Context, where, for example, when we seized 800 million in Swiss Bank Accounts that belonged to the corrupt uzbeki official in the silicon case, there was one claimant to that money, the government of uzbekistan. So we see that. Thats obviously something that the people who were involved in the wrongdoing were associated with the government of uzbekistan. So we wouldnt necessarily be willing to agree to give the money back to them, because they might put it back in a different pocket. So in the hypocrisy context, thats a typical thing where whatever government, whatever the constitution was, that government will claim an interest in the funds. So we do deal with that. We generally fight that. We recognize the entire government is not corrupt and that the government itself was a victim, in some way, of the corruption of this official but we try to work to get the money, to the extent we are giving money back to the country, we work to get the money back in a different way so we can be sure its not going to be used either corrupt officials just to be put into a different swiss bank account. I have not seen in the ftpa context, but i can see that similar rationales may apply. That we do not want to give money that was paid to get contracts through bribes back to a potentially the same officials got the bribes. Susan well, please join me in ell forg leslie caldw this wonderful presentation, particularly with regard to transparency. The fact that youre here and talking about these important issues. P for the karen pop perspective from practice. I think we were able to get a nice balance of issues and something i think develop the issues with perspective from the government and the private sector. Thank you very much for coming. Please join me in thanking the panelists. [applause] and we will have a reception outside across the hall. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2016] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] Republican Donald Trump is elected as the next president of the United States. And the nation alexa a controlled house and senate. Watch live on cspan the transition. Watch ondemand on cspan. Org. Or listen on our free cspan radio app. Now, a look at the president ial transition process and what challenges await the next demonstration. Speakers include a former advisor to president will ofnton and former chief staff to first lady laura bush. This was hosted by the National Press foundation. Chris welcome. I am chris adams, the director of training at the National Press foundation. I will be introducing our panel here in a second. Sandy told you her transition story, i will give you my one brief transition story. 2000, most interesting transition in my lifetime, i was working at the wall street journal, i was in the midst of a longterm project that had nothing to do with politics. Everyone in my newsroom was working on the transition but me. So we are going to talk today about transition. We have three panels, a panel of experts, reporters, and two experts talking about the revolving door issue. What we are trying to help you figure out is what happens when you wake up on a cold day in january and all of your sources are gone. For reporters, that is what today is about. Strategies on how you can prepare for, what stories you should be looking for, how you build new sources in the new administration and the stories you want to do, like the old standby stories. For the politicians and the administration, it is a matter of efficiency and speed in getting the president s new agenda enacted. These are some numbers from the david eagle center for president ial transition. A new administration is likely to get its appointees confirmed fastest in the first year of its administration. It has only 73 days to do so. If it wants to get them in place by the start. And there is 4000 president ial appointees to try to get through the process. That is what we will be talking about today, our three experts, david eagles, the director of the center for president ial transition of the partnership for public service, he will tell you what pivotal role they are playing in the transition this year for both potential administrations. Anita mcbride, executive in residence at the center for congressional and president ial studies at the school of Public Affairs at American University and a veteran of incoming and outgoing transitions with the reagan, george h. W. Bush, and george w. Bush administrations. And william galston. A senior fellow for the Governance Studies Program at the Brookings Institution and a veteran of the bill clinton transition process. The first session is 75 minutes. Each of them will give a brief view of some of the most important things they see and that they have experienced in their transitions. And then it will in for 30 to 35 minutes of q a, because that is what most of you want to do. We will start with david. David eagles. David thank you. Appreciate your time. Thanks for talking about president ial transition. I want to take a quick step, understand the sheer scope and magnitude of what we are talking about here. These president ial transitions are massive. They are inheriting a 4 trillion dollar apparatus. There are hundreds of federal agencies. There are 4000 political appointments. 