WASHINGTON — If she wins in November, Vice President Kamala Harris may face a hostile, Republican-controlled Senate in no mood to confirm the senior Cabinet officials she’ll need to run her administration.
Anticipating that scenario, Harris’ team is exploring whether to keep in place some of the Biden administration officials who’ve already been confirmed by the Senate and wouldn’t need to face the gauntlet again, four people familiar with her transition planning said.
Her aides are also looking at the option of initially retaining some current officials so that she’d have more time to make staffing decisions. With only a few months to build a campaign after abruptly replacing President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, Harris has had little time to focus on the makeup of a new administration, the people familiar with the planning said.
Harris’ transition team has been identifying Cabinet members and ambassadors who might be willing to remain in their jobs after Biden’s term ends, though no formal inquiry has gone out asking them if they would stay, the sources said.
Entering office with Biden holdovers in tow carries political risk for Harris, undercutting her message that she’s a change agent who would take a fresh approach to governance.
A recent NBC News poll found that 40% of registered voters worried that a Harris presidency would be a continuation of the Biden years, versus 39% who said they were worried that a second Trump term would resemble the first.
Harris wants to leave her distinct imprint on the Cabinet, though, and would like to name the first woman to run the Pentagon as part of a broader shake-up of the national security team, allies said.
Harris also might ask some Cabinet members to remain indefinitely or put some Senate-confirmed officials into different jobs on an acting basis, according to the people familiar with the planning. (Federal law permits such moves.)
‘An interesting road’
Some Democratic senators and other party officials have reached out to her transition team to ask that Harris not call for the resignation of all of Biden’s appointees if she wins — just in case Republicans capture the Senate and gain control of the confirmation process, one of the people familiar with Harris’ transition planning said.
The electoral map is tough for Senate Democrats. Republicans stand a good chance of erasing the Democrats’ narrow 51-49 Senate majority in November, a hard reality that complicates Harris’ transition planning.
In the past, the Senate has shown deference to new presidents when it comes to appointing a Cabinet, a gesture meant to allow them to put their preferred team in place. But the creeping polarization in Washington has eroded bipartisan norms.
After becoming president in 2009, Barack Obama retained Robert Gates as defense secretary, making him the most prominent holdover from George W. Bush’s presidency. (Because Gates had already been confirmed, he didn’t need to win Senate approval to stay on).
Years later, Gates gave an oral interview and said that Senate confirmation had become so arduous that he was reluctant to fire people at the Pentagon because it would have been too difficult and time-consuming to get a new person confirmed.
“Polarization had gotten to the point on [Capitol] Hill where any senior confirmation in the national security arena was going to be tough,” Gates told the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “I just didn’t feel like we could afford the loss of time that would be involved in bringing new people on board.”
If Republicans control the Senate next year, Harris nominees could face withering scrutiny from GOP senators eager to weaken her at the start.
“The question of what to do with current appointees — at all levels — is something we have to deal with,” a person familiar with Harris’ transition work said.
Harris’ advisers are looking to history for guidance.
It’s been more than 35 years since the nation has undergone a transfer of power in which the outgoing and incoming presidents came from the same party.
Members of Harris’ transition team have studied that one — the handoff from Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush, both Republicans, after the 1988 election. They’ve also examined the transition planning that took place in 2016, when Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton ran to succeed Obama. She went on to lose to Donald Trump that year, so the transition never happened.
Harris’ team is operating under an unusually compressed timeline and is still building the basic apparatus needed to vet potential hires and staff an administration.
She inherited much of Biden’s campaign machinery when she became the presumptive nominee in July. But Biden didn’t need an especially robust transition operation. As a sitting president, he already had a team in place and had set his overall policies and direction.
When he ran in 2020, by contrast, Biden’s advisers were holding initial discussions about the transition that March.
No presidential campaign likes to talk publicly about transitions for fear of appearing overconfident. Yet transitions are important to a White House’s success in the first 100 days, the yardstick by which modern presidents are often judged.
