Jonathan McBride Oral History, interview 2

We just want to say for the record this is our second session with Jonathan McBride for the Barack Obama Oral History Project, and that we always start in the second go-round by asking if was there anything you thought of after we had our first session, some weeks ago, that you wanted to start with? If not I’m going to turn things over to Katie. She, Jim, and Nancy put together a superb list of questions. Did you get those questions from our scheduler?

I did, and I went and spent some time with some of the folks I worked closely with from Leg. [Legislative] Affairs for that middle portion. It was actually a really funny exercise because we were all struggling to put all the chronology back. We remember what happened; we just couldn’t remember the sequencing. So we were Googling and talking for about 40 minutes. We think we got it roughly together.

There are a couple of things where I might say, “Hey, go stress-test our memory on the sequence of things.” Per our conversation last time, I wanted to construct a much better narrative for you around the relationships with the Hill and the various things that were going on. You call them exogenous or macro factors; we felt like they were very micro. [laughter] They felt very much like day-to-day. But yes, I wanted to give you a much better, more informed view on that.

Perfect. Because she is modest, Katie may not mention it, but she’s just published an article in Presidential Studies Quarterly that will probably relate to some of those things that you’re going to be talking about.

She’ll remember it better than I will. It’ll be fantastic to prompt my memory. We had some very interesting conversations, but the narrative was very consistent among us, so what I’m going to tell you today is a pretty well-shared view across a bunch of people, which means it has a prospect of being close to the truth.

Well, even better. There is all the more reason to thank, again, Katie and Nancy and Jim for developing this set of questions. With that, unless you have anything else to add, Jonathan, I’ll pass things off to Katie.

OK, great. Thank you so much. Jonathan, thanks for doing the homework beforehand and getting hold of your other colleagues. That’s really, really helpful for everybody. We’ll just start broadly, with a general question, and one way to step into those waters is to think about any major corporation. They have large HR [human resources] departments, and they care a lot about personnel. They care a lot about the people they’re hiring. The White House, on the other hand, has a much smaller personnel division, and from the outside looking in it’s hard to understand how it’s organized, so the first question just has to do with whether it’s broken down by Schedule Cs, Senate confirmations? Is it broken down by executive departments, White House jobs? If you could just talk to us generally about how the PPO [Presidential Personnel Office] is organized, that would be terrific.

Yes. One comment first on the comparative with the private sector, in case that’s part of what you want to talk about, just one quick thing. If you took my former employer, BlackRock, and on January 20th of next year you said, “OK, Larry, you and the top four layers of management all are leaving tomorrow. We have a replacement coming in, and she’s bringing a new head of HR with her. We’re going to start hiring people to backfill your role, and oh, by the way, the U.S. Senate’s going to be involved in deciding on a third of those, while BlackRock continues to manage $10 trillion of other people’s money.” How might that go? [laughter] Right?

That’s insane.

It’s a peaceful transition of government, but it’s messy. That’s an incredible thing, and that’s where the vacancies are going to come in. I know we’re going to talk about that. But you have to really think about that. Remember, on top of that, the first person who runs PPO is usually somebody who’s very close with the candidate and has been their confidante and advisor probably on a couple of senior conversations with people on the campaign and other things during the campaign. But it’s not necessarily somebody who’s ever run personnel before. They grab people from the campaign, who usually tend to be policy experts or have some domain expertise, and definitely know the people on the campaign, the people who are important and who matter, but they have never hired anybody necessarily, or they’ve never run a personnel process, or whatever the case may be.

Then for some reason they walk into a system where all the work that other people have done has disappeared, and you have to rebuild it each time. There’s technology. There are systems. Because it’s usually going from one party to another, they’re not going to pass all that information off.

We thought we were going to get a really good test case with Hillary Clinton if she had won, because it would be the first time in a while—When [Ronald W.] Reagan transitioned to [George H. W.] Bush, the Bush people fired all the Reagan people. They started from scratch, even though they didn’t necessarily need to. There was a little bit of a handoff, but it was pretty stark, if you go back and look at it. We were hoping Clinton was going to come in and say, “We’re going to keep a lot of people in place and not worry about them right now. We’re only going to replace the people we really need to keep this thing going.” So from an efficiency standpoint, that was going to be a very interesting exercise that didn’t happen.

Then you have a personnel office that hires about 2,300 people a year. That’s the same number BlackRock was hiring, with 17,000 employees, with an HR department of 600 people, and a budget of tens of millions of dollars. You have no budget. You’ve got about 50 people, plus another 40 in the agencies, none of whom had done this before, probably. That’s the stark reality, which is why a lot of times that first summer when the head of PPO turns over—A lot of times the people who come in even in that first wave or the second wave a year later, one of them is usually from a search firm who understands basic search, because they think, Wait, we need to come up with a system. If you want to frame this for average readers, people need to understand that’s what we’re talking about.

How it’s organized has been pretty consistent back, to my understanding, to the [William J.] Clinton days. That was the first time that PPO was organized this way specifically, or when this became pretty static, because someone came in from a search firm—again, in that first summer, less than a year in—and organized so you have a director of the office, you have a deputy director of the office, who split the responsibilities generally, but the director’s usually managing the personalities at the top and getting decisions made. The deputy director’s usually helping run the office. That’s how you usually had an AP, an Assistant to the President, and then a Deputy Assistant to the President. Then you have Special Assistants to the President that sit over policy domains or talent pools that are somewhat alike. Energy and environment is often one.

You usually have the lawyers and DOJ [Department of Justice] in a bucket with some other things, like HUD [Housing and Urban Development] and other things. You usually had an economics cluster that would have Treasury, Commerce, USTR [United States Trade Representative], et cetera. You definitely have a national security cluster every single time. There would be a separate boards and commissions group, because those are part-time; you spend all eight years or four years trying to fill them. You actually never get to 100 percent filled; it’s just a steady stream of part-time commissions, which are about a third of the total headcount that a President has to fill, so it’s not small; it’s significant.

Is there one for Ambassadors?

Ambassadors are usually in national security, but they have their own little thing that goes on. Importantly, sheriffs, judges, attorneys, marshals, in our case, that was run by the White House counsel’s office, not by us. That was a whole separate process that they ran distinctly. That continues today, and it requires a whole level of intention. It’s like a talent pool that funnels down from a bunch of people. It’s systems where people pick up from where you left off. That’s a distinct process other than what we’re talking about.

OK, so just one quick question. It’s organized based on topic of expertise, so that would include White House appointments and executive branch, right?

Well, not White House appointments. White House appointments are run by the EOP [Executive Office of the President] admin [administrative] office, so it’s run as a separate process, run by the White House itself. However, because there’s an interest in the agencies in some of these appointments over time, because you’re often pulling people from the agency, what ended up happening in practice is we ended up working very closely with the folks in the White House. Candidly, when you start to think the way we did, which is we want to retain people, that means we want to proactively move them around. The White House becomes part of that, because you want to pluck people from the agency, bring them to the White House [unclear] college, and vice versa, because you want cross-fertilization. You need people to understand the two sides of that phone when they’re calling.

What about CEQ [Council on Environmental Quality] or EOP units?

In the EOP, there are offices that are distinct, so CEQ runs through the PPO process. OMB runs through the PPO process. Independent offices that are set up in statute are appointed, but DPC [Domestic Policy Council], the Chief of Staff’s Office, Leg. Affairs, Comms [Communications]—That’s all run through the White House. Those are the statutory structural offices.

We ended up being very involved in the Chief Technology Office of the United States and the CIO [chief information officer], because we’re technically part of OSTP [Office of Science and Technology Policy]. I was personally involved in Todd Park coming into the role, and then when we replaced Todd with Megan [J. Smith] we were very involved in that, again, because it reported up through OSTP. If it had reported into the Chief of Staff’s office we might have been asked to help out, but it wouldn’t have been our domain, technically.

Nancy or Barbara, do you have any other questions about how it’s organized?

Just to answer one question, in the Personnel Office there are no career civil servants.

There are no what?

There were no career civil servants in the Personnel Office. There were careerists in other offices like Ethics, and so on, and Documents, other offices we had to work with, who supported some political appointments in some of those offices, so we did work with careerists on certain parts of the process, and definitely back and forth with the agency, but PPO was entirely staffed with Presidential appointments.

That was actually your second question, Katie, on your list—whether or not there were any career people in PPO.

Yes. Jonathan read my mind. [laughter]

OK, got it.

I knew the question was going to come up so I thought I would just answer it. The offices varied quite a bit. In OMB it was run by the careerists. You put your appointments in, but they’d better be acceptable to the career civil service or that’s just not going to work. They are very powerful, and deep, deep subject matter experts. There are other offices where the political appointments really do dominate quite a bit. It just varies by office.

So there are no careerists in PPO who can help you with managing the submission of the nominations or how to deal with the withdrawal or any of those formalities?

Well, you have people you can consult, and this goes to your questions about OPM [Office of Personnel Management]. What ended up happening invariably was a guy named Michael Grant—have you heard that name yet?

Is he still there? Michael Grant?

He’s still around. Michael Grant was the White House liaison, among other things, in OPM—the interlocutor between my office and OPM for Obama, Clinton, [Jimmy] Carter, maybe one before that—for 35, 40 years. He was the institutional knowledge. Like a lot of people, he would just materialize out of the dust when the Democrats won an election and would show up in the transition office, because everybody knows him. There’d be other people like this, but he was one of the linchpins. He was the one who would say, “OK, this is how the last person, the last group of people, did it. Here are all the things you need to know structurally about how people can get hired. Here are the mechanics and everything else.” There were other people who were helpful, but that one guy did it for multiple administrations in the OPM office.

We don’t know if he’s there now, right?

He finally has decided to retire. [laughter] But you can get to him if you want to talk to him, because he’s sent me notes a couple of times through LinkedIn. I know people who’ve been in touch with him, and I know he was advising on this transition. I don’t think he was in a formal position, but I know he was advising the Biden administration.

Katie Marshall might know him.

Yes. He sounds integral to the government, like he can’t quit.

