These campaigns start thinking about a transition of power. Guest it is an interesting history. Until 2010 there was no legal requirement for campaigns to prepare. In 2010 the president ial transition act passed. It provided that it was not just something they could do, it was a responsibility. Of candidates who are representing major parties to organize transitions. So, transitions generally start as early as april. Certainly by may, because there is just too much to do in organizing the National Government to do it in 75 days between the election and inauguration. It is a quite surprisingly sophisticated, can be, operation. Host what does it entail . Guest there are really four responsibilities. The first is to prepare to put a team on the field, if you will. Organize a white house staff, a cabinet to fill the most important senateconfirmed positions. They have to be cleared. Getting a running start is important. The Second District the second is to prepare the first 100 or 200 days of the administration, to fulfill Campaign Promises that the candidate presented to the public. Wri actually gets down to , preparingive orders legislation, and so forth. The next is to organize departments, to be able to get to begin to formulate how you will interact with congress. Finally, it is what we are seeing with the president elect today, where he is supported by his transition. The white house staff does not exist, they do not have the trappings or facilities or any of the normal organization. Those are the four major things transition does. Host how much money has been involved in this . We just read for our viewers a headline that the president elect is crowdfunding s transition costs, raising already 10 million. Guest the transition begins in spring, until they actually become the president elect, is funded through private sources. It is regulated by the gsa, the General Services administration. There is a maximum of 5,000 for any one person. I think the biden transmission raised about 10 million prior to the election. Npon the election there is a appropriation of money that is made. I dont know exactly what it is. Changes over time. When i was organizing a transition it was about 6 million. I think it is likely more than that now. Successful ascertainment, they are to transfer that money. What has happened is, because the gsa has not declared eyes thentelect president elect as the successful candidate, they are appealing to the public in that way. Im confident they are raising lots of money. Host governor leavitt headed up the Transition Team for danpresident ial candidate mitt romney. Also a book about that. What were the Lessons Learned . Guest there were a lot of them. Truth, a transition had never been organized under the 2010 president ial transition act prior to 2012. After that point, most transitions have been done in a much less formal way. After 2010, beginning in 2012, government space was allotted, computer and technology, access to federal agencies. So, the book really goes through the process that we came to understand by actually executing the law. There are lots of technical issues raised, but mostly it is about, how can you organize to stand up the federal government in advance so that when you hit the ground you are running . Tois a real relay, opposed i have heard people describe it as handing the baton off. If you were to walk down the halls of our transition, for the the you would see department of state, the department of treasury, and there would be people inside the transition offices that had worked there before that understood the lay of the land and how things worked, and you are essentially creating a federal government in literature that you can begin to get a running start. Host we want to take your comments, your questions about the transition of power. Governor Michael Leavitt as our guest. If you live in the east, 202 7488000. Mountain pacific, 202 7488001. Medical providers, because we are also talking about the impact of this delay on the covid19 Pandemic Response. Medical providers, you can call at 202 7488002. Governor leavitt, with your health and Human Services secretary had on as well, what kind of problems could this for responding to the pandemic . Whether that is distribution of the vaccine or other areas . Think the area people are most concerned about at this moment would be to handle of the vaccine distribution. I think it would be vastly better if there was direct cooperation between the teams. I think that is a big part of any outgoing and incoming restriction. To see, we ought not this as a complete collapse. If you are a medical provider and looking for that to come, i think much of this is going to happen. There is an operation that is going to be conducted by privatesector vendors. Im talking about a big medical distributors that are already going to every clinic, hospital, Doctors Office on a regular basis to deliver this. Emphasize, i want to i think it would be better it would be better if there was a conversation, but im confident those contractors are having contact with the biden team and there is going to be at least a degree of assistance they will provide. , you are upn hawaii first. Good morning. Caller good morning, greta. It has been a long time since i called in and have gotten your voice. One is about a doctor i think you should get on named michael mina. He had an article published in time magazine. He is a proponent for a whole group of rapid antigen tests. The government to produce them, to give a whole bunch to each person. Like pregnancy tests, where you can use them daily. He was saying he is an epidemiologist and other things he was saying to use them at least twice a day for everyone. Get them out to at least 50 of the population. Statistically on the studies they have done, the infection would decline, the transmission would decline rapidly. That is part one of my question. Part two is, you need to get Alan Dershowitz on, same spelling is my name. He wrote a letter on