Presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden is looking to assemble a team that will help carry him to the White House next year should he defeat President Trump in November.
Biden has reportedly looked to former Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., to lead the way. Kaufman was appointed to fill out Biden’s senate seat when he became vice president and also led Biden’s transition team in 2008 and 2009.
Kauffman acknowledged they are in “very early stages of pre-transition planning” to ensure an incoming Biden administration is ready to tackle any challenges on the road to assuming the highest office in the land.
“The next president will confront an ongoing global health pandemic and inherit an economy in its worst shape since the Great Depression,” Kaufman said in a statement, as reported by Fox News. He continued:
No one will have taken office facing such daunting obstacles since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Joe Biden is prepared to meet these urgent challenges on the day he is sworn in as president, and begin the hard work of addressing the public health crisis and rebuilding an economy that puts working families first.
Roosevelt took office in 1933, with the world in the grip of the Great Depression. He won four terms and died in 1945, shortly before victory was secured in the Second World War.
Kauffman announced that a half dozen staff, including Obama Administration and Capitol Hill veterans, will join the early effort to clear the way for Biden.
Yohannes Abraham, a longtime senior White House staffer in the Obama administration and former COO of the Obama Foundation, will manage day-to-day operations. Avril Haines, former principal deputy national security advisor and deputy director of the CIA, will manage the transition’s national security and foreign policy efforts, according to the Fox report.
Major party nominees traditionally build transition teams before a general election to coordinate with the incumbent administration.