He has a wealth of knowledge and is a unique figure on many levels. It will be wildly entertaining if you talk to him. He knows all of this stuff. He’s also interesting. He will be a really good source of comparison of how the different offices did a couple of things. The questions I would ask him are a couple of core ones. One is this: on the spectrum of the White House making all the appointments and putting them in agencies, to the President seeing this as a house of brands, and you’ve got CEOs [chief executive officers] who are going to make these determinations, where was each of these administrations on this spectrum, and where would you put Obama?

I’d give you my answer, but I’d be interested to see what his answer is. I would definitely ask that question. I would ask the approach to the ramp-up, like who got organized faster and how, what were some of the key issues, especially with the Biden group, where they got ahead and then they fell behind. What was all that about? The transfer of knowledge being next to zero other than with someone like him, he can give you an inside scoop on that.

That’s part of what that act in 2012 was meant to do. It was meant to start to make this a little more sensical and logical. There was a series of things passed both in and around that, where GSA [General Services Administration], for instance, can engage both campaigns, starting in May: offices and resources, support them in technology. Ideally some of this stuff becomes a little more sensical and structured. It’s still a long way from being how you would design it if you could. If you could take a pencil and design it on a piece of paper, there’s no way you would design it this way, period.

Yes. One thing that really pops out to me—and maybe you don’t know the answer, but maybe Michael Grant does—why would PPO surrender all the really important legal appointments to the White House counsel’s office? It’s not like the NEC [National Economic Council] is taking the econ [economy] appointments, or Domestic Policy is taking all the domestic types of hiring, et cetera.

Because usually White House counsel says he or she wants him, and usually the White House counsel gets what they want, [laughter] just to be blunt. It is a specialized process, and you’re going to need a team of lawyers to vet these people legally at a level—You’d have to bring in a whole team at PPO with that level of knowledge, because they’re going to have to go at these people and murder board them intensively on their actual legal discipline and beliefs, so you need high-powered lawyers talking to high-powered lawyers, and we would be borrowing the interview talent from the White House counsel’s office anyway.

We had a couple of people on our staff to do that for really important—Pamela [unclear], for one—She was one of the main ones—Michael Camuñez before that, who was a very successful lawyer and was in and out of the White House counsel’s office, which is very common for people, and Doug Kramer.

We had some people who were really high-powered who could do that, but you need an army, especially now when people are trying to put so many of them in place during their tenure. They start from Day One, and they start with a list that was probably made during the campaign. It would be a whole other arm of PPO. In many White Houses—not all; I think in some White Houses it might be integrated, I’m not sure, but in the Democratic, at least as far as I can tell, the last couple, it’s always been separate.

And because we talked about the lack of institutionalization and institutional memory, from your perspective do you think that this organization is ideal in the platonic form of how it should be organized? Or what would you do, having been in the private sector for a while since then?

The other reason for designing it that way, with the judges separate, is because you’re dealing with different people on the Hill, and they care differently about these things. It’s a more intensive process, and there’s more bartering going on around specifically which people are getting which seats, so it’s better to keep it as a whole, rather than getting it mired down into some debate over who’s going to be running the PBGC [Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation] or something like that, which is what happens after a short period of time.

You start making these very strange deals based on the personalities involved, with jobs that have nothing to do to each other. These packages come through and everybody’s thinking, How did that package get through? It’s because of that person and that person. So—

That’s like the sausage-making thing going on, right?

The sausage-making thing is real. I’ve only ever watched one episode, but oddly it happened to be this one, of Veep: There is a scene in Veep where Julia Louis-Dreyfus is talking to one of her staff members, I think a Senator, and I think a House Member about appointments, and, hands down, more than in West Wing or anything else, that ten minutes is 100 percent how it happens. I was listening to it and I thought, Holy crap! They nailed this. They really got it down. I was watching the credits afterward, and somebody who worked for me—who was very junior, by the way—was an advisor on that show. [laughter] Julia Louis-Dreyfus added her own personality to it, which was just magical, but it was real.

This is one of the things I want to say. I was talking about this, and checking everyone else’s memory about this. I don’t think this is true now, but thematically, when we came in, you still had your Cabinet. The rule with the Senate was a President gets their Cabinet. If you look back, we had Daschle fall out for something material, and then we had a couple of other people—Nancy Killefer, who was Deputy Director for Management, Budget, a couple of others, for some tax stuff—but [Timothy F.] Geithner got through.

People got through who had some, when you look back on it, not insignificant things. If you look at that first year, there was not a lot of fighting going on over who we were going to get. There were a couple of people who had some things that were flags that disqualified them that later wouldn’t have been an issue, but we pulled them out early because you don’t want to drag your agenda down by fighting over somebody. You probably pull people earlier than you should.

The first year and even the second year we got a lot of the people we wanted. The question was could we get them up and get them through. There were some outliers in general, but that was also when we had the busiest legislative agenda, so there is some linearity between your legislative agenda and your appointments. You probably want to look at it to see which wanes faster. There’s probably one that’s a leading indicator and one a lagging.

Appointments are an easier thing to measure because they’re more frequent. But everyone’s recollection was that the first couple of years were great on the legislative front and pretty good on the appointments front, and when it started to derail wasn’t the midterms; it was in August with health care before the midterms, when we didn’t get the bill to the floor, and narrowly missed it because we had the votes, so it would have been going through before August.

That August recess with all those town halls would never have happened. Well, it would have happened, but it would have happened over a bill that was just signed, and it would have been one of those really quick coups. We would have moved on to something else, but because we didn’t make it, that August turned into that August, and the Martha’s Vineyard trip the President took where he had a huge discussion with his team about what we were going to go for or not.

That was the beginning of what was—while there are stair steps in this pattern, it was a direction that everybody agrees was going to happen anyway. We can look at certain events, like [Harry M.] Reid’s nuclear option, and all these things we could talk about, but those are train stops in the year where people were reacting, and reacting to the context that was already building.

I actually went back and looked at when was it when that Representative [Joe Wilson] yelled, “You lie!” to the President in the Chamber. It was year one, September 9th, 2009, in a joint session of Congress, where he was talking about health care and immigrants, and he yelled. That was eight months in. I thought it was a year and a half in. I thought it was much later. That was eight months in, and he fundraised on that the next week. He had his best week of fundraising in his political career the week after that.

The point was these were all things under the water. There was still some belief that Presidents get their people, and that that halo, as well as a majority in the Senate, a majority in the House, helped us get through those first couple of years. But it was tough because you still had 60 votes that you had to get, so there was still a debate and a fight that started well before we lost the Senate and things got really, really messy. It was already building, and there were moments along the way, which we’ll talk about.

The year 2010 was important as the margins closed, but after that it was more flexing. People were flexing and talking about the election and everything else, but there wasn’t really teeth to it. It was really 2012 and 2013 with the step down, the switch of the Senate. That’s when things really, really got hard, but they were already going to get hard, just to be clear. It was going to be very hard. It’s just, I always feel, a little harder when you don’t have a majority.

Right. Why don’t we move to the next question? If you think about the White House, and you’re thinking about PPO, I’m really curious to understand how PPO fits into the sea of the White House, which offices it tends to interact with most frequently, and which offices are more integral to its accomplishments and efforts. Maybe you could identify some of those and explain why those other units were helpful.

In year one there’s probably no more central office than the PPO. That’s why the first head of PPO is usually a very close friend of the President’s, because one, they need to be able to walk into the Oval Office whenever, because it’s just that high volume, and the President’s still very involved; but, two, they need to be a force multiplier for the President. They need to be able to sit in the room without the President and talk like the President, and have everybody follow them like the President, so the President doesn’t have to be there.

The first head of PPO is almost always a very close friend and confidant who has no intention of being there for more than six or seven months, which happens over and over again. They think, OK, I’ll do this job. I don’t really want to do it, but I’ll do it because it’s super important. And the reason is because they spend that six months constructing a Cabinet and everything else, and having all those people be people that probably said it took too long but they are generally happy with them. For every one of those people, there are nine world-famous, important people who hate their guts, because there are nine people who got promised something at some point by somebody, and they probably were, and they think they’re besties with the President, and they’re realizing they’re not. So you spend a lot of time calling people and disappointing them at a very high level, so the job’s brutal. Plus you don’t sleep for about eight months.

So Cathy Russell was a perfect pick in your mind, then, because she had worked with Biden for decades.

Yes, Don Gips and what’s-his-name from Bush’s administration was there for a long, long time.

Clay Johnson?

Clay Johnson was one of the progenitors of that legislation we’re going to talk about. Clay, Max Stier—

The partnership. Yes.

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So you interact with many of the offices, if not all. The reason why is because initially, again, your talent pool was being looked at for all these roles, right? You’re kind of thinking White House offices, agencies.

[INTERRUPTION IN TRANSMISSION]

The question was about which offices did you interact with most, and you said pretty much all of them.

The talent pool is swirling around in the transition, and then coming in, and that is being used for all these positions. So it’s like, is it CEQ? Are you going to Energy? Are you going to go to environment, like EPA [Environmental Protection Agency]? Where are these people going to go? It’s the same talent pool that people are moving around, and the head of personnel is heavily involved in all of that, along with usually the Chief of Staff and the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations.

That switches probably about six to nine months in, when you start having the first bits of turnover, but also once people get their legs underneath them in the White House and the White House offices, who are interlocutors, or who work with the agencies. If you do it right you’re letting them be a little bit part of the personnel process because they have an interest in who’s in the agency working on certain policies and what their backgrounds are.

Some PPO offices don’t even invite that because it’s just more trouble than it’s worth, as I understand. We did not. We tried to, over time, build more of a rapport in the White House, and thanks to Pete Rouse we created, once Nancy shifted into the job, a very inclusive meeting that was run out of the Chief of Staff’s office. That was the personnel meeting, which was a couple of hours every week, with all the key players in the White House. You’d give them a briefing memo a couple of days in advance. Plus you could go talk to them if there were roles that were going to come up that they really cared about and get their input maybe on the front end on what they wanted, and so forth. You wouldn’t fight any political fights after you had appointed somebody, or have some surprise.