the internet, in his letter trumps onlyls road to victory, which is he is expressing the concept that trump has an actual strategy behind what he is doing. He is not intending for the electors to get to the Electoral College and for it to actually mimic a situation that happened twice in the 19th century, which was the example dershowitz uses is rutherford b hayes, where the electors were actually the house of representatives. I know that may be outside of the skill set. That is why it might be good to get alanon. Alan on. Host do you have any thoughts on that . Guest testing is an evolving, and i think increasingly sophisticated and hopefully rather increasingly accurate and easy and inexpensive. We have seen that happen already, but we have to continue. What he is describing is a lateral flow test. You mentioned a pregnancy test as an example. The dilemma we are having with antigen test is that they have not proven to be quite as accurate. There are lots of different tests and i dont mean to characterize all of them in that way, but rapid testing, abundant testing to it better. I am thinking about a little outing my family has for christmas. Wouldnt it be great if i had the ability to do a home test and have every member of our family tested every morning . I think that is a good thing. If we get it down to a dollar or two it would be good in some circumstances. As for the Electoral College, i have actually been an elector and know that process well. May i say, i dont personally see any particular strategy for the trump effort that can succeed. Candidly, i find that if we were to disrupt that in some way that was not reflective of what happened in each of those states, at the ballot box, i think that would a disruption to a critical american institution. So, we are all seeing it unfold. Im confident it will work its way out. Host do you think that the president should concede . Guest i think the president has every right to pursue whatever remedy is available under the law, but a concession . That is basically a nicety, it is not a legal proposition. I do think it would be much better if he did transition activities and never process he is going to go through simultaneously. There is no reason they cannot coexist. Host brian in oregon. Caller yes . Host go ahead. Listen and talk through your phone. Youve got to turn that television down. Caller all right, just a second. Host go ahead, please. Im a republican and i am a little disheartened by President Trump acting this way with joe biden and not allowing a transition. He is putting our country in danger. Won the election. The people voted, devoted him in. I voted for trump, we lost. I think he needs to be responsible and allow this transition to proceed, because it just puts our country at danger. He is continuing on challenging in these courts, and there is no path for him to win. It is all over. I just dont understand why he doesnt proceed and let joe biden have his transition. Host ok, brian. Let me go to nancy, who is in houston. Caller hi. Ive been following the pandemic. The different vaccines. I was listening to the news on this, and they were saying the transition may not be as hard because the corps of engineers letter the ones that are going to be working on that. So it is not going to affect is bad. Is that true . Guest im not aware of the role that the corps of engineers would play. It is possible that there be certain government assets there was a time where i think there was discussion of having military assets involved in the distribution. I think what theyre going to is already anhere infrastructure in place to distribute the vaccine. They are called distributors. Who everycompanies day send trucks full of supplies. The part ofey are the supply chain that goes from the warehouse to the Practitioners Office or the hospital. They are doing that every day now. I think they are going to harness that effort to say, lets use that existing distribution. That would be the natural way and the most effective way, in my own judgment. I think they undoubtedly have those contracts in place for a while. Host governor leavitt, he also led the development of a federal Pandemic Response plan after the 2005 avian flu outbreak. What did you learn . Guest the first thing we learned is that we were not very well prepared. At that time we did not have sufficient vaccine manufacturing capacity. Host of our capacity was on contract outside the United States. We can see the danger of that now. If the only place we could get manufacturing done was outside the u. S. , there would be a danger that the countries who walkd that might somehow the vaccine before it got to the United States. Congress ando said, a pandemic will happen. Maybe this one, it may be another one, but when it does, we are not prepared. The congress appropriated a billion dollars. This was a good piece of insight by president bush. We spent a lot of time and effort developing what is now reflected as the National Pandemic plan. It has been changed and enhanced sense that occurred, but much of what has happened, i think, is a reflection of that work. Host what is in place to respond to this current pandemic that you saw, that you outlined in your work in 2005 . Guest and mentioned the vaccine manufacturing capacity. We are now seeing the benefit of that. Had we not done that and the other things that have affected it the technologies, the way in which they manufacture it, the type of virus this is has affected that but we put a lot of emphasis in actually having the capacity to manufacture vaccines. We have what i think its going to become a modern miracle in seeing vaccines manufactured, developed, tested, manufactured, distributed in a remarkable remarkably short. Of time remarkably short period of time. As the virus develops, we are able to gain access to the vaccine and develop a vaccine. We spent a lot of our energy focused on local Public Health capacity. Can i just say, this is a really big problem that has been revealed