Kathryn Dunn Tenpas

Each president decides which officials are part of the cabinet. For consistency across administrations, Brookings senior fellow Kathryn Dunn Tenpas and research assistant Grant Koehl looked at only the cabinet-level positions in the line of presidential succession and didn’t include certain positions that presidents sometimes give more importance, such as United Nations ambassador, which Mr. Biden has made a cabinet position. The number of cabinet members in the line of succession increased with the addition of the Veterans Affairs Department under former President George H.W. Bush and the Department of Homeland Security under former President George W. Bush, bringing the total to 15.

Despite the truncated transition brought on by President Trump’s refusal to concede the election and Emily Murphy, administrator of the General Services Administration, also refusing to certify the transition for nearly three weeks—the delay has not affected the pace of President-elect Biden’s appointments. In fact, the Biden transition is well ahead of his seven predecessors. As of Jan. 7, the transition had publicly identified the top 15 Cabinet members. The completion of these highly visible appointments provides the opportunity to compare the relative diversity (in terms of race/ethnicity, gender, and age) of the Biden Cabinet to his six predecessors at the start of their administrations.

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, Senior Fellow at the Miller Center, University of Virginia, discusses moves to remove Donald Trump, why impeachment is important even if it may not be achieved by 20th January, how recent events will change the Republican Party, and the risk of escalating violence.

Not having those positions filled “inhibits any kind of long-range planning,” said Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a Brookings Institution expert and a senior research director for the White House Transition Project. And it burns time off the four-year clock that Biden faces before the next election to implement his policies.

Have major recent developments in China and the United States raised the possibility that the U.S.-China relationship, which has become increasingly strained over the last 10 years, might now move in new and more positive directions? The first panel discusses the November 2020 elections in the United States, providing an analysis of the election campaigns, the electoral process, the outcomes of the elections, and the transition from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration. It will then examine the Fifth Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee in October, which discussed the foreign and domestic economic policies underlying China’s new five-year plan that will begin in 2021. The second panel analyzes the implications of these events for Chinese policy toward the U.S. and American policy toward China, assessing the prospects for both change and continuity.