Now, not everybody worked that way. That was inviting more process and people in, which is tricky. It makes you one part staff set, one part PPO. Nobody would design the job that way. That’s not an enviable place. But what it did is it also limited forum shopping and bilateral negotiations with people that don’t agree. You put everybody in a room and have them debate and work with the different offices if you’re being proactive. It’s not inherently built in, or it’s not guaranteed. A PPO office could just work with the agency leaders on who’s going to be in the agencies. That would be totally within the job description. I can’t say what other people did. I just know what we did over time, and it was easier to get everybody in a room and have the discussion all at once and make decisions.

If you had to create a hierarchy of which offices in the White House were most integral to your work, wouldn’t Leg. Affairs be in that group, just because—

Leg. Affairs was hand in glove for all the confirmations, obviously. They have people who are dedicated to the confirmation process who work with us, and we talk to them even when we’re at the early stages with a candidate over time. We got them involved in the front end and we evolved our pre-vetting questions with them in mind.

One of the things you have to understand is that people who went through the personnel process in the second term, who went through in the first term, would be thinking, Wow, this got a lot harder. The ethics did not change one iota. The process, the forms, nothing changed. The political vetting changed. The need to think about every issue and how it could be weaponized against you to the nth, and new things and pet projects that people cared about so they would hold up confirmations became so numerous that people who went through it in the second term who went through it in the first term thought it felt completely different. It’s a lot longer, and a lot more arduous.

Leg. Affairs had to carry that burden. Leg. Affairs was also in the vetting meeting, so when we’d be done with the vetting attorneys, people would fill out their initial paperwork. They’d have probably an initial call with the vetting attorneys. Meanwhile they would sign all the releases and the IRS [Internal Revenue Service] would start their work. That’s one, independent work stream.

The FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] would start another independent work stream; the Ethics Office in the White House would start a work stream that’s vetting for administration-wide challenges; the agency ethics team would start a separate one, which was about agency ethics and conflicts; and our team within the agency would start their own process, which is about mechanics and not getting anything afoul of hiring practices and so on. And then you’ve got PPO looking at the person individually, relative to the President.

You’ve got all of these things going on in separate work streams, with a vetting attorney sitting over all of it who is, in our case, in our office. Some people left the vetting attorneys in the White House counsel’s office; we had a team in our office that reported to me. They’re managing a process, and they’re starting to surface things in an annual vetting meeting to me, saying, “Hey, we’ve got this thing going on. This thing’s coming up. What do you think about that?” We’re adjusting things as we go and asking follow-up questions and so on until we get to a final state, where the vetting attorney has all of the information, has an extremely detailed set of conversations with the individual, now with all the information, to make sure they understand any potential old business, whatever the case may be.

Then they bring that to a meeting. When I was running it, the meeting was the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, Alyssa Mastromonaco; myself; Anne Wall, who ran vetting for Leg. and the confirmation process—Jon Samuels had left; he was doing House and she was doing Senate, and became the point person—and then the whole vetting team with the head of the vetting operation. Then sometimes if it was really tricky we might bring in someone else. But that group then got the final distillation of all the information and we had to decide whether to go forward or not.

Jonathan, could I ask you a question that may be a somewhat illustrative case example, to your point about the difference in vetting between first and second term and the political weaponization that became so obvious through the second term? We read for this project all the memoirs of people we may be interviewing.

I just have finished John Brennan’s memoir. As you probably know, he was considered and thought he was going to be appointed to be Director of CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] coming into the first term. He actually hit some snags with people in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, but then he successfully gets through after the reelection. Did you work on that one at all? Was there fear that some of the things that would have been bothersome to the progressive wing of the President’s own party would also be a stumbling block for the opposite party and could bring down the nomination?

I can answer that in a general way, which is I can say that, one, political context changes, so your ability to nominate different types of people in different climates practically changes. Two, committees get new members who care about new things and raise new things, and dig into stuff. Three, you start to build up a relationship of things that happened, didn’t happen, got through, didn’t get through, whatever the case may be. A lot of times people are reacting to things that happened after the fact. “Oh, this person got through. Why didn’t we look at this?” We start looking at that going forward. Like anything in life, you’re kind of responding to the last war in fighting the next one. For all those reasons, the climate shifts and changes and evolves.

If you have a really good relationship, there are sometimes reductive processes where you say, “OK, This is less of an issue now; let’s take that off the table.” But that’s not my experience. My experience is it’s like an additive process. Each time there’s a new layer it just adds on to the wall people have to climb over, so it gets bigger and bigger in terms of vetting. In our case, it’s well documented the political climate was getting harder and harder every single month, and that plays out in these situations for the candidates, because you have to think of more and more things that could be made to look a certain way, whether they’re substantively that or not.

I want to refrain from too much commentary on the people who were in the Senate at the time, other than to say that both sides do it. It’s just a question of you start to look at every possible thing from so many different angles, and that just takes more person power, and more time, and causes you to have to make more judgment calls about those types of things, because you never know when something’s about to become a new standard for a vetting process. Things work their way into different agencies or different committees: Oh, now this is a thing. All the way back to Zoë Baird, right?

That’s just the nature of it, so when people think about change—This part I’m comfortable definitely saying on the record—In the vetting process of an administration, based on our experience, it had more to do with that: the political climate, changing dynamics, and practical realities of people that would get held up or be able to get through based on what was going on, and the people who were sitting in those seats at that time. That’s the part that became longer and longer. It wasn’t the core ethics paperwork, all that stuff. That stuff remained pretty static, and we worked hard to try to take all of the variability out of that to speed the process through because we could control for some of that. You just don’t know what’s going to become a thing.

Jim or Nancy, do you have questions about PPO’s interaction with other White House offices?

Actually, I have a question that might seem silly, but going back to when you first started working in the office in 2009, was there paperwork in the office that was left by the previous members of the office?

Zero. Here’s what happened. For obvious reasons, because you’re always changing parties, there’s a kind of natural unwillingness to leave stuff behind, except for the following. There’s much talked about in terms of the conversation Bush had with his people about the transition once Obama won, because we had the economic crisis, we’re at war, and that story’s true. There’s the story of Bush going to his people and saying, “The campaign’s over. We have all of this going on. This is going to be the best transition from one group of people to another, because we’re all Americans.” That happened.

It was also during the midst of the economic crisis, as well.

Yes, the financial crisis, economic crisis, we were at war, all those things were going on at once. The reason why I know is because people that I know, including people in the Office of Presidential Personnel, after the Inauguration, when they walked in—because they’re the first people—some of them found Bush appointees sitting there, saying, “I’ve got a day; let’s go,” which is highly unusual. What I know for a fact is the woman who was Don Gips’s EA [executive assistant], which is a very powerful position—the executive assistant to the head of Personnel on the first go-round is controlling all of the calendar and everything that’s going on. It’s an incredibly powerful position. When she walked in right after the Inauguration to get to work, in her desk was a 56-page, I think, letter from the outgoing EA, saying everything she wished somebody had told her Day One when she started.

The reason I know that’s true is because when I arrived in August, I walked into one of the rooms and it was taped to the wall, [laughter] and every single person who got hired was told to go read it first thing, so people would just read it. It was both personal—here are the things you shouldn’t miss doing, because this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing—and then here’s all the mechanical stuff. It wasn’t going into every little bit of detail, but the point is it was transferring information. But that’s the extent of it, these handwritten notes and people sharing information. It’s pretty much starting from scratch each time.

What the Biden administration clearly was able to do, however, was—I don’t know if they had access to the database of all the names and stuff like that that we had created, because we had a database that we perfected over time that had everybody in every position. We rated people and evaluated them; we did succession planning every quarter. That was how we got to be able to move people around and retain them.

I don’t know if they got access to that, because I’m not sure if that existed, but what they definitely had the benefit of was who was serving in those roles at the end of the last administration, because we know them, who was the likely next person to get those jobs. Then there were a lot of people who are serving in this administration who were the runners-up for the job last time. They had a lot of good intel, however they got it, which I think helped them, which makes complete sense. When you’re in a pandemic, you need people who know what they’re doing, because they’re all going to be working virtually, and you can’t have all that learning on the job. It’s just a particularly important period of time where you would need—

One of the things of diversity that was important to the President was not hiring people who had done the job all the time, right? To really build in a lot of new thinkers, bring new people to government, go around the country and find people who had never served before. I can completely understand that if I were doing it for Biden, initially I’d be thinking: That has to wait. We have a reality here, and it’s going to be harder because we’re not going to be together, so I need people who know how to work together, know how to do these jobs, and can hit the ground running. I’m going to swarm people into the agencies, and I’m going to let the senior people hire their teams next year, but right now it’s an all-hands-on-deck moment because there’s just too much going on.

If I had the job, I would have done that exact thing. Even knowing what I know and what I believe about our tenure, I think that was the right move. They were very smart. We hired a thousand people by the hundred days. They appointed a thousand people Day One.

Wow.

They didn’t have Senate-confirmed people. We did in that first thousand, but that was over the hundred days. But they put roughly a thousand people into the agencies and the White House on Day One, in that big Senate swearing-in ceremony. That’s a big deal.

Yes. Jim, do you have any questions on this topic?

Well, it seems that the Biden strategy was to get those people to be PA [Presidential appointment] people, non-Senate-confirmed, so if you were to do it again, would you focus on those to try to gear up as many people as you could, as the Biden team did?

I’ve thought about what I would do so many times, Jim, you have no idea. So a couple of things. The first is—and this goes to the vacancy thing, because I’m going to mix a couple of things up here, but I know you want to talk about vacancies. Vacancies are determined by agencies, not by the White House. The Secretary assigns a first alternate or first—I can’t remember what it’s called—for each Senate-confirmed position. They say, if this is vacant, this officer, the SES running something, is the first alternative, or first acting, who then immediately takes over that role. It’s a legal construct that can be changed by any Secretary simply by going through a paper process.

So when you come in, and all of these things are open, you are inheriting all these actings. If the prior administration was really on it, they would determine who the people would be, but a lot of times these things were determined three or four administrations ago and no one ever changed them, so you could have somebody acting in there who doesn’t agree with you. You could have somebody acting there whose office is no longer that big of a deal, and there are other people who could be in it.

