With the help of Allie Bice
Welcome to the POLITICO Transition Manual 2021, your guide to the first 100 days of the Biden administration
President JOE BIDEN said his government “is not a third Obama term”.
Many of the people he brought in for his first term, however, are Obama’s two.
This is especially true in front of foreign policy, where veterans of the Obama administration are the ones who are now trying to build a “Biden doctrine”.
At least 16 of the top political nominees from the Biden National Security Council served in the Obama administration, several of them in the NSC itself. The top echelons of the State Department also have many veterans of the Obama administration, including the Secretary of State TONY BLINKEN; WENDY SHERMAN, Candidate for deputy secretary of Biden; and BRIAN McKEON, a longtime Biden advisor who has been appointed assistant secretary for administration and resources.
Biden’s team and Biden himself argued that the government will necessarily be different this time because the world is very different in 2021 than it was in 2009 or even in 2017, when Obama stepped down. But there are also some parallels – with the rise of China, conflicts in Yemen and Afghanistan, nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea and even Myanmar is back to military rule.
“We realized that the restoration is not on the cards,” said a senior administration official. “It is not viable. It is not wise. We know that the world has changed profoundly since 2009. ”
The government official added: “We believe that knowledge, know-how and expertise are a good thing, but also people who are not stuck with old ideas or who are not ideological or doctrinal.”
In particular, many Obama-era officials acknowledge that there have been previous failures on the same fronts they are facing now. The Biden government now gives some of them a rare chance to start over.
In other words, the pivot for Asia lives.
Some government officials argue that many of the veterans who returned from Obama were, in fact, Biden people before they were Obama people – or at least they are fifty-fifty.
Blinken was Obama’s deputy secretary of state, but he also worked for Biden in the Senate and was Biden’s first national security adviser when he became vice president.
National Security Advisor JAKE SULLIVAN replaced Blinken as Biden national security adviser in 2013, deputy principal national security advisor JON FINER served in the Obama State Department, but before that he worked as a speechwriter for Biden. Homeland Security Advisor ELIZABETH SHERWOOD-RANDALL He first worked for Biden in the late 1980s as an adviser to the Senate and went on to serve in the Obama administration.
Although most of Biden’s top foreign policy executives worked in the Obama administration, there are some new faces.
SHANTHI KALATHIL, the NSC’s coordinator for democracy and human rights, has never served in the Obama administration. Others are former career intelligence officers or foreign service officers or have been assigned to the NSC by other federal agencies.
A White House official said that no one should be surprised that a large part of the NSC team is made up of Obama veterans, considering how many people have served in the government and how Obama recently stepped down.
“It’s no surprise that many capable Democrats would have spent time in an agency under [Obama] him at some point, ”said the official.
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In the Oval Office, where he met with the governor of New York ANDREW CUOMO, Arkansas Gov. ASA HUTCHINSON, Government of New Mexico MICHELLE LUJAN GRISHAM, Maryland Gov. LARRY HOGAN, Mayor of Atlanta KEISHA LANCE BOTTOMS, Mayor of New Orleans LATOYA CANTRELL, Mayor of Detroit MIKE DUGGAN, Miami Mayor FRANCIS SUAREZ and JEFF WILLIAMS, the mayor of Arlington, Texas, to discuss the pandemic.
With Biden in the Oval Office.
With the Presidential Transition Center
The Senate confirmed DENIS McDONOUGH on Monday as the 11th Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Which of your predecessors led the department the longest: JESSE BROWN, ERIC SHINSEKI, EDWARD DERWINSKI or ANTHONY PRINCIPI?
(The answer is at the bottom.)
BIDEN FOSSIL FUNDING BAN PROHIBITION LAUNCHES IN CHINA Last month, Biden halted US funding for fossil fuel projects abroad, a move that could lead the poorest countries to depend on Beijing. ZACK COLMAN reports. The president’s action retains money from international institutions, such as the World Bank, that help poor nations build fossil fuel plants.
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FIRST TRANSITION MANUAL – DANIEL LIPPMAN reports that LAURA BOOTH she began as a senior associate attorney with the White House Presidential Personnel Office, according to her updated LinkedIn profile. She was recently an associate lawyer for the Biden campaign and is also a former student of Latham and Watkins.
LinkedIn also revealed that SHANNON RICCHETTI he is now associate vice director of the White House Social Secretary’s office. Most recently, she was a research assistant for the transition and is also a former student at the Aspen Institute. Ricchetti is the daughter of the White House advisorr STEVE RICCHETTI.
A White House spokesman declined to comment.
SCRAPPING ‘REMAIN IN MEXICO’ – Starting next Friday, the Department of Homeland Security will begin the first phase of a program to allow some asylum seekers to enter the United States, SABRINA RODRIGUEZ reports. Under the Trump administration, these migrants were forced to stay in Mexico while their asylum cases were being processed.
Secretary of Homeland Security ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS he warned that the policy does not mean that the border will be open to all migrants, and said that “changes will take time” – the latest warning from Biden government officials to migrants discouraging them from trying to cross the border.
TURNING OFF GOVS: The Biden government is acting lightly with governors who are relaxing restrictions on coronavirus, RACHEL ROUBEIN, BRIANNA EHLEY and SARAH OWERMOHLE report – even with senior federal health officials urging the public to continue wearing masks and distance themselves socially to limit the spread of highly contagious virus variants.
“It is not an intentional dissent.”
– White House press secretary JEN PSAKI in response to a reporter’s question about why Biden didn’t call the Israeli Prime Minister BENJAMIN NETANYAHU since he took office. “I can guarantee that he will speak to the Prime Minister soon and is looking forward to doing so,” she said.
President of Honduras, involved in drug trafficking, wants to conquer Biden (The Washington Post)
Biden donors are not happy that he hasn’t started nominating ambassadors yet (The Daily Beast)
Biden will have another vacancy to fill at the DC Circuit Court (The Washington Post)
We recently informed you that MERRICK GARLAND, Biden’s choice of attorney general, is a huge Harry Potter fan, but it seems he is also an avid observer of the famous HBO TV show, The Wire.
In a 2013 DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, the panel reaffirmed the conviction of ELOHIM CROSS, who appealed for conviction for conspiring to distribute heroin. Garland mentioned the show in the decision, writing that a conversation between Cross and another man “might as well have been written for The Wire”.
Hasn’t Hamsterdam’s story changed your opinion about drug criminalization, Merrick?
Eric Shinseki, President BARACK OBAMAThe first secretary of Veterans Affairs, led the department for 1,987 days. He resigned in 2014 during the VA hospital scandal.
