WASHINGTON (AP) – Three blocks from the White House, there are offices for more than 500 mostly inactive Biden transition employees. The government sends laptops so employees can work from home. President-elect Joe Biden, surrounded only by a handful of Delaware attendees, uses Zoom to oversee his plans to take power.
But Biden will soon enter a no-zoom zone in the White House, just one of the signs of the challenges his new administration will face as it moves to Washington amid a pandemic..
After months of virtue of the prudent approach their campaign and transition teams have taken towards COVID-19, Biden’s prudence will be put to the test by technology and tradition when it arrives on January 20th..
White House computers do not support popular Zoom video conferencing software or rival systems such as Google Meet and Slack. Mobile phones with government issues only got text messaging features a few years ago. And many employees will need to be present at the White House to access classified information.
The Biden team has limited experience with providing a physical office during the pandemic. His campaign went virtual in mid-March, clearing the Philadelphia headquarters and sending staff to his families in Washington, New York and beyond. His transition team charted its path to power completely online.
Biden’s closest team to experimenting with in-person work was election night, when a small selection of masked and socially distanced auxiliaries in Wilmington, Delaware, oversaw returns to hotel conference rooms, much far from running a White House 24/7.
Even now, the most prominent use of the more than 9,290 square feet of office space set aside for the transition is for Vice President-elect Kamala Harris to receive the highly ranked President’s Daily Brief.
Teleworking is possible for some White House officials, and improvements have been made in secure, unclassified video conferencing over the past two decades. But the lack of face-to-face coordination could pose an additional challenge for the new government facing a multitude of crises.
To further complicate matters, the Biden team needs to develop safety and health protocols from scratch. The Trump administration was, at best, a cautionary tale about not running a job during a pandemic.
Despite relying on an aggressive testing regime that is not available in other workplaces, the Western wing led by President Donald Trump has been the site of at least two significant outbreaks of COVID-19 since Trump himself fell with the virus. five weeks before election day.
In addition to the first family, dozens of the Trump world who have tested positive include the White House chief of staff, the chief of staff to the vice president, the White House press secretary and the president’s campaign manager. They have still had to isolate more helpers after a potential exposure. The full scale of infections is not publicly known.
The problems arose in large part since Trump’s White House passed its own guidelines for the safety of COVID-19, including holding large events, which allow for frequent travel and above all do not require facial masks. The Biden team believes some of the biggest risks can be mitigated simply by following scientific advice: organizing safer events, requiring facial coverage, and continuing with regular testing.
White House veterans say the task of making the Western wing a safe workspace is achievable, but that it will require intense discipline, both for White House staff and for hundreds of government employees. other federal agencies that support it.
Detailed planning is still underway, but some of the first considerations are to reduce the number of staff who have free access to the Western wing, encourage remote work whenever possible, and even get employees to use secure teleconferencing. between individual offices to minimize the use of shared spaces.
Biden’s team may obtain a type of plan for its use of Trump’s White House COVID-19 vaccines, which is beginning to roll out inoculations for some critical government officials, including military aides to the president, service agents secret and situation room surveillance agents.
It seems likely that Biden himself will receive at least a first dose of vaccine before taking office, based on the advice of the American expert on infectious diseases. Dr. Anthony Fauci asked that Biden and Harris receive the vaccine quickly.
“For safety reasons, I really feel strongly that we should vaccinate them as soon as we can,” Fauci told ABC News on Tuesday. “You want him to be fully protected when he takes over the presidency in January.”
Moving the bidens to the White House (a stressful process even in normal times) will be more complicated this year.
There will be a top-down cleanup of the West Wing in the hours after Trump leaves the venue and before the Biden team is installed. Public health experts say it is crucial that additional measures be taken to mitigate the spread of the disease during this change. .
A former official said the White House ventilation system, hardened against biological and chemical threats, raises less concern than in typical buildings, but Biden’s team runs no risk.
“The two things to keep in mind are cleaning all surfaces, especially places with a high touch, such as door knobs … and aerosol transmission and the possibility of aerosols remaining in the air between the two transitions if someone is sick “. Dr. Abraar Karan, global health specialist at Brigham and Women Hospital and Harvard Medical School. “Having a complete change of air, filtration and open ventilation will be important between cleaning and moving the new presidential family.”
Normally, the whole movement is completed in about five to six hours, said Kate Andersen Brower, author of “The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House.” For safety reasons, the day of the move is carried out by the domestic staff of the White House, a company that claims everyone, from construction engineers to kitchen staff.
“In the past, there was literally one truck moving at the entrance to South Lawn and one at the north entrance,” he said. “It’s pretty much a practical situation on deck.”
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Madhani reported from Wilmington, Del.