People learn that late, that you can go in and actually change these things and change the actings. Who you have as actings is hugely important, because if you’ve seen the numbers, if you’re really good at your job, you’re at 73, 75 percent occupancy of appointees and Senate-confirmed positions at any given time. You never get to 96. You’re always going to have actings, and especially during these tricky times when there’s more political debate you’re going to have actings, so the sooner you realize it, the Secretaries themselves can look through this and think about these things. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is we were way too afraid to move people in. There’s a Vacancy Reform Act, which says what a person may not do as an acting for fear that they would violate the Vacancy Reform Act, and therefore disqualify themselves to be Senate-confirmed. It’s based on a memo that was written in the White House counsel’s office that everybody’s followed that might have been updated now but wasn’t updated before, might have been updated during the last administration, but we were operating on a memo that had preexisted us, or maybe it was right at the beginning.

It basically said if you’re going to be an acting in the agency, because you’re brought in pending Senate confirmation, you may not sit in the physical office of that office. You may not make binding decisions like budget and strategy. You can’t make hiring decisions. In other words, you can’t act like you’re the person before the Senate-confirmeds make you the person. That’s a bridge too far. You could come in the agency and learn the subject matter, advise on other things, be strategic. You could meet the process, but you can’t decide who gets the job. You can be in a strategy meeting, but you can’t speak up and drive the conversation. That Vacancy Reform Act in subsequent White House counsel memos governed that thinking.

We wanted to stay far away from that line in the first term. If I could do it over again, I would walk right up to that line pretty early. The key was when we realized that we could do that, as long as we went and talked to the Senate committee first, and said, “Listen, we’re going to bring this person in. They’re going to do these things. We’re going to put these guardrails in place. Are you OK? Are we agreed that this isn’t going to become an issue later?” The committees were pretty cool about it, and they said, “Yes.” They very rarely went back on that. In the second term, when we started having more actings and having everybody get stuck in the process—because remember, when somebody gets announced, their current employer now knows they’re going to leave, so they get fewer cases, fewer projects, and now they’re waiting for confirmation six months, nine months, twelve months, it may be never, so it’s unfair. Candidly, because at that point there was still a decent rapport, the Senate got that on some level, so we started moving more people in in the second term, to learn the agency, learn what they’re doing, advise on stuff, but we would just keep them out of these positions where they would be “acting as if,” which was key.

I can’t remember a time when we got into really hot water, because we pre-vetted it with the Senate. We should’ve been doing that from early days. The prior administration before Biden did a ton of that, just moved people in and put them in the jobs. The Senate seemed not to care all that much, so that’s something that we would do over again.

We also—and this is, again, a difference between us and Biden—got really concerned. We’re putting COs [communications officers] in place; let’s get them and their teams in place and let them hire their people, because we want them to be working together; we want better coordination and collaboration. But when you’re trying to ramp up, there are lots of things you’re trying to do in the first instance, so swarming or surging a group of people who might only be in the agency six to nine months, who can be there so that as the senior people come in they can brief them, get them organized, and then potentially be replaced, I would definitely do that if we could do it over again.

The one thing we did learn, though, is in the first term we hired Secretaries and Deputy Secretaries independently. If you’ll notice, in the second term, I don’t know if you could see it from the outside, but we had the Secretaries be more a part of the process of choosing their Deputy in the second term, and I think we had better cohesion, probably, across that in the second term. It slowed down a bit, but I think that relationship is a particular type of relationship, so we needed more of that, we thought, over time.

I want to make sure I’m answering all your instances of whether we would do it differently or not. I want to make sure I’ve covered all of them. I know I’m giving you a lot, but I’ve definitely thought about this, and I spent some time in the Biden talent policy process a couple of summers ago, where we talked a lot about this.

Are you good, Jim?

Yes.

OK. Jonathan, I want to ask if there was any sort of strategy behind putting Schedule Cs in various executive departments.

SESs are done formulaically. They go up every single time, and then a certain percentage can be political, so that was set. We could grow based on that number, and that was based on OPMs, on overall size of government, so that moved along. Schedule Cs were a little more fungible, and I don’t remember the actual governing of how many we could have. There was a constant ongoing debate. I don’t remember what the governing variable was. Meg McLaughlin will remember it like it was yesterday if you get in touch with her. But we tried to be strategic about it and say, Well, where are we going to need these bodies? Because in HHS [Health and Human Services] we were going to need more people, so we sped it up there. We might deemphasize a bit here and there.

But candidly, over time Cabinet Secretaries, especially one Secretary of State who will remain unnamed, get really creative, because there are tons of exempt hiring authorities through the civil service process that allow you to bring in IPAs [Intergovernmental Personnel Act] and experts from different think tanks on loan. They can get people exempt through the process because of some specialty or some particular need, usually national security or something like that. The bigger agencies that are more sophisticated—definitely DoD [Department of Defense], the State Department for sure, Justice for sure, even Treasury as well—Those agencies have long histories of bringing people in through a bunch of different mechanisms.

They’re fully legal, and it’s fully appropriate. They’ll leverage them more to bring in more expertise, especially if things are happening, which is as it should be. You shouldn’t have to run all of that through a political process when something big happens or there’s a new initiative and you need people immediately to set something up on Afghanistan or whatever. Bringing people in, especially on loan, they still have to fit all the ethical criteria, because the agency looks at that, but there’s some flexibility around that.

With the Schedule Cs, there was some debate about it, for sure. I wasn’t there for the first wave of debates on the allocations. Were there debates as we went on? Yes. Was allocating Cs or granting Cs to certain people part of what we did in the office? Absolutely.

One of the things the President pushed for, in a couple of different phases, were investments in this pipeline for other future administrations, particularly around diversity. He had us start a Presidential Appointee Leadership Program for midlevel appointees who could be Cabinet members in the future, so take the best and brightest, and it was modeled after something that he went through at Harvard called Saturday School—

[INTERRUPTION IN TRANSMISSION]

He spun that up. He also said, “Hey, why aren’t we using our magnetism for getting more people into service through our mechanism, not just the civil service?” which we were trying to reform, which was a whole separate thing. “Why aren’t we getting more people out of college to come directly in as Schedule Cs? There are all these great generalist positions.”

We started a program working with Hispanic-serving institutions, historically black colleges and universities and other broad-based universities, looking at diverse and underrepresented groups, including socioeconomic. We had Cs we could use, so we were able to allocate them across areas where there traditionally have not been as many women and people of color. We moved into those areas.

In the national security domain, certain parts of economics, things like that, we created more roles there and hired people, because that’s the difference. The difference is if somebody starts their career there, then ten years later they are one of the resident experts, and it’s easy to hire them. We were intentional about stuff like that, that fit an overall thesis, but also just improved the quality of those agencies and the people who were in them, not just for us, but we were thinking about future administrations, Republican or Democratic, and having a broader pool of people later so the next group doesn’t have to work as hard as we had to work to find people to take these jobs. That was absolutely the case.

I don’t remember there ever being a huge fight around the Schedule Cs. If there was, it was mainly in the really small agencies, where they had a couple and they really needed one more. You’re bringing in a new head—I don’t want to use a specific agency; it’s sort of a general thing, but one of these smaller agencies where they might have a couple of appointments, where the new person’s coming in.

Let’s say they’re a big hire, and it’s a big deal, and they have a change agenda. They’re thinking, I need a couple more people that are my people. How do we do this? That was, oddly enough, where I spent more of my time. I wasn’t talking to Arne Duncan or Clinton or Kerry or anybody about appointments—That was not the conversation—about who gets to hire the people, and who’s making certain decisions. Those we talked about a lot. Overall populations and representation, absolutely. We had a lot of conversations about that.

Jim, do you want to add on, on these questions on Schedule Cs, SES?

No, that covers it pretty well.

Jonathan, can you talk a little bit about the relationship between PPO and OPM?

Yes. John Berry was the first OPM administrator. He and I became very close while I was the Deputy. Nancy, John, and I were the people who were setting in place the President’s belief about how he treats his people, and that’s a pretty big deal.

The other thing that was personal to our office, something that we talked about before that may or may not have been true about other offices, is if you do the math, we’re going to hire two to two and a half thousand people a year—We’re going to have a final slate of at least five, where we probably have talked to ten people—so we’re going to talk to 25,000 people a year on the phone about working for the President in the White House. That’s the only conversation 24,920 of them will ever have with somebody who works for the President, and they’re going to walk away with a determination after that process about whether he’s a good boss and a good person.

We talked openly about our constituent relationship and customer service priority as an administration and as a PPO constantly. And John was thinking the same way about OPM, reforming the system and everything else. That was a much bigger, harder task, but it wasn’t that he didn’t want to. That was core to what he was doing.

And, in fact, [unclear] and John and a group of us were working on a project with IDO as an advisor on how you make government cool again. It was a throwback to the [John F.] Kennedy era, when Kennedy got Sargent [Robert S.] Shriver and Harris Wofford and a bunch of people together, and brought them into the White House and said, “I want to hire the very best people, and our question is not going to be should you serve; the question is going to be are you good enough for government.”

That was a phrase that he used in the first conversation, and then he went out and recruited, famously, an incredible group of people. The President wanted to return to that era where that question’s not a punchline. I used to say that in speeches. That question was real. Are you good enough to serve in this administration?

John had that belief through and through, as did we, so it was best that we work closely on that. There was also the reality that the back end of hiring appointees is the HR operations and the [unclear] in the agencies, so you’re fundamentally working together, and that matters quite a bit. The intelligence you get about what’s going on in agencies is much deeper and more profound through the civil service, so having a better working relationship with them is just better. And because there are lots of different hiring authorities in government, people realize over time you want to have a close personal relationship with the people who know those things backward and forward because they’ll keep you out of trouble and help you design safe, legal, appropriate ways to do these things, because there’s a lot of flexibility.

For all those reasons, the relationship was really important. It was always a close one. I feel like I personally had a really close relationship with the different OPM directors who were there, and the deputy directors. Beth Colbert and I are still friendly. She was the one who had to parachute in. I wasn’t there for that, but she had to parachute in with the whole technical glitch. I felt like it was an important, close personal relationship.

