Roadblocked

Book excerpt: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris began their transition to the White House in the most unusual of circumstances: a global pandemic, a sitting president violently refusing to accept the results of the election, and a historic racial reckoning all posed profound questions about how they would staff large parts of the government and articulate policy remedies to pressing problems in just eleven weeks. Heath Brown’s Roadblocked is a revelatory look at the seventy days between the election and the inauguration with a focus on the ways the Biden-Harris transition team sought help and advice to overcome these obstacles. Informed by over 125 exclusive interviews with members of the transition team and a wide cast of other stakeholders, Brown takes readers deep inside the 2020 presidential transition. More than that, Roadblocked is also a gripping history of US presidential transitions over the past half century that compares the transition teams of the last four administrations. Biden-Harris transition leaders had a massive team with a complex organizational structure and a stated aim to promote coordination, encourage teamwork, and avoid siloing staff. In the end, however, these aims were foiled by the conditions of the pandemic and steep hierarchies, which both reduced collaboration and information sharing and left many feeling isolated. Despite substantial changes in the Democratic coalition, newly influential groups armed with novel tactics, and great shifts in their political agenda, the Biden-Harris transition did not lead to transformation. Roadblocked explains why.