Overall, a president makes more than 4,000 political appointments, about 1,300 of which need to be confirmed by the Senate.
Last month, Harris’ campaign appointed Yohannes Abraham to run the team that is preparing for a transfer of power. At the time, Abraham was the U.S ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), based in Indonesia. He came to his new role with direct experience, having been executive director of Biden’s transition in 2020.
Trump, too, began transition preparations relatively late. Like Harris, his campaign only named his transition team leaders in August.
“She obviously started late, but to her credit, she’s moved with dispatch in announcing her transition leadership,” said Max Stier, founding president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group that helps candidates plan presidential transitions. “Now, transitions are hard and there’s not a lot of time. She has an interesting road. Harris is neither a true incumbent nor a true challenger. There’s not a lot of precedent for that. But in terms of how she started, she started well.”
Find new Cabinet secretaries
If Harris becomes the first female president, she has privately told allies that she’d like to make history again by appointing the first female secretary of defense, two people familiar with the planning said.
Potential Pentagon chiefs include Christine Wormuth, now the secretary of the Army, and Kathleen Hicks, the deputy defense secretary, the people said. Another prospective candidate Michèle Flournoy, who was a senior defense official in the Obama administration.
“She’s somebody who’s just really beloved and respected within the building,” said Rosa Brooks, who served as counselor to Flournoy in the Pentagon.
Naming a female defense secretary “sends a very powerful message that will help other women break through all those glass ceilings,” Brooks added. For women “who finally have the ability to serve in combat roles in the military, it will be incredibly encouraging to them. It will shatter that glass ceiling in a way that I hope will have a permanent effect on the military and national security culture.”
Harris’ instinct is to install a different set of national security officials, some of whom don’t need to be confirmed by the Senate, two people familiar with her approach to the matter said. One exception may be CIA Director William Burns, they said. A former diplomat who has served under six presidents, Burns could stay on or serve in a different Cabinet position, the sources said.
One difference between Harris and Biden is that she tends to be more eclectic in her personnel choices. As a former prosecutor, state attorney general, senator and vice president, she has needed to rely on people with vastly different skills over a long career in public life.
Biden, by contrast, has cultivated a small network of trusted advisers who’ve remained in his inner circle as he’s moved from job to job.
“She understands the importance of having people who know her history and background and how she approaches the world. But she also values people who are experts in their field,” said Rohini Kosoglu, Harris’ former Senate chief of staff.
Two people whom Harris may consider for national security adviser — a White House staff position that doesn’t require Senate confirmation — are Julianne Smith, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, and Phil Gordon, who has been her vice presidential national security adviser, people familiar with the matter said.
Potential secretary of state candidates include Burns, Sens. Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, and Chris Coons, of Delaware, both Democrats; Linda Thomas-Greenfield, now the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; and Samantha Power, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Asked for comment, an official involved in Harris’ transition wrote in an email: “The lean transition team will not be making any personnel decisions pre-election.”
“There is no transition without a successful campaign,” the official said. “The focus right now is on the Harris-Walz campaign. As envisioned by the Presidential Transition Act, the vice president’s transition team is laying the groundwork to be able to support the vice president and her senior staff after election day.”
It’s unclear whether Harris would want to find jobs for other marquee Biden-era figures. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, himself a former presidential candidate, has become a familiar face in Biden’s Cabinet, venturing onto Fox News with some frequency to defend the administration’s policies before a conservative audience.
A person close to Buttigieg said it’s “too early to say” whether he would leave Washington after Biden’s term ends.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has also become a fierce pro-Harris surrogate on the airwaves. She appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Wednesday in what she called her “personal capacity.”
Asked about a recent comment by Trump that he will be women’s “protector,” Raimondo said: “How did we get here? Let’s extinguish him for good.”
Clarifying what she meant by “extinguish,” Raimondo added: “Vote him out. Banish him from American politics.”
“We have an answer,” Raimondo said. “We have a remarkably talented candidate who is sincere, who’s pragmatic, who’s open. Let’s just get it done.”