Michael Grant, who was a creature of OPM, was an important role player in ramping us up quickly before I even got there, by giving everyone a sense of how this stuff is done, so I didn’t have to reinvent every single wheel. Everybody would tell you that the first couple months of the transition and the first month of the administration, very few people were consulted by PPO more than that guy. He was on every call, because it was all in his head, and he was just regurgitating all the things that people had done in the past, what worked, what didn’t work, so you could design your own way of doing it.

You would say outside the EOP the most important relationship in the executive branch was with OPM?

We viewed it as one of the most important. Is there one more important than that? It was probably the one most constant, right? It was the most natural relationship, and where you’d want to have a relationship. If you look at when we did the reforming management in government agenda, it was me and the Deputy Director for Management, Beth Colbert, and then the head of OPM at the time. We were the leaders of that effort, for that reason. The word “most” is tripping me up a little bit, but yes, it was an incredibly important relationship, and one where you’d want to have a shared—

Here’s another example. There was an all-appointee call for the first time in January of 2010, the first time President Obama did that, where he talked to everybody, all the appointees. The first address to the civil service, if I remember correctly, was right after the election, and then there was another one right after the shutdown.

[INTERRUPTION IN TRANSMISSION]

We were just talking about the relationship with OPM, so we can switch gears, I think, now, and talk about do you recall—

The one point I wanted to make at the end is we did do this all-appointee call in January of 2010. That was the first time the President addressed all appointees, which is something that Bush used to do. We kept that going once a year, at least, and then special events around the shutdown and things like that. The first time the President addressed the civil service as a whole—and this is something to look at—was after the election, and then again after the shutdown, because of how significant it was. It became an annual thing after that.

I was gone after that, but I think it became an annual thing, and different people did it at different times. But we were intimately involved in when those calls were going to happen, and the script in those calls, because as appointees we felt how he addressed the civil service had to be part of the same philosophy around the concept of service and how he thought about it. The first time the President used the term “nobility of service,” when he was talking to the civil service about the civil service, was in that first speech, and then he did it again in the second. I don’t think that was written in. That was a riff the first time; the second time I think it was written in. But I know he said it. I remember for sure he said it after the election, but I can’t remember if it was in the speech after the shutdown.

The shutdown was a very big speech, because that was the long one that really hurt. That was a really painful period of time, and things really shut down. In the White House there was no one in the building. I thought everyone was going to be declared essential. Uh-uh. There was no one. When you walked into a meeting everyone was just sitting there for the first time ever, because no one had anything to do. You could walk into the Oval Office and talk to the President, because there was nobody to stop you. It was crazy.

Wow. OK, so switching gears a little bit, did you ever have any preferred candidates say no? And if they did say no, what was the most common reason? Similarly, did you ever have to fire any appointees, or ask them to step down?

So, yes, people said no, but not anywhere near as much as you think. Even when you were getting late in the first term, you’re thinking, No one’s going to take this job. Why would they do it? There’s too much variability. And then you forget that people spend their whole lives trying to do this, and also they’re optimistic, so it wasn’t very common. It was far more the case that they were falling out of vet for some reason, or we were saying no to them.

It was a rare thing that people said no to us. Some people would say no because they wanted something bigger. That was in some cases. That was rare. A couple of people who I won’t name but with very big jobs made very impressive personal family decisions and said no. There were a couple. But these are the kind of people who when they did that, you’d think, I like them more now. [laughter] It was just so incredible that they would say no, given everything, but they had a kid who was in trouble, something that was going on, and they just prioritized family or whatever to a degree that I don’t think most humans would. There were some of those.

Some people, once they got into the process, said, “I don’t want to go through this. I can see what’s coming, and I just don’t want to do it.” Some people pulled themselves out legitimately. You always wonder when people pull out: Well, who’s really pulling out here? Is it really the individual? Is it the White House? The answer is some of both, depending, but there were definitely situations where people pulled out midway through something because they were just tired of it.

But all of these were far fewer than I would have thought. Every single time we thought we were going to be in a real big pickle, sending the renominations up and lots of people have been sitting in process for a long time, and a bunch of them are going to say they don’t want to do it. Should we go on offense? Reach out to them and have the conversation? Very few people pull out. You just forget that these are once-in-a-lifetime jobs and people will endure an incredible amount to do them, which is as they should.

This goes to one of your questions about when it was tricky to keep people focused at all these political stages; the time I remember being particularly focused on that was the reelection year. You asked about that specifically. We went into the reelection year. Jack Lew was the Chief of Staff. Now, that matters, because Jack Lew had been in and out of government. He’d worked in the private sector, he’d worked in academia, and he was the first and youngest OMB head, I think, appointed years earlier, so he’d operated at a lot of levels. He had a sense for how these things went because he’d been in multiple administrations, as had some other people.

What happens in that last year is, one, you start a campaign and things get uncertain, and then people on the outside start telling your people on the inside, “Listen, if you go now, you’re one of five résumés on the street. You’re highly specialized. You can get a great gig. You don’t want to be one of 4,000 résumés on the street. You’ve really got to think about your family, and everything else, and the 4,000 résumés on the street. All of a sudden it might be a year before you get a job.” People started hearing that and they started getting that advice from their friends and family, so they start thinking about it.

We knew that going into the year, and the other thing we knew, for lots of reasons, is that it’s also the case—and we had started working on this—people come in feeling close to the President, especially if they’re on the campaign or had some relationship, and then they get into this big organism, and they’re at USDA [United States Department of Agriculture], working on food technology, and they think, I’m never going to see the guy, and they actually don’t.

In the first term we started to take all the assets at the White House—Marine One landings, events, everything else—we used them all—holiday parties—and we made sure we tracked who got invited to what. We wanted to make sure that more people got to come back through at key times, and that people didn’t go too long without coming back to the White House and being reconnected to what their purpose was. The higher-performing people, the people we were thinking about promoting, would come back through around that period of time, very strategically and intentionally.

Going into 2012 we said, OK, a number of these people are going to get pulled away by the argument of Should I go home and work on the campaign? Because I know how to do that, and I want to help us win. But we’re getting elected for governing, so we needed to keep everybody there and keep them moving. We had a proactive strategy. One was we brought Senate-confirmed folks into the White House, into the Roosevelt Room, 15 at a time all year to meet with the President and sit and talk with him. They could talk about whatever they wanted, including their nervousness about the current environment.

I’ll tell you a story about that in a second that I think he wouldn’t mind me telling you, that I think you can write. The second thing is Jack Lew, who had been through this was incredibly empathetic and understanding in this position because he had been there from a young age on. He and I went door to door in every agency and talked to the appointees. He talked to them himself and he told his personal stories. He talked about examples of when people had gone into these situations, how it turns out. It was a very human moment.

If you’ve ever met Jack Lew, he’s a really decent human being. He went door to door all year making the case on behalf of the President, but also a lot of other people, saying, “Hey, every time anything like this has happened, if it didn’t turn out, everybody got jobs pretty fast.” [laughs] He told his personal story and everything else. He was amazing. He really was. Watching him that year talking to 23-year-olds and 70-year-olds and everybody in between in a very personal way was just something to watch.

But here’s one of my favorite Obama stories. We’re sitting in one of those early Roosevelt Room meetings for everyone who’s Senate-confirmed. We’d bring them in different levels. There would be Assistant Secretaries, Deputy Secretaries, et cetera, because most people hadn’t seen him in a while. These were intimate. This was an hour with him, which is a lot of time to just sit and talk, and there was no real structure. He’d have a couple of things he’d want to say, but he’d let people talk about whatever, which is really unusual.

In the first or second meeting—He did these things often—someone who will remain unnamed was very direct with him: “Here’s what I’m hearing from people. I have young kids. I have a family. I came from academia. I don’t have the money to be unemployed. I’m the primary breadwinner and everything else.” She made a very clear case to him, and you could see on her face and in her tone she was very stressed about this, but she wanted to keep working for him. It was a really passionate, very direct argument to him.

He turned and said something that he then started saying in all the sessions near the end. It was just brilliant. The first thing he said was, “I’m going to win this race.” Just like that, to the whole room. And the way he said it was—because he doesn’t talk that way—everybody just was like, Whoa. OK. All right.

But then he went another step further, and he said, “Let me tell you how I motivate myself these days with all this uncertainty, because we’re all in this together.” He made it very personal, and he said, “You, like me, probably a number of years ago got really excited about the prospect of this happening and thinking maybe we’re going to win, and maybe we’re going to come here, and maybe we can make a difference. And you, like me, since you got your job have probably used every second of that to do the most you could, because you knew it was precious and it wasn’t going to last forever. And now you’re worried that we might lose, so you might only have ten months.

“But let me ask you a question. You tell me: If we do lose, aren’t these next ten months the most important?” And he had them, [laughter] because that logic’s sound. If we’re going to lose, you better maximize these next ten months, because someone else is coming in. As soon as he said that, you should have seen everybody’s faces. They were both pissed because he had them, but fired up at the same time, and he was just relaying what got him up every single day.

Then he would talk about stories of the people, but that logic—He used to do this stuff a lot, where you’re all going down one path, and then all of a sudden he would argue a different case, where you’re like, “Oh, yes, that makes complete sense.” He used that once, and then he used it over and over again, and it was incredible. It was just amazing to watch people respond to it.

As a former athlete who played team sports, when you win and you get back to D.C. a day later, because you’ve all been in Chicago, and you’re walking around the building, people who don’t even know each other are high fiving each other for a week. You’re a part of 5,300 people at the time who all just when they thought they had no time left suddenly have four more years. You’ve won this thing together, and you all knew in a day that you won it together.

I don’t think you can describe what it feels like. But I remember it being three days after the election, in the recesses of the EOP, on the fourth floor, in a small room, with Todd Park and Steve VanRoekel, and all these other people. We were conspiring on what we were going to do with all this time we had, and it was the single greatest five hours you could possibly imagine, because you suddenly have all these tools, you know what to do, and you have all this time. That was an incredible thing. Now, of course, the second term jinx: something blows up, everything slows down, and you don’t get to do any of it, but [laughter] it was a great meeting, and it was a great five hours nonetheless on the front end.

[BREAK]

I am back. I’m sure you all had time to conspire about how to use the remaining time we have left.

