The transition of power from Barack Obama’s administration to Donald Trump’s has begun. We answer the when, what and how

When does President Trump take office?

At noon on Friday, 20 January 2017. Until his inauguration, neither Donald Trump, his family or his staff can take possession of the property or offices of the federal government (other than the transition spaces provided by the General Services Administration).

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Isn’t that a really long time from now?

Yes, compared to parliamentary systems, but it used to be much longer. When the US constitution was written, the inauguration date and the first day that a new Congress could be seated were set as 4 March because the difficulties of travel – and particularly travel during the winter months – made an earlier start date for the incoming administration inconceivable to the drafters. It wasn’t until the 20th amendment was ratified in 1933 that the president’s inauguration was moved forward to 20 January and the seating of Congress changed to 3 January.

That amendment was introduced by Nebraska senator George Norris in 1923 in an effort to crack down on what was then a common and widely disliked practice of legislating by lame-duck Congresses. In that, the amendment was entirely unsuccessful, as lame-duck sessions of Congress still often pass legislation not expected to be approved in a succeeding legislative session.

What happens in the meantime?

While each administration-to-be is slightly different, it’s standard practice for the president-elect to announce his cabinet choices during the transition and for the new Senate (which will be seated on 3 January) to hold confirmation hearings prior to the inauguration to allow for seamless transitions in the top roles.

They will also vet potential nominees and appointees, trying to identify whether there are potential conflicts of interest that could scuttle nominations, and help prepare nominees for the security clearance process.

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The transition team is said to have delivered lists of three potential nominees for each of 15 cabinet positions last week, when each of the 22 transition team department heads submitted their transition plans to Trump. Politico reports that they were asked to work off Trump’s public statements and give strong preferences to nominees with business experience as well as longstanding supporters of Trump’s campaign.



They were also asked to identify executive orders Trump could easily rescind or issue and relevant items that Obama had refused to approve, like the building of the Keystone XL pipeline. One of the departments, according to the Wall Street Journal, is exclusively developing a plan for how Trump can quickly act on his signature campaign issue: the border wall. Other teams are reportedly examining how to re-open the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), which entered into force in 1994, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which has been signed by the United States but not ratified by the US Senate.

Trump and his top aides will also receive the same national security briefings as Barack Obama in the coming weeks.

Who is in the transition team?

The team is currently headed by New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, and former Utah governor Mike Leavitt is an adviser. CNN reports former George W Bush officials and former Mitt Romney staffers are working for the team, as well as “advisers from the Hill” and several governors.

CNN also reports that Trump’s transition team is smaller than in past years, comprising only 80 employees who are said to be consulting 200 experts, though that number is likely to grow as campaign staff moves to the transition team.

The Wall Street Journal suggests they may have trouble recruiting other members for the team, since Trump has announced that anyone working on the transition team will be prohibited from lobbying the administration for five years, essentially eliminating anyone who has agency expertise and is currently using that expertise professionally.

Former New Jersey state senator Rich Bagger, who worked for Christie in New Jersey, is executive director. Publicly identified members include former Heritage Foundation president Ed Feulner, former US navy officer and longtime adviser to the Boston Consulting Group Ron Nicol, private equity fund chairman William Walton, former chief economist at Bear Stearns David Malpass, former House member Mike Rogers, retired army lieutenant general Joseph Keith Kellogg, former Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell, Reagan attorney general Ed Meese, George W Bush’s director of the office of personnel management Kay Coles James, former George HW Bush economic adviser and Romney transition alumnus William Hagerty, former George W Bush liaison to health and human services and Romney alum Jamie Burke, and former Dick Cheney domestic policy aide Ado Machida.

The immigration team is reportedly exclusively made up of staffers with ties to Senator Sessions.

How many posts will Trump have to fill?

There are about 4,000 positions in the executive branch, including the White House, that are filled by appointment. About 1,200 of those positions (not including federal judges) require confirmation by the Senate, including cabinet nominees and agency heads.

It generally takes between six and nine months to fill all the positions requiring Senate approval, and well over a year to fill the mid-level positions not requiring confirmation.

What challenges will Trump face?

Very few members of Trump’s transition team will have any familiarity with the post-election transition process. Vetting nominees is an often-fraught process in which administrations quite regularly miss or think unimportant parts of their preferred appointees’ backgrounds that may be disqualifying – think Zoë Baird’s undocumented nanny, Tim Geithner’s tax mistakes and Bernard Kerik’s undocumented nanny, mistresses and gift-taking.

Though the transition is allocated $5m from the federal budget, it often costs more to complete – Obama’s cost $9m, and he relied on his donor base to fund the costs above and beyond that which was allocated by the government.

And, while the external focus is often on the nominees and policy planning process, there are hundreds of quotidian tasks that need to be accomplished, like setting up the technological infrastructure of an administration, assigning office space and equipment, ordering stationary and the like, which can easily be lost in the shuffle. In 2009, the first 50 Obama staffers found themselves with no computers or paper on which to start their jobs after the inauguration.

What happens if there are any difficulties with appointments?

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Because of the Democrats’ decision in 2013 to eliminate the ability of the minority party to filibuster nominations, Trump is likely to encounter little effective opposition in the Senate to confirming his nominees.

It is nonetheless standard practice for all of an administration’s 4,000-plus appointees to tender their resignations on inauguration day. In many cases, their jobs will be done by career agency staff on an interim basis until the positions are filled. It’s unclear whether the Trump administration’s reported intention to make it easier to fire non-appointed government employees will enter into effect while those employees are tasked with making his government function.

Has it always run smoothly in the past?

In addition to problems with appointees and the well-documented Travelgate scandal of the Clinton administration, the outgoing Clinton administration removed the letter W from many of the White House’s computer keyboards in addition to the more standard memento-taking by rogue staffers, earning them opprobrium from the General Accounting Office in 2002. George W Bush and Obama both warned staffers not to play pranks on the next administration’s staffers in subsequent years.