Building 44

Federal agencies and the Obama transition | FULL COVERAGE »

Jamie S. Gorelick, who served as the department's second in command during the Clinton administration, said the resource issue poses "a very big problem."

"It appears the buildup in national security has come at the expense of criminal enforcement resources," she said. "I don't know how they are going to do it in a tight budget environment. Just sorting out whether they've cut meat or bone, or both, is going to be important."

The Obama advisers leading the Justice Department transition will have only a few weeks to make last-minute adjustments to the $25.4 billion budget for 2009. By early February, the 2010 budget will be due, another significant time crunch.

David Ogden, a chief of the department's civil division in the Clinton years, will lead the transition effort. Thomas J. Perrelli, who was a counselor to Attorney General Janet Reno and a classmate of Obama's at Harvard Law School, will serve as a deputy.

Within the Justice Department, career employee Lee Lofthus and political appointee Brian A. Benczkowski have been preparing binders for the transition team that contain sensitive information about ongoing investigations, positions the department has taken in forthcoming legal disputes and more run-of-the-mill data.

Early signals about Obama's view on presidential powers could come in several ongoing court cases that turn on executive privilege, including a House lawsuit against former White House counsel Harriet E. Miers and Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten that rests with an appeals court in the District. The Obama team could decide to dial back its use of the privilege in that case, and in Freedom of Information Act lawsuits filed by the ACLU, which seeks information on detainee issues in New York federal courts.

Moreover, by summer, key provisions of intelligence law are set to expire, including a controversial measure that gives the government more power to seize information from libraries under the USA Patriot Act. Civil libertarians say they will watch how Obama handles such issues and what he does even earlier, to review new guidelines for FBI agents conducting national security investigations that will take hold Dec. 1.

Personnel issues will pose another challenge, given the inspector general's findings in three blistering reports that said hiring by Bush Justice Department officials routinely flouted civil service laws.

William Yeomans, a former department civil rights division official who serves as a counselor to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), said that "the new team needs to make it very clear that ideology won't trump merit in hiring. There needs to be a comprehensive review, including what needs to be done to correct the hiring situation we now find. . . . There is a great deal of latitude among management to move people around."

One lawyer who offered Democrats advice during the presidential campaign suggested that Obama could decide to keep on several of the nation's 93 U.S. attorneys, such as Patrick J. Fitzgerald in Chicago, in a bid to demonstrate that merit trumps political connections. Fitzgerald, who prosecuted former vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Antoin "Tony" Rezko, a Democratic fundraiser with ties to Obama, is a political independent.