Well, once again, great minds think alike. We said, yes, let’s glance at the list of questions, and those that we need are begging to be asked, so Jim has one or two to start off this last part of our session with you.

With respect to exogenous factors, a number of other—[E.] Pendleton James particularly in the Reagan administration, Chase [Charles G.] Untermeyer in [George] H. W. Bush—said that they had problems with people from the Hill recommending people who might not necessarily either be the best people or be qualified. Did you have any problems like that? If so, how can you handle them delicately?

Well, everybody they sent us was fantastic. Yes, it was a wide range. When we go back to the structure—We talked about the fact that there were these SAPs [Special Assistants to the President] who ran these clusters, and they were organized by like policy matters, and therefore talent pools, in theory, and then there were boards and commissions.

There was another group—We called it engagement—that was another cluster. On that engagement team was somebody who worked with the Hill, somebody who worked with all of the USDA and regional appointments. That was somebody who just did regional appointments, which were in the dates and were highly politicized with a whole different set of stakeholders; somebody who worked with all the affinity-based organizations—women, people of color, LGBTQ+, et cetera—with all of those folks as well. Then there was one person who worked with all the campaign staff. They were another constituency, because there were 4,000 of them.

Obama famously—This is true; this did happen—got on a call the day after the election. He was super excited and said, “Now you’re all going to get jobs in Washington.” Nobody had explained to him the math of that. [laughter] We had people for the first couple of years in particular focusing specifically on that group, because there were so many of them. We really wanted to have an interlocutor for those folks.

That group worked also really closely with Valerie Jarrett’s group, the public engagement group, because you would have groups advocating both for policy through her, and the people who had managed the policy through us. We worked very closely together.

The way in which we managed it for all the third parties was to usually have a main person who’d take responsibility. For example Tony Coelho, a former Congressman, who cares a lot about disability, would be the point person for all of the ability-based organizations. They would convene once a month with our hour-long conversation where we would update them on how we’re doing in terms of statistics, talk about candidates, and so forth. We worked through him, and he would manage all of those relationships. There was the same thing for all the women’s groups, et cetera. HRC [Human Rights Commission] did all of the LGBTQ+ [Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, plus] groups, so there was an interlocutor that we worked with.

On the Hill, Ven Neralla was the Hill staffer who was the first person. He kept that job for quite some time—I think he had it for the first five years or something. He was the person all the congressional offices knew to call. There would be a couple of categories. They would reach out just because they wanted to advocate for a role, where they might say, “I want to have a say in what type of person gets this job.” They might reach out and feel like it was in their domain, some of these regional appointments and things like that, where they actually feel like they’ve got a vested stake and they’ve got a candidate. They would also funnel through constituents of theirs to us, and we created a sliding scale. This extended to the White House and VIPs [very important persons] in general.

There are three categories. There’s “I’m just passing this person along. Great if you can reach out to them. If you don’t, whatever. However you manage I want to be able to say I passed them through. That’s the important thing for me, and I’m going to tell the person.” Next level up was “This person needs a call from the White House, and then whatever you do after that I’m not leaning in, but I do think they’re important. They’re a serious person and they deserve a call.” So we would give them a call within a very short period of time. Then you had, “This is a really good candidate. This is someone I really want you to consider for this role.” For a lot of White Houses there is a fourth level, which is, “Get this person a job.” And that could be the President, the Vice President, or anyone else. That did not happen much at all to us. That was not a thing.

I have theories as to why that is I won’t get into, but I didn’t have to deal with that much at all. I did have to deal with important people who were coming—

[BREAK]

You said you had a number of theories, but can you offer us your top one or two as to why you didn’t get a lot of input and requests from the President and the Vice President?

No. [laughter] But I would just make one interesting point. People from the outside might say something like the Obamas had not spent their life in politics. They didn’t have decades of relationships and people that they had built relationships with who were important to them, and all the stuff like that.

But Biden did. And it wasn’t like he didn’t have his people, don’t get me wrong. That guy maintains relationships on a level that it’s absolutely staggering. He and Pete Rouse. I’ve never seen anything like it, the way they return everybody’s call. I don’t even know how they have time, so the Vice President had genuinely close relationships with people who genuinely wanted jobs and were good people, and talented, so that was something we had to contend with. But again, I never got a call from the Vice President my entire time about anybody, not even once, or the President, not once.

Remarkable.

It was a culture thing. People ask me a lot of times, “Will you write a book on your experience?” And the answer is I will never write a book on my experience. But if somebody wanted to ask what are the three most prominent things that came out of that experience, one is the power of fatigue.

The negative power of fatigue?

Both. People who manage fatigue better win. Period. Because fatigue is a necessary condition. It’s not a might be; it’s one of the certainties you have. The more structured you are on the way in—to build a structure to keep that from being a problem—the better. The people who had been there before worked out at the same time no matter what, and it was invaluable. They ate at the same time and got a good night’s sleep. They were super disciplined, as were the First Lady and the President. The rest of us were a bunch of schmucks running around with no sleep.

The other two things would be the power of the spoken word that’s just unbelievably apparent, meaning language matters so much more than you can imagine, because it carries further, it lingers, and it hangs around hallways. Obama used to always say success lingers. Language lingers, too. We saw that so many times. But the last thing, both in the White House and when you see these new people move into these agencies, would be how fast the personality, at least at the top of the house, a couple of layers down, changes based on who’s in that top seat and their personality. It’s remarkable.

The logic’s very sound: the people talking to that person most, if you are different from them, and behave very differently, that’s a risk. If Obama’s “no drama,” you’ve got to be “no drama,” right? Then if all these people start behaving that way, and the next people down, et cetera, it doesn’t go all the way down through 350,000 people or something, but it does move at the top.

I’ll give you a perfect example. I’m a very high-energy, fast-talking person who moves around a lot when I talk. I realized a week in I had to bring that way down, especially when I was around him and his inner orbit, because that feels risky to him. It was the same thing with Larry [Laurence D.] Fink, my next boss. If you go in a business meeting with Larry Fink and he asks you a question and you answer fast, he thinks you don’t understand the room you’re in, because he deals with very important things, and the world is gray to him, so if you have a really fast answer and he doesn’t have an answer, that’s a little bit quizzical to him.

With Obama, if you’re moving fast and talking fast, you’re going to make a mistake, so you need to slow down. If you’re somebody on fire, fire, fire, as opposed to, “Hey, go over, pick up the bucket, and put the fire out,” he’s also not going to listen to you. He’s thinking, I know there’s a fire. I can smell it. I can see it. What are you doing? That’s wasted energy. That might be part of it. It was true about a lot of things, including the no drama thing, which is very real.

What you’re also saying is that leadership really matters, getting the right people in the jobs.

There’s a concept that people talk a lot about in the private sector called “leadership shadow,” and it’s the long shadow that you cast. The best way I can describe it is I was interviewing a guy who’s an old-school Wall Street guy who was at BlackRock, didn’t graduate college, was from Long Island, worked on the Florida Exchange, worked his way up, and was running all of retail for BlackRock, which was 60 percent of the revenue of the whole firm. This guy was big. Frank Petrillo was his name.

I was interviewing him in front of people and I said, “Frank, what’s the best advice you’ve got on leadership?” He said, “I was standing in the delivery room after my wife gave birth to our first child, my oldest daughter, and my dad—” His dad worked with his hands. He was a low-word, high-impact kind of guy. He didn’t say much, but when he did, it mattered. He walked over and whispered into his ear in a gruff voice, “She’s not going to listen to a thing you say, but she’s going to see everything you do.”

That’s the leadership shadow. How you spend your time, what you reward or subtly penalize, what you give attention to, what you decide to talk about, how you behave, more than anything you say, leaves this long shadow over time, and it tells people what really matters.

So the behavior—not the strategy, not the speeches, the behavior of the people—and the more consistent the people, the bigger the shadow, because it’s really easy to see, right? And Michelle and Barack were really consistent people on this stuff, as is Biden, by the way. So when it comes to how you treat people and how you behave, Biden’s unbelievably consistent, because he’s incredibly human. Anyway, in leadership circles in the private sector you talk a lot about the leadership shadow. That’s what that is.

It’s almost like a variation on tone from the top. The person at the top sets the tone, and everybody else kind of recognizes, Oh, that’s what we need to do.

That’s right, and I think, What bad leaders! [laughs] especially in government. You find this out because you bring people in, you drop them into an agency, and they can’t change—they can’t fire people. They have a broken feedback system and they can’t reorganize, so all they have left is fear, which doesn’t last very long, or inspiration, right? They don’t have very many tools. The people who aren’t successful come in and think that because they say something people are going to do it. Uh-uh. I don’t care how motivational you are; you have to be about it first.

Admiral [William H.] McRaven came in and talked to our appointee leadership program and he said, “If you want everyone to be on time, you have to be one minute before everybody until they get the point. If you want to be detail-oriented, you have to edit the last page of every document until they get the point. They don’t have to want to be your friend; they have to want to be you, if you’re going to lead them. Just like that.” I thought, Whoa. [laughter] That guy’s as good as Bill. He’s incredible.

And make your bed in the morning.

And make your bed in the morning. You’ll change the world. [laughter] If we have extra time, I’ll tell you the two to three things that he told that group of people that I tell every leader I ever meet since then, but he was great. Anyway, yes, tone at the top matters a lot, but the tone isn’t in your voice; it’s the tonality of you as a person. It’s how you behave and where you spend your time and energy, or where you appear to be spending your time and energy.

Jim, do you want to do a second one, or do you want to shift to me?

Go ahead, Katie.

OK. Jonathan, you can’t really think about this job—It’s constantly changing, if nothing else. One of the things I was thinking about was how elections impact your job. Can you describe concrete ways in which the midterms and the reelection campaign affected your job?

Well, there’s one, a fear of your loss of your base of people, and what’s going to change, and that can be a drag on retention. That’s a very real thing. That’s the first thing. The second is for some White Houses, those become very politically charged environments, and they impact policy and behaviors, and even nominations of people.