1100 of those have to go through the senate. And there are only 73 days. There is generally not a lot of experience in this process. There are generally not a lot of folks leaving and there are not a lot of folks coming in. What has happened is this is a reinvent the wheel exercise, a groundhog day exercise that every incoming team has gone through. Not only is it big and complicated, it is also a time of vulnerability for the country. By and large, the white house is virtually empty, the original files are virtually gone. There are no hard drives, or they wiped hard drives for the incoming team, and historically, there are no instruction manuals when they come in. And there is really an interesting time around the inauguration, where it is very vulnerable for the country as well. Also no incoming president really has done this very well. Because it is a reinvent the wheel exercise, this is the first time you have seen both teams planning this effort early. Because of the legislation that has passed, they have space and logistics provided by the government. This is only the second time in history we have done that. Governor romney dated four years ago and went to town on it. He had several hundred people preelection focused on this. This whole thing is one big epic corporate takeover. Except the big difference is 4000 of your top people quit in the exact same hour. In this process, you get virtually note due diligence, so you do not know what you have so you doyou not know what you have bought into after the election. It is a six to 12 month process, you have ceo succession plans and you review the financial statements. Here, there is virtually nothing. There is an opportunity to do so much better. What i mean by that every , president coming in nearly a year after they have been elected, are getting less than one third of their people in office. They are not getting their top people in place. Even today in the federal government this is not only president obama, this is every modern president one in five senior positions are vacant. We have to ask yourselves why, what is happening, why is it taking so long, why are there these senior vacancies, and we found couple of things. One is that first of all these , teams are not starting early enough. They are not managing this process strategically. That is why we feel if these teams take a step back, this is one of the greatest opportunities to make government more effective. It is the only time these teams can understand how they want their government to work. It is very difficult once you are in office. All of our research and interviews show once you are in the presidency, you are hit with ufos, or unforeseen occurrences, all the time. This is that time they have to maximize. They historically have not gotten their people through, and once you are in office, you cannot catch up. That is why youre seeing these type of vacancy rates that we see out there now. Secondly from the campaign , promise perspective, we are in the midst of a few days left, of the silly season of the campaign, they are making Campaign Promises, transition is what connects those Campaign Promises into the government. Understand how to execute them. So they will develop the teams now or developing 100 day plans or 200 day plans, thinking about their Campaign Promises, how do you execute them within the federal environment. This is an extremely complicated business that is the u. S. Federal government, the largest, most complex, and powerful entity on earth. So if you want to keep the country safe and prosperous, these teams have to start now. It,cannot afford particularly in the post9 11 environment. This is why the Bush Administration started early. That is pretty much what i wanted to leave you with. Eagles, part of the partnership for public service. We are committed to making government more effective. We are nonpartisan and nonprofit. We have been working with the team since spring. In april, we convened all five Senior Campaign officials, the candidates who are still in office, pulled them offsite for two days to talk about governing the country. It is the first time we have seen that this early. As an american, super proud to see a safe, nonpartisan environment where these teams could talk about governing this entity, which is the u. S. Federal government. Since then, we have been working closely with the teams. Both are committed to the effective transition, which is exciting and the understand the importance of governing this country. Anita thank you. That really helped to frame things. I will talk a little bit more from the practitioner point of view. I want to pick up on something that sandy mentioned you never know who your source is going to be for information. I think that was very illustrative. I can speak to that for a minute. In 1994, when congress split from democrat to republican almost after 50 years, people who were in the opposition working behind the scenes that could be in leadership at some point. So it is important to be cultivating those relationships. Particular went it comes to transitions on the senate side, who will be in the position of overseeing the nominations process for any Senate Confirmed appointment, because they could be a stumbling block to the nominations of a president elect or they can be a real help. So it is really a good, illustrative example of knowing who is on the hill. Chris, thank you for inviting me to participate. I want to focus on a couple of key areas. Really, what role does the Outgoing Administration play in ensuring that there is a smooth transfer of power. My answer to that is it plays the most important role, because they set the tone, the outgoing president and his team will set the tone on how the transition is viewed by the American Public, about how the transition is handled by the incoming team as well. We will take a lot from the First Encounter that the president elect and the outgoing president have. Particularly if it is a dramatic change, if donald trump wins, given all the rhetoric that has happened in this campaign. That will be a moment that everyone will have eyes on and will set the tone for what may happen. Because it has been such a visceral election. Obviously, if this is mrs. Clinton these are two people that know each other, he is campaigning for her, my assumption is all of the assets and resources that the Outgoing Team can provide will be there and that the tone will be set very early as a positive one. So the role of an Outgoing Administration in ensuring a smooth transition is setting