by the pandemic . Infrastructureth over the course of time has been allowed to to use a metaphor to see. Go to sea. We spent a lot of our efforts focused on that, but it has to be ongoing. It,nnot just be invest in then not invest in it. There is a lesson we can learn from 2020, it is that this kind of emergency, we have to treat it like an insurance policy. Dont make a claim every year, you need to invest over and over so that when these things happen you have the capacity to respond. Host what kind of investments are needed . Again, i think vaccine manufacturing capability. We need to continue to invest in it, depending on the type of virus it can be an even bigger problem. Investments in local Public Health. What has occurred is, as Health Care Costs have gone up, state legislatures let me pause and say, the health is not a federal issue. It is a concern, but it is not an issue that is controlled by the congress, other than appropriating money to states. When it comes down to it, Public Health assets are at local governments and in state governments. Over the course of the last multiple decades, we have invested more in providing health care to people who are already sick and less in health care Public Health which will help people stay healthy. If you look at the big jumps in our Public Health, they came during the 70s and 80s, when we were cleaning the air, water, and land. I ran the Environmental Protection agency at one time. That ite learned was was a Public Health issue, that agency. It is all about cleaning air, water, and increasing human health. I think the agency is going to be going through its 50th anniversary next week. That is what i learned. Host judy in lawrence, massachusetts. Caller yes, good morning. Donald trump dont want to concede for the simple fact that a while back when they were doing the investigation on him with the mueller case, they said they were going to indict him when he becomes a normal citizen. And he is afraid to leave the white house because he knows hes going to get indicted. Host hard, we will go to susan who is in fort myers, florida. Caller good morning. I have a couple of points. All, i would like to remind all of the politicians from local all the way up to the white house and the supreme are all employees, not employers. The money that they utilize and throw here and there does not belong to them. Belongs to we the people who pay all of the taxes and who pay their wages. As far as covid goes, i was around for the polio vaccine as a kid. I grew up in the alleys of the west side of cleveland ohio. Cleveland, ohio. They used us as experiments. We lined up one day, parents didnt know, we all got injected. Nobody knew why. The other thing you need to understand is, this does not happen overnight. The people who do not believe in it in at least wearing a mask and following basic requests for social distancing, handwashing, these other people who do not believe in science. Host susan, im going to have the governor jump in. Guest she made some very good points. One is that everyone in public service, we all need to be well, i am a former Public Servant that is exactly what we were and are. Public servants. With respect to the need for us as citizens to keep the basic rules. When it comes right down to it, government can do many things, our success in fighting this pandemic will oil down to our individuals to do the things that are necessary to fight this virus. Host john in beaverton, oregon. Caller hi there. To me it is a transfer of power to govern and to serve. , whatvernor leavitt effect will this have on the agencies to be able to meet their missions and serve the public . I think the most significant problem that not having access to the agencies is more a Relationship Issue than it is an actual legal or logistical issue. Anytime there is an administration change, the people running the departments daytoday have apprehensions and they dont know what is going to happen and change. Settling that of happens when i bunch of human beings, and you can look them and i and talk with them. It is on both sides. There are those who are going to be on what is referred to as a landing team. Ultimately, when they gain access to the agencies you are going to find out these are human beings who want to do the same things they do. It begins to put into the more practical. I think that is an very important part of a transition. Host luis in fincen, ohio. Vincent, ohio. Caller i was wondering, how common is it for senators to join, like they just joined the . Rial of pfizer it seemed to be after it was proven that there was 95 efficacy. How common is that . You were talking about distribution. I am a Senior Citizen and have underlying conditions. I would love to have the vaccine right away. Is that common, for senators to just join the trials after knowing how effective they are . Anyt so, im not aware of direct report that you are referencing, but i will comment or generally. More generally. One of the more important things the federal government must do in the distribution of a vaccine prioritize a limited supply. We are going to be manufacturing hundreds of millions of doses, i think. Who gets it first . Evident to pretty people that the first group to get it are the heroic Health Care Workers who are putting themselves in harms way every day to care for those who are ill and need help. I think the next group that likely will be our people who are in special categories. You would be one of them, if you have an underlying condition and you are at an age i think that will likely be among the second group of those who receive it. So, help is on the way. Therewould also say that are other groups who have special significance. Again, i do not know of any particular thing that has prompted your comment, but it would be a very bad thing for the United States if congress could not function. So, it is not surprising to me at some point you might look for key government officials whose performance is required to make