When I was in the meeting with the group to try to compare thoughts ahead of time, I said, “Does anybody remember feeling that very much?” And we said, “No, not even when David Plouffe came into the White House and was running the campaign from the White House, was interlocutor, was a very powerful voice who was always in the room for everything. You didn’t feel like the White House was getting run by the campaign. It just didn’t feel that way.”

Now, it might have been, at a pay grade above mine, because at that point I was Deputy, but I didn’t get that feeling. They can build cohesion, because if you think about what elections are designed to do, what are campaigns designed to do, campaigns are designed to separate two ideologies and make you choose. so it can be bonding, as well, if you do it the right way. It can make you feel like us against them, which is part of the problem: it’s too much of that now. But the point is it still does have some of that effect.

Campaigns also introduce you to thousands of new people, and give you lots of new candidates to potentially hire from, so that’s helpful. They give you a thousand people who want a job. That’s unhelpful, but both of those things are true. And they can be disruptive, and then it’s absolutely the case, and obviously there are power shifts in the outcomes of elections that change the dynamics on the confirmation process, which is the most profound way. It changes the dynamics over time, because it’s not about overall numbers; it’s about what political fights you are in, and how that plays out in the people. Again, the strange bedfellows that get aligned to approve some appointments versus others moving through the Senate are really surprising over time.

Nancy, did you want to move on?

Yes, move on.

It’s worth saying—We mentioned 2010 and the midterms. They shifted the focus a bit. They changed the balance a bit. We still had to get 60 people nominated, so it didn’t change all that much on some level. And there was some flexing going on, but we still did pretty well. It was 2012 and the fiscal cliff debates, the threat of a shutdown, and then the shutdown, and then the mishigas during the election, and the camps that created, and that political lens of the fiscal cliff started to play out in appointments and everywhere. It was a policy debate with very strong political dynamics that was weaving itself through this, so you could argue that both were happening. I’m pretty sure it was in 2013 that Reid decided to deploy the nuclear option.

Yes, November.

Yes. Now, the prior year we put through the recess appointments, and I know one of your questions was what was that like, and what was the debate about the legality of it. There were two separate conversations going on, and they were distinct and unrelated. There were the conversations about “May we?” It’s the constitutional question, which was going on in the White House counsel’s office. Second, our office was in the process of, “If we can, how do we do it?” And we were involved much more in the mechanics, which were about when are they in and when are they out, and what can they do, and what’s the precedent.

There’s a separate set of people looking at the constitutionality or legal issues. They made that determination and we did what we needed to do, and that’s how it came out, but there were two distinct things. We talked to each other a little bit, but we were not influencing them, nor they us. It was two separate things. They were the conditional part of the statement for us. If they say yes, then we move. If they say no—We worked independently, just being ready to move if we needed to.

If you ask was that a big debate and conversation? Yes. We were talking about it quite a bit. It was a pretty big move and decision. But remember, it was as much led by Harry Reid, really. We were, again, trying to figure out how to do it, and if we could do it. It was as much a Senate-led and Harry Reid–led thing than anything else. It was a two-part decision because the Senate had to be involved as well. Katie, do you have a follow-up question?

I don’t have a follow-up question on that. That’s more Nancy’s territory.

Actually, you covered it, that obviously whatever Reid was going to do was going to impact on you.

Yes. As they’re sitting there, obviously we had to be on some level supportive, but if you go back to that time, we were at a point where from a Senate procedural standpoint, you had people working at the highest, most sophisticated levels trying to figure out how to outmaneuver each other, and Harry Reid was about as good at that as anybody. [Mitch] McConnell is as well. That was going on. Obviously it impacted us, but that was going on at its own pace on a million levels. Confirmations were part of that, but they were broader than that.

Who in your office would have been the person dealing with Harry Reid or dealing with Leg. Affairs? Or was there somebody that—

Yes, we had our hand in Leg. Affairs at the time, and then the person who ran the Senate—Anne Wall was running the Senate interlocutor; Jon Samuels was running the House relationship, as the two deputies, if I remember correctly, at that point. That was about right. Phil Schiliro had moved on, and I don’t think Katie [Beirne Fallon] was running it yet. I don’t remember who was running Leg. Affairs at exactly that moment. It might have been Katie, but I can’t remember exactly.

Yes, but I’m saying was there somebody in your office who was tasked to do that, or was that you?

Our Leg. Affairs was the interlocutor, and they would bring me to meetings at times with Senators, but I didn’t go on my own. There were times when I went to the Senate for other things, and the House for other things, which we could talk about, but I would work entirely through Leg. Affairs, and we would be joined at the hip and never have any daylight between us on that, for obvious reasons, so it was part of their broader strategy.

They only pulled me in for very specific situations. They were largely doing that on their own because this was all wrapped up in a broad negotiation with a three- to four-dimensional puzzle, the different things you’re trying to do. We were just one part of it, and I would have been a liability, because I probably would have spoken out of turn and blown the whole thing up. I was only deployed in certain instances where I either had a relationship with the Senator somehow or I could report on something that might be helpful, or when it just was really important, or they asked for me.

OK, thanks. Katie, if you want to go on.

Can we talk a little bit about vacancies? And it’s twofold. One is: how were you able to monitor the vacancies so that you would know that you had somebody in the pipeline who was getting ready to leave and you’d have to fill it? And then at what point did you start to have—? You start out having roughly 4,000 Presidential appointments, but then even within the first year people are leaving, or getting better jobs, better gigs as an ambassador or something. Is there somebody in the office who’s monitoring the whole universe of appointments and what the priorities should be? It just seems like a massive influx, as though there’s a big pipe of water that’s just pouring out into your office.

Meg McLaughlin helped take different systems and over time migrate them to a single database where we would have all of the appointees and know who’s there. We used that database for all things, including monitoring the process through Senate confirmations. People had to click on certain things as they’d progress through the process, so you could see where people were. A lot of us started to manage the process, from an efficiency standpoint, and look at when people were getting stuck, and all that, which was basic stuff for the private sector, as well. We were kind of catching up.

We implemented, not perfectly with every agency but to a surprising degree across a lot of agencies, a habit relatively early on—I would say maybe two, two and a half years in: quarterly succession planning conversations. We would just sit down, usually with the Chief of Staff, maybe the Deputy Secretary first, and talk through every appointee. We’d say, “Well, how are they doing? Do you have a sense of their longevity at this point?”

We’d put a best guess on it. And we’d identify if there was a person who we should promote within the agency. You already have plans for them, so we’ll manage that, but you’ll start to take a look at them if you have plans, and I’ll explain why that matters in a minute. Should we promote them across the administration? If you have other plans for them, we want to start thinking about those. Or is it that they’re not in a succession plan? If they stay, great. If they decide to leave, so be it, we’ll backfill them.

That allowed us to start to work against some information about the lead times, and the best guess as to when somebody might leave. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than zero information. It also allowed us—which was really important—to go to folks we had more plans for, and say candidly, “We have plans for you, so if you’re starting to get tired and you’re starting to think—don’t just disappear,” because what happens with these appointments is—because they’re so sensitive in terms of people’s departures and everything else, and because they feel like they’re letting down people who they care a lot about—when you find out, they’ve already decided they’re gone. We needed to interrupt that somehow, and the way to interrupt that was to have plans for people, and let them know ahead of time, to move them before they get too burnt out—You move them a little before that.

I used to say in every single conversation, “Listen, if you get a little burnt out and tired of your job, don’t leave with half the information. Don’t leave with the information on what the outside world can offer you. Come talk to us—no harm, no foul—in confidence, and see what we can offer. Just don’t make a bad decision.” Now you have me just trying to get people to raise their hand and come to PPO.

Then we started having a conversation internally, created a central clearinghouse, using succession planning, and we had meetings to move people around. This all happened based on a conversation I had with Jeff Zients. I remember it. I was sitting in OMB. He had just come in with the new Deputy for Management. We were comparing notes as two private sector guys.

I do not put myself in the same category as Jeff Zients; I just want to be clear. I was mainly reading his notes most of the time. But we were having this conversation, and he said, “What are you thinking about?” I was saying how the average tenure of an appointee—We didn’t have the data at that point, but we asked OPM for the average tenure. They said, “No one’s asked for that.” We thought, Aha! We’re on to something. But we looked at the average tenure and it wasn’t that long. Senate-confirmed was a couple of years, a handful of years, but in the White House, out to the agencies, it could be two years; could be less, could be more.

Thinking it through, I was relatively new at the time. My logic and his was people probably get a lot better in months 12, 13, 14, 15 because they come in from other sectors. It’s not just that you don’t keep them longer; they’re just figuring this thing out and becoming super effective, and then they’re starting to look for a job, which means their focus diminishes, and then they’re out the door.

Our theory was, what if you could interrupt that? If they’re going to leave in month 23 and 24, what if you could move them month 18 and give them a new gig and they spend another 18 months? Now you get an extra year-plus out of them. Those are highly productive months, more than the first ten to a year, so the return’s huge. You have lower turnover. You have smarter people who are more effective. You spend less time on backfilling and all the loss of position and vacancies and all that stuff. You win all the way across the board if you just decide to focus on it.

When we rolled out our plan for PPO in the fall of 2009, there were a couple of things we rolled out: one, our tagline, which was “People are policy.” We basically said that every single time you hear people talking about policy, get all spun up, everything else, remember, we are the people who find the people who make that true. We are the tip of the spear. That’s super important.

The second thing is we are the people who most people in America will talk to over the course of this administration, so it’s that customer-service thing, right? And three, we’re going to spend half our time hiring people and the other half trying to keep people, as opposed to all of our time hiring people. We’re not going to get more people, so we have to figure out how to do this. But if we do this second part better, there’s less of the first that you need to do. There might be a little bit of a dislocation. We’re going to start by following the basic rule of retention, which is that if you onboard people well, they stay longer. The data’s been clear on this for decades.

We started with the benefit of a great relationship with Liz Sears Smith and Chris Lu, who were the Cabinet Secretary and Deputy Secretary, respectively, who helped find money, which was from the transition, technically, to ramp up. We started an appointee onboarding program that started in the first quarter of 2010, and every appointee within the first 90 days went through an onboarding program that was an entire day. We talked about the purpose of being there. We had somebody coming to teach them how to work with civil service. We talked about diversity, and how diversifying makes people better. We brought in the Hiring Negotiation Project, and got them better at dealing with difficult conversations. We talked to them about how to hire people in the government.