the tone. It is really important that the president do that and do that well. And by extension, that they give direction to all of their staff, not only in the white house but to the departments and agencies as well, to be open and transparent in providing the information that an incoming team would know. So what are the greatest obstacles for an incoming team . The greatest obstacle is they do not know what they do not know. Particularly if it is a trump presidency, how do these people , who may be because this has been an election based on dramatic change and overhauling the government, from top to the anticipation that people want to come in and blow the whole thing up is probably pretty highly likely. So who are what tone is going to be set by the incoming team, how open are they to learning how the government does work. As david said, extremely context. Trillions of dollars, thousands of people work, hundreds of thousands of people work in these federal bureaucracies. And you do have 4000 pivotal positions to put in there to run the government the way you want it to be run. So a great obstacle for the incoming team is to admit what they do not know. Having good people on their Transition Teams, which are in place now, to understand what is happening in the agencies, what are some of the things that are on the table, what are some of the things in the hopper that agencies, through regulation or policies, are getting ready to do, and how is that different from what you have campaigned on, what you have promised to do . And the personnel that you need to select and be ready to go in at the end of that 73 days to actually execute on what the electorate has asked you to do. How has the transition process improved or changed . You heard chris mention about the transition of 2000. Really, that is one that no future president should ever experience. In a post9 11 world, it would certainly put any white house and the American People, by extension, at great risk. You think about the number of days we did not know who was going to be president of the United States the decision was not made until december 12 of 2000. So there could be no official transition process. There could be no official conversation between an Outgoing Administration and the incoming team. George w. Bush, the president elect well, i cannot even say that. The george w. Bush Campaign Team was operating in arlington, virginia, in offices that were acquired by dick cheney, the candidate, acquired by him and paid for privately. There were no government resources. People like me, who had worked in previous transitions, were called up. I was never expecting to go back to into the government. I had my time working for Ronald Reagan and george h. W. Bush. But i had been in personnel and management administration. I had been director of white house personnel. I understood how the process worked, i knew how to offload people, how to onboard people, and the critical connection between security and Personnel Management and administration. So i was asked to come help, and it was a very dramatically different experience, because you were kind of operating in the shadows, you were trying to be ready and have things ready to go if the decision was going to be that it was george w. Bush to become president of the United States. But if he did not, then all of those resources just collapsed. The private money had to be raised to make those offices available. Once the decision was made by the supreme court, then all of these assets and resources General Services administration, things that are provided by the government, could kick in, and you had a very quick turnaround to move into transition space, which is downtown, closer to the white house, and you could get to have conversations. But the conversations, you could imagine, were not all that easy. That was a very tense time. There was a call in question, particularly by Vice President gore, that this was really the right decision. There were personal tensions. But nonetheless, the process worked. And there was a transfer of power that all of us expect and americans are entitled to have once the Campaign Rhetoric is over in the business of and the business of governing begins. But that was a very illustrative experience for george w. Bush and for a lot of us on the team. Basically, with the underlying premise for him, for any future president , president elect, should not face a transition like that. It was not the way we should be doing business. But we learned from that. And then, of course, came 9 11. So the stakes were even so much higher in a transfer of power. And what it led to in late 2007, early 2008, president george w. Bush really executed an executive order creating a transition network, began to put a framework, an early framework, around having conversations between the Outgoing Administration and whoever the incoming team may be. So what did that look like . That meant every department and agency and every White House Office was charged with putting together documentation, we put it in binders, all welldocumented, provided, tabbed, with what you can expect on day one. What are some of the things that that this particular office i was chief of staff to laura bush, the first lady. What are the things you can expect in a calendar year . What are the things that you can anticipate . That was done for every single office, so there was a hands off of excellently documented information that provided a template and a framework that we still are using until today. What also opened up an opportunity for, once there was the decision, november 6 in 2000, an early meeting between barack obama and george w. Bush, and we began to have conversations with incoming teams that have been named by president elect obama. They came in and met with us in our offices in the white house began to have an exchange. ,it really was a very dramatically different experience