WASHINGTON — Eight days after President-elect Donald J. Trump won election in a stunning upset, surprising even himself, the process of transferring power from the Obama administration to the Trump administration has yet to grind into motion, delayed by a series of shake-ups at Trump Tower that have sown confusion and discord. One associate of Mr. Trump’s has told people that his operation is a month behind schedule.
The briefing materials are ready, loaded into tablet computers, secure internet sites or cloud computing applications. Officials from the White House and 100 federal agencies are on standby, waiting to meet “landing teams” from the president-elect’s staff and brief them on how things really work in government. The organizational charts have been meticulously mapped.
Under ideal circumstances, the process — months in the planning by the Obama administration and aides to both Mr. Trump and his defeated opponent, Hillary Clinton — looks far different. Parts of it are governed by a statute President Obama signed this year to streamline the transition process and ensure an early start to a task that has been compared to a giant corporate merger involving a $4 trillion budget.
But for all the drama surrounding his transition to power, Mr. Trump is hardly the first president-elect to preside over a disorderly takeover.
The 1988 transition from Ronald Reagan to George Bush was particularly nasty, because many Reagan administration aides assumed — wrongly, as it turned out — that they would be in line to keep their jobs in a government that remained in Republican hands.
Bill Clinton’s transition in 1992 was marred by a staff shake-up that upended a carefully planned process: Mr. Clinton replaced his transition chief, Mickey Kantor, who had been Mr. Clinton’s campaign chairman, with Warren Christopher, who would become secretary of state. It was also hobbled by Mr. Clinton’s campaign promise to slash White House staff by 25 percent, which made it more difficult to manage the government.
“There is a long history of unfortunate transition activity,” said Max Stier, the president and chief executive of the Center for Presidential Transition, a project run by the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service.
Still, he added, the Trump transition is different in that it appears to lack guidance from seasoned government professionals who grasp the magnitude of the bureaucracy he is about to inherit.
See More: Trump, Obama Discuss Transition At White House