the care available to all of us. That is possibly what that could be. There is a very well disciplined set of priorities on how that vaccine will be in ministry. Be administered. I dont think it will go perfectly, but it will happen in phases. Host governor, she is referring to headlines like this one. Steve daines, senator from montana has antibodies after participating in a Pfizer Vaccine trial. I think i saw rob portman as well. Guest like any other citizen, they probably volunteered. Host he will go to jeff, new york. Caller thank you greta and thank you mr. Levitt. I want to pick up on a point he made regarding the need to only be prepared, even though it is an insurance policy to invest in pandemic preparedness and response. We have seen that when populism rises, investments and the willingness to have Public Health messaging declines. And we become vulnerable. It is an existential threat. Congress had the wisdom to realize that existential threats needed to be addressed with the Federal Reserve, from economic sources. I am proposing that we amend the Federal Reserve to include funding for pandemic preparedness and response. Host jeff, let me jump in. Governor leavitt, what do you think . Guest well, the Federal Reserve first of all, i am not well enough acquainted with federal for the statutes surrounding the Federal Reserve, to know what we would need to do. But i do think it is worth reflecting that the federal veryve jumped in in the big way. I think 3 trillion of liquidity. The federal government has put forward a quite dramatic effort to keep the economy going. Know more about that. He does point out something that i think is worth commenting on for us as a generation. We reflected some on my efforts to prepare the country for a 2007 andin 2006 and 2000 eight. You asked what i learned. One of the things i learned is that anything you say in advance of a pandemic sounds alarmist. People cannot conceive of it. Donenything that you have after it starts to prepare for it seems inadequate. That is the dilemma. You are dealing with so many needs we have is a country, having the discipline to regularly invest in what we are not experiencing, but could and that could disrupt us, is a very significant discipline that i hope is a lesson that will come. Rom what we experience now host governor, what are your thoughts on Hospital Capacity being stretched across the country and in some rural areas . Guest i think it is a matter of eventuality. It is going to happen. I look at our circumstances we went you know, through march, april, and may, but we thought was a very difficult time, and in some areas it was catastrophic. Like new york and other major cities. History of pandemics is that almost always there is a second wave, and very often it is more the relent and ent andead virul widespread. We are in the midst of the second wave. You have to ask the question, whether it is going to cause it to stop . The only things that will cause it to stop because there is still a lot of people that have not been affected and this virus has an insatiable need to replicate itself. First of all, our behavior. We can stop it by doing the things we are told by Public Health officials over and over to do. The second is, vaccine. It is on the way, but it is going to take some time for that to occur. And so, in the course of that period of time, we have got to ourn to continue to work way through. Is, a headline out of utah local leaders urge residents not to gather for thanksgiving as utah again smashes a daily covid19 record. Guest well, utah is where i live. It is in a, i think, a crisis with this. We are seeing it double every two or three weeks. If it were to double again, it would very clearly exceed our capacity inside hospitals. We are right at the breaking point now. So, i am asking the question, as i did before, what is going to stop this . Giving, we are all planning our thanksgiving. Those states have asked their citizens not together because they are finding the place where this is spreading the fastest, most easily identified and the most certain, is in informal gatherings in homes. That caused a little bit of controversy because people thought, wait a minute, are you telling me what i can do inside my own roof . I dont like that. Well, none of us like this. What they were pointing out is, it is a reality, that that is with is with the disease is spreading. That is not just true in utah, it is across the country. What will ultimately allow this to stop will be our own behavior, a vaccine, and time. We will get through this, but the degree to which we have damage and pain will be determined in large measure by the way we react to this. Leavitt,mer governor we appreciate the conversation with you this morning and you taking calls from our viewers. Guest my pleasure. Journal,gton everyday we are taking your calls live on the air and we will discuss policy issues that impact you. Monday morning, we will talk about the latest in the development of a Coronavirus Vaccine with Health Care Reporter andrew dunn. Then a discussion of Social Security reform with Charles Bluhm house. Watch washington journal, live at 7 00 eastern monday morning. Be sure to join the discussion calls, facebook messages, and tweets. On the sunday news programs, many of the questions focused on the trump administrations legal challenges to the election results, the transfer of power, and the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic. We begin with kevin cramer. Legal systems. These are processes in our constitution and they are not just appropriate, they are an obligation to the millions of americans that President Trump is a reflection of. A lot of people may think we are the reflection of him, he is a reflection of millions of people that want to see him fight. No, there has to be an end. I frankly do think it is time it is past time to start a transition. I would rather have a president that has more than one day to prepare. Should joe biden end up winning this