Stephen Hess is a Distinguished Research Professor at the George Washington University and a Senior Fellow Emeritus of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is a veteran staffer of the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations and a former advisor to Presidents Ford and Carter. Hess is the author of “What Do We Do Now? A Workbook for the President-elect” published by the Brookings Institution Press.

Question: When a new administration enters the White House, roughly how many people throughout the government lose their jobs?

Hess: The incoming administration ultimately has about three thousand jobs, although not all of them get filled at once. Probably about five hundred of those are of considerable importance and the rest are assistants to people and so forth. Of those, probably one hundred get chosen during this period of transition.

Question: Where do these people usually go?

Hess: Anywhere they can find another job. Some people go to school, some go to work for members of Congress, and others go to work for think tanks. There is not really a pattern to where these people go. These people tend to have been political appointees themselves to a degree, if they want to stay in politics they look for other jobs that are either in the opposition party or state parties or other levels of government.

Question: Where are the best replacements for those positions most likely to be found

Hess: The President looks for people of very substantial achievement at the highest level of his cabinet and at some very specialized posts. That’s why if you look at the Cabinet that President-elect Obama is choosing, he has people who are or have been governors or members of Congress, but as a general rule these are people who were his supporters. That means many of them worked on his campaign or contributed money to his campaign, so that’s where they come from.

Question: Can you tell us about the “Plum Book” and how is it different from regular civil service employment? Can an average American get a job using the Plum Book?

Hess: The “Plum Book” is a name given to a book that is put out by the government that shows at the time of a change of administration jobs that are non-civil service. Now that doesn’t mean just jobs for the President-elect Obama, this includes jobs in the legislative branch as well. An average American can apply for a job in a “Plum Book” but the chances of him getting a job depends on his qualifications. The person might have a PhD from Princeton in nuclear physics, so obviously that person would do much better than someone who didn’t graduate from high school. It’s a meritocracy in part, but it’s also a political system in which it would depend on how much work he did for the newly elected official.

Question: When does an incoming president traditionally have his White House appointments in place and what is his earliest and most important appointment?

Hess: I put a lot of emphasis on this in my book. It’s a good thing if he can have those appointments in place by Thanksgiving. This President-elect actually has had his White House appointments in place even before that. In my book I list the six top jobs that are very important to have in place, but there are probably about fifteen jobs that are very useful to have in place. 

Question: Like the White House Chief of Staff for example?

Hess: That post has to be filled first, and often that person is even recruited prior to the election.

Question: How common is it for an incoming administration to expose the mistakes and corruption of the previous administration?

Hess: Well, why would they expose them? That’s the sort of things you do during the campaign, you attack your opposition. Once you have been elected, you look forward and you don’t look back.

Question: Do you know of any examples when a newly elected president’s foreign policy outlook and goals were altered by the high level intelligence briefings he received when he first entered office?

Hess: Yes, there is one classic case. That is when John F. Kennedy ran for the presidency in 1961 on the platform of what he called a “missile gap” with the Soviet Union. When Kennedy got elected and had the intelligence in hand that he was entitled to, he realized that there wasn’t a missile gap, and he announced that.

Question: How often does an outgoing president make important decisions during the transition period that negatively affect the incoming president?

Hess: The outgoing president always makes decisions that influence the incoming president because it’s a continuum. The system doesn’t stop and start again when a new president comes in. So the outgoing president as well as the outgoing Congress have commitments, they have treaty obligations in place, they have financial obligations, and in some cases traditions. These all bind the incoming president. He doesn’t have a clean slate to start with, nor does the President-elect have any influence over the decisions made by the outgoing president during the transition period.