Wearing yellow badges and traveling in groups of 10 or more, agency review teams for President-elect Barack Obama have swarmed into dozens of government offices, from the Pentagon to the National Council on Disability.
With pointed questions and clear ground rules, they are dissecting agency initiatives, poring over budgets and unearthing documents that may prove crucial as a new Democratic president assumes control. Their job is to minimize the natural tension between incoming and outgoing administrations, but their work also is creating anxiety among some Bush administration officials as the teams rigorously examine programs and policies.
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Many chosen for the teams come with high-level, firsthand knowledge of certain agencies.
“They were part of that culture; they understand the political issues as well as the bureaucratic issues,” said Melody C. Barnes, Obama’s incoming Domestic Policy Council director, who is helping with the agency reviews.
Much of the writing on transition teams ignores this type of agency-level review (although see the quotes by John Burke in the article).
A couple of years ago I was doing archival work at the LBJ Library in Austin and came across the “agency history” series that his administration wrote to aid the incoming administration. It was a curious mix of critique and shilling for the agencies. I don’t think anything has been written in the presidency or administrative lits on that type of “transition review” either.
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