The Great Drill-Down

Given her knowledge of how the White House works and his knowledge of the Senate, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Tom Daschle probably made the best deals on their subcabinets. They have almost certainly identified the key jobs they want to fill immediately and are likely to be vetting candidates right now.

Several of Obama's cabinet picks, most notably Daschle again, have also identified their chiefs of staff, even as their colleagues wait for the dense transition team reports that will soon be written by the 400 Obama aides crawling about the federal government. If the past is prologue, the reports will be thrown at a junior level staffer in the secretary's office to be condensed into a two-page memo.

As the nominees pile up in the White House, the appointments process will inevitably slow down. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has only so many agents, both active and retired, to throw at its full-field investigations of the national security questionnaire, while the Office of Government Ethics and its network of department and agency ethics officers have only so many staffers to review the financial disclosure forms.

In addition, the economic stimulus package is likely to consume the Senate early on, meaning that required confirmation hearings will start to slip. As the Bush administration quickly learned, it is one thing to nominate the sub-cabinet and quite another to push them through the Senate. Obama may be likely to beat presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton on getting his appointees in place, but he cannot rewind the clock to the two-and-a-half-month average that John F. Kennedy achieved in 1961.

Paul C. Light is a professor at New York University's Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service and author of A Government Ill Executed.