We put them through an onboarding, but we also made a cohort of them. Importantly, when they attended that, that’s when they got their signed appointments, so that was a real coming back. “I just got hired, but I came back to the White House”—It was always at the White House—“to remind me why I’m here 60 days after I got hired,” or whatever. Every appointee went through that, and then later they went through follow-on things that we kept doing for them, and so on. We implemented that pretty early. Then, obviously, there was the kind of engagement piece with all the things that people came through the White House.

All of this was kind of a master plan, which was let’s figure out who’s good and keep them around, like anybody else. It matters even more for us because we don’t have that big an office. We have zero dollars to help. We can’t use in-kind benefits from headhunters and stuff like that, so we have to do it all ourselves. For all those reasons, never mind the productivity and everything else, it’s just a better way to go.

Rudy Mehrbani, our last head of personnel, testified right after the administration that he had stats—and I think I have them somewhere—that we not only were the most diverse administration in history—which is a little bit of a hedge, because the population gets more diverse over time, so that’s kind of baked in—but we did retain people a lot longer, at every level, not just Senate-confirmed. You might say, well, that’s on the Hill. No, that wasn’t it. Schedule Cs and SESs we kept a significant amount longer, about 60 percent longer and 40 percent longer. It was a lot longer. Any people who want to point to other reasons why that might happen, I think the numbers are so big that you can’t presume anything other than the fact that we focused on it.

Interesting. There was a question about that innovation that you all had for your retention program, and it was this: Do you think that there was some thought given to your assignment, and by giving you something new that way you weren’t really stepping on any toes, and because you hadn’t worked on the campaign, by giving you this new project of retention, that was a way to integrate you with your new colleagues?

No. It was a conversation I had with Jeff Zients. I had been interviewing everybody in my first few weeks who had been working there, who had not been sleeping for however many months, asking them the simple—again, this is very private sector—start, stop, continue. OK, you just crushed yourself, killed yourself for five months, stood up all this stuff. Based on that, what should we stop doing? What should we start doing? And what did you learn is a smart thing to do we that should continue? It was very basic.

Then I also asked everybody this series: If you went around the administration right now, in the White House and the agencies, and you asked people what it’s like to work with us, what three things would they say? A year from now what do you hope they’re saying? I played that back to the whole staff a month later, or weeks later, when we rolled out this plan, and there was a huge gap.

People wanted to be easier to work with, to be seen as strategic partners, all these other things, the same stuff you’d see in the private sector. Nancy and I used that as a basis to get people to focus on what’s the smartest thing for us to do? The smartest thing for us is to keep people around and invest in them, keep them close and keep them connected. Because of all this evidence in every other part of your lives, you well know, we shouldn’t suspend that just because we’re a smaller group of people with no money. Let’s figure out how to do it with what we’ve got.

That was the rollout of what we called PPO 2.0. That was so cheesy, but it was PPO 2.0. We rolled it out I think something like October or November of ’09, and it was about all these things we were going to do. We had the first onboarding for all new appointees in that following January. It was really fast. We started putting everybody through it, and once we started getting some wins inside the building, and everybody saw us doing something different, all of a sudden we got a lot of support and everybody wanted to be a part of it. Everybody started fighting to come to the appointee sessions and talk to the appointees who were being onboarded. The First Lady, the President, everybody wanted to do that after they got up and running, because the feedback was so great.

What Don Gips and Pete Rouse and everybody else was thinking was—I know for a fact the reason my résumé was picked, other than the fact that I knew someone who was in the room who could say, “Oh, I know a guy”—“Can we find someone who knows a little bit about politics, so has worked somewhere in D.C., has done a startup before, because we’re in startup mode, and who knows something about hiring and retaining good people, putting together good teams? Does anybody know anyone like that?” And someone in the room said, “I know a guy.” It happened to be my résumé.

That was as much as they had thought about, and Don, who was a former McKinsey partner and everything else, cared a lot about talent, knew that the office could do more, but they didn’t say, “Hey, start retaining people.” That came out of the conversations Jeff Zients and I had, where I was thinking it, and then he said the exact same thing I was thinking out loud on his own. And I thought, OK, this is a good fit. And so that was where it started.

As we come toward the end of this session, Jonathan, could I ask you a macro question about the linkage between people and policy? As you look back, can you point to either specific people or kinds of hires and say you saw that link between the people you hired and a policy outcome?

It was constant, because those people were going to come in. I don’t know that I want to necessarily put this in the record, because I think I would alienate more people, but if it’s off the record—and you all can look at this and make your own determinations—someone like Jeh Johnson going over to DoD, and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell being repealed, there’s a link there you can investigate.

The Deputy for the Office of National Drug Policy was the Deputy in the first term. If you look at his background, he was a recovering addict, an openly gay male. There were lots of things that might have been a little bit tricky in a first term, right out of the gate; he became the head of the office in the second term and was the guy who figured out how to get the heroin shot [naloxone] in the hands of cops, which nobody else could figure out, which is saving lives. You can do some investigation, and then you can infer what you will about that. But there are lots of examples like that of people who were the right people at the right time, or became the right people at the right time. There are so many of them I don’t even know how to enumerate them.

But I would tell you that people often ask how do you manage a job like this, because the scale is so big. Doesn’t that freeze your mind when you’re thinking about the scale? You don’t think about the scale, ever. You think about the fact that whatever you used as a tool to get there is the same tool you’re going to use; there are just another couple of zeros. But every once in a while something happens when you realize the impact you’re having, and you see it—I have plenty of stories about that—where stuff happens where all of a sudden you suddenly realize the impact you’re having, one way or another.

My first or second full week on the job, Nancy was on vacation. It was August, and everybody was taking a break. The Van Jones czar thing happened with me running the office, and I was ten days in. [laughter] It was a Thursday and a Friday, and it was bananas. There’s so much of that that it’s almost impossible not to—and the reason to have that linkage—and people used to say things like this. We just codified it as our rallying cry, so I don’t want to take too much credit for it. But what we needed to do is we needed all these people who worked on a campaign, who worked on these policy things, to feel like they were as important as anything else going on, and we needed to bring that level of energy to the work day to day, because it was really hard.

The hiring was never going to stop, the number of people upset was never going to stop, so for us it was giving them a sense of purpose that was clear so that they could be reminded every time they heard a policy debate going on. They’d be thinking, Oh, we’ve got to step up. That was the main reason for it. It was to sharpen their focus, give them a sense of purpose, and create an identity for the group.

Unless someone has a question for which they think there’s a very brief answer, we will pause now, Jonathan. Oh, yes, go ahead.

Just really quickly, other things that I wrote down, based on your questions. Streamlining legislation was interesting, but—it changed those positions, and that was hopeful. If you go back and look at it, though, what’s really interesting is that all of the Leg. positions were in the ones that were made PA [Presidential appointment], which is really interesting, except for a couple, like Treasury. Max Baucus was on the committee that decided this, and that’s a very powerful decision, to confirm the Treasury Secretary’s Leg. Affairs person. You can do that research.

But again, that was a congressional decision to do it. We just had to react to it. It didn’t help us get those people in faster. It did not impact hiring. People weren’t like, “Oh, I’m not Senate-confirmed anymore. I don’t want to do it.” No. We thought it might. But it had zero impact. After everybody adjusted, they thought, Oh, I don’t have to go through Senate confirmation? Great. It might have even helped on some level, but there wasn’t a prestige thing, because you were still the Assistant Secretary for Leg. or whatever, so it had zero impact.

There was an effort to try to create a technology system, however, to make the process easier, and there were lots of fancy people involved. It shattered under the rigidity of the idea, because you could not get these communities to agree to a common app [application]. That was everybody’s idea. Oh, we’ll do a common app like college. Try to go to the Finance Committee. No way. Everybody thought they were snowflakes and it just never was going to work. People were still getting embedded under the PA change, but they just didn’t go through Senate confirmation, so their time was probably 30 days in the process, as opposed to 90 to 180.

It didn’t have that big an impact, because the rest of the stuff that they had hoped to do just—it required Senate committees to all agree, and that was not happening. That’s the very clear [laughter] recollection of that phase. Nancy and I were sitting on all those committees, and doing all that work, so I was pretty aware of that. Other than that, I think everything else is pretty much covered.

That’s great, and what I was about to say was when you receive your transcripts, which should be within a few months, obviously anything you want to change is up to you, but if there’s something that you wanted to add, you can feel free to do that at that point. We certainly want to thank you for your service to our country, because you have explained so well not only how you helped to make it run better but how you had an impact on policy. We are grateful for that. We like to think that these interviews carry on that service, certainly to history, for a host of different audiences.

All the people who were on my call—which was this morning, by the way; [laughs] it was a little last minute—everybody enjoyed going back through it. We were just sitting there; we can’t remember anything, but it was still fun. [laughter]

I went to the Presidential Site Summit in Dallas in March—It’s run now by the White House Historical Association—and ran into Tina [Christina M.] Tchen in the lobby of the hotel, and said we’d be in touch about setting up her appointment. She said, “Oh, I do these things on occasion, but we can never tell our stories too much.” I said, “Music to our ears in oral history. That’s what we like to know,” so she’s already set up for September.

Also just psychographically or psychologically, this would have been harder to do, just being blunt, three or four years ago, because it all felt less real, if that makes any sense, for lots of reasons. That’s not a political comment—the inverse would probably be true, as well. But right now it’s all real, because so many people we know are back there slugging it out, and some of us are trying to be helpful from the outside. It feels more real, but it definitely feels like a long time ago. [laughter] It really does. Anyway, this was fun. I will look at the transcripts when I get them, and if I have anything else to add I will let you know. I know a lot of people, so if there’s some piece that’s not working because you need to talk to somebody, give me a call.

That’s wonderful. Yes, that’s very helpful. We’re very grateful for that, as well. All right. Have a wonderful afternoon and evening coming up, Jonathan.

Thank you, Jonathan.

Great talking to you.

[END OF TRANSCRIPT]