A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Days after Donald Trump declared victory, the negotiations to work out a handoff of the government are underway. Yesterday at the White House, President Biden said he's been in touch with the president-elect.
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PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: And I assured him that I would direct my entire administration to work with his team to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition. That's what the American people deserve.
MARTÍNEZ: There are already questions, though, about whether Trump's second transition is on track. Here's NPR's senior White House correspondent, Tamara Keith.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: A week before Trump won, the co-chair of his transition, Howard Lutnick, projected confidence in an interview with CNN.
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HOWARD LUTNICK: We are ready for the transition for Trump-Vance. We are so ready.
KEITH: He's heading up the search for people to fill positions in the new Trump administration.
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LUTNICK: We've got so many candidates. We are so set up. I feel great, and it is completely different than it was like in 2016.
KEITH: In 2016, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie spent months building a transition plan for Trump, working cooperatively with the outgoing Obama administration. And then, as he told the "Transition Lab" podcast, two days after the election, Christie was fired by Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
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CHRIS CHRISTIE: And I said, are you kidding me? And he said, no, no. Vice President Pence is now going to be the chair of the transition, and you're out.
KEITH: Not only was Christie out, but, he said, so were all the plans.
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CHRISTIE: They had won a race that most people didn't think they could win. And now they thought, now we're going to run a transition in an unconventional way and watch everybody, you know, react to that.
KEITH: With cameras trained on the elevators in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York, the president-elect put on a show.
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DONALD TRUMP: We've got some great people coming in today. You'll see them.
KEITH: In the end, Trump picked a whole lot of people who just weren't a good fit - Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, former General James Mattis as defense secretary. The list of hiring misses in 2016 is a long one. And because Trump's team threw out months of planning, they were left with a lot of Obama holdovers in high-ranking acting positions when Trump took office. On the podcast, Christie said the Trump administration never fully recovered from its rough start.
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CHRISTIE: So you had people there who were hostile to the president personally and hostile to his agenda that he had just been elected on. And then he would wonder why he couldn't get things done.
KEITH: Clay Johnson led George W. Bush's transition in the year 2000. He says transitions are a huge management challenge.
CLAY JOHNSON: It was just so hard and unbelievable. You know, people were crying and were losing sleep and so forth and so on. But a lot has to happen. An incredible amount has to happen in a very short period of time.
KEITH: Johnson says there are thousands of jobs to fill and untold numbers of people working their connections to get in. But he tried to tune out the noise.
JOHNSON: The most important thing to pick the right people is to figure out what is the picture of success that you aspire to realize on behalf of the country.
KEITH: Trump announced late yesterday that he'd picked his campaign manager, Susie Wiles, to be his White House chief of staff. A campaign adviser says the jockeying for jobs in the administration has already gotten intense. Loyalty to Trump and a desire to disrupt Washington are top qualifications this time. But the Trump transition is already disrupting Washington by failing to sign two formal documents that would give them access to everything from government email addresses to detailed information about agency operations.
MAX STIER: It has not happened, and they are late.
KEITH: Max Stier heads the Partnership for Public Service, which has assisted past transitions. He says this delay sends a very bad signal and could mean Trump is about to repeat history.
STIER: The Trump team did not understand the process or the importance of understanding that process and did not respect that process and paid a real price. And I fear that we might see something similar again.
KEITH: A Trump campaign spokesman tells NPR the transition team is still having conversations about the documents, and, quote, "We will update you once a decision is made."
Tamara Keith, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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