO there has been almost no contact with the transition team, adding that the agency is “operating blind” when it comes to what will happen after Jan. 20.

Even major government entities aren’t getting attention. Sources close to the transition have described Trump’s staffing at the National Security Council and other foreign policy and defense agencies as a “black box,” leaving open the question of who will manage major crises.

“It’s still unclear how much work they’ve done on lining up deputy secretaries and other top political appointees within agencies,” said Clay Johnson, who oversaw the Bush-Cheney transition and cautioned that having those appointments in place is key to keeping agencies running smoothly.

For example, Trump’s delay naming his choice to lead the Department of Agriculture — one of the largest government departments — will put the incoming USDA head at a disadvantage, outgoing Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack recently told POLITICO.

Over the past several weeks, Vilsack has been critical of the Trump transition’s lack of engagement with USDA, a sprawling department with nearly 90,000 employees that works on everything from meat safety to crop insurance to food assistance for millions of Americans.

“It’s hard to start because you don’t have all your political appointees,” Vilsack said. “It makes it harder. There’s a terrific learning curve.”

Trump’s USDA transition effort got off to a slow start. As of mid-December, there was only one transition volunteer, Brian Klippenstein, showing up at the department — a stark contrast to other departments that had much larger staffs assigned to the job. The landing effort has grown in recent weeks.

“It’s increased to the extent that they have four or five people here,” Vilsack said. “But it’s still not as robust as it was in 2008 to 2009.”

At Veterans Affairs, officials were caught off guard by the pick of an Obama administration official, David Shulkin, to head the agency when they were told Trump wanted wholesale change.

Officials didn’t move in for several weeks at the Education Department, sources said, and Trump officials were difficult to reach over the holidays. Yet in a recent interview, John King, Obama’s secretary of education, praised two members of Trump’s transition team, and Obama officials say they have recently seen a flurry of activity. Some people who worried about the nomination of Betsy DeVos, a conservative and big backer of charter schools, as secretary have been heartened by candidates for other education posts.

At the State Department, people close to the transition say Trump’s team has gone out of its way to alienate people who criticized them during the campaign. They have circulated questionnaires that rattled many longtime observers of foreign policy. And they have brought few people into Foggy Bottom, leaving some Obama administration officials scratching their heads.

But Trump officials say they are carefully examining the entire department, and they argue the American people wanted a serious shift in foreign policy. Soon, one person in the transition said, there will be hundreds of hires and a clearer doctrine of policies. “It’s going to be a different State Department,” this person said. “And that’s what the American people voted for.”

Obama has been mostly circumspect about the transition, trying to maintain civility with Trump even though he knows the incoming president will reverse many of his policies. In a recent interview on “60 Minutes,” Obama said the transition is different because Trump was an “unconventional candidate” who didn’t “have the support of many of the establishment in his own party, because he ran sort of an improvisational campaign.”

“It’s unusual,” Obama said. “I’ll agree with that. And I suspect the president-elect would agree with that.”

Nancy Cook, Caitlin Emma, Eliana Johnson, Ted Hesson, Maggie Severns and Helena Bottemiller-Evich contributed to this report.

