The delay in pronouncing a winner of the presidential election is cutting into the already limited time for the eventual president-elect to conduct the massive task of launching a new administration, causing problems that experts said could last well into his first year in office.

Both campaigns have put their transition efforts on hold as they battle over Florida's 25 electoral votes. The delay could be more of a problem for Texas Gov. George W. Bush, who would be assembling an administration from scratch, but it could also greatly hamper a Gore administration.

The transition--which is supposed to last 73 days but is certain now to be less than 60--is when the winning team moves from campaigning to governing and when the new president reintroduces himself to the country as its new leader, rather than a partisan candidate.

It is when the exhausted campaign operation catches its breath and begins the massive process of organizing the White House and the rest of the government. There are about 3,000 jobs, 600 of them requiring Senate confirmation, which can take about eight months from selection to background checks to Senate approval.

It is when a new administration translates campaign promises into legislative proposals, focusing on a Jan. 20 deadline to prepare a series of executive orders to quickly set the tone for the next four years. The new president prepares his inaugural address, and his team scrambles to prepare a budget due in Congress in February.

Most pressing, the winning team must organize more than 300 people who are to move from the campaign to a transition headquarters in Washington to begin this process, interviewing outgoing officials and career bureaucrats and writing position papers. But the transition office doors are locked, and little work is going on.

"People are watching football," said transition expert Charles O. Jones of the University of Wisconsin, "and they don't understand what happens two months from now when you lop off the top echelon of every department and agency and clean out the White House down to the cooks. Transition planning is always important, but it's especially important when you've had a tie election. . . . They ought to be thinking about governing, and instead they're going in absolutely the opposite direction, burrowing into their combative campaign mode."

Karen Hughes, communications director for Bush, recently expressed trepidation about the lost time.

"The General Services Administration is telling us they have keys to a transition office but don't know who to give them to, and the FBI wants to talk about clearance procedures for staff but they don't know who to meet with," Hughes said.

Bush aides say campaign officials are preparing for a transition, although the governor's closest confidantes are throwing their full energy into hour-to-hour legal and political survival.

Meanwhile, the transition planning for Vice President Gore, said to be less extensive than Bush's before Election Day, appears to have ground to a halt as attention is diverted to Florida.

"They are in freeze frame," said a source who had been in recent contact with Gore transition chief Roy Neel.

For Gore, with friendly Clinton administration officials able to stay on and a budget going to Congress that likely reflects Gore's priorities, a truncated transition period may not be that significant, most transition veterans agree.

But for Bush, who would have to re-staff an entire political appointee class, there would be less time to select Cabinet and White House personnel and to have the FBI and other background checks completed so his team can be put in place. Bush also would need time to rework Clinton's proposed budget.

If the election uncertainty ends in the next few days, Brookings Institution transition expert Paul Light says, it may be mostly "no harm, no foul. But any further delay will mean you just have a backlog" on a number of important tasks "that hurts Bush more than Gore because he needs to do more."

Heritage Foundation transition expert Alvin S. Felzenberg said that, for both camps, the delay "is going to hurt a lot. It's not crippling, but a transition, under the best of circumstances, is an arduous process, and the shortened time frame makes it more so."

The president-elect, particularly, needs this time to change from candidate to national leader. "The transition gives the winner a new introduction to the American people," said Mark Gearan, deputy director of the 1992 Clinton transition. The ceremonial events, the meetings and private lunches to thank friends and to reach out to adversaries "help build a honeymoon," Gearan said, so the new president can govern effectively.

Ironically, at a time when a longer transition might be most needed to soothe post-election bitterness, the battle in Florida makes that reconciliation period even shorter.

"In a limited-mandate election, the ceremonial activities become even more important," Light said.

During the 1988 transition, President Reagan took President-elect Bush for lunch with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and in 1992, President-elect Clinton held a marathon economic conference in Little Rock with business and labor people to show off his economic bona fides.

The transition is also a critical period for getting key aides in place and the cumbersome clearance process well underway. A shorter transition may make it impossible for a new president--especially for Bush--to get all his senior people vetted and confirmed before Congress recesses in the fall of 2001, Light said.

The process, like a pipeline, can handle just so many people at one time, Light said. In varying degrees, those appointees have to be cleared by ethics officials, the White House counsel's office, the IRS and the FBI. Such clearances can take two weeks to several months.

The Senate-confirmed positions--the key assistant secretary level where policy is refined and implemented--are a critical layer for a new administration to get into place, Light said, and a short transition may mean the closely divided Senate will be processing--and debating--nominations well into 2002.

But several transition veterans see a bit of a silver lining--as long as the delay doesn't last too long.

"This delayed transition may actually be a blessing in disguise," Gearan said at a Brookings Institution symposium Wednesday. ". . . It may actually save us from creating the kind of massive bureaucracy sometimes that any transition period can come into, with the creation of working groups and cluster groups and study groups and the preparation of briefing books and documents from anything from the Tuna Commission to the Department of Defense."

C. Boyden Gray, former Bush White House counsel and director of the office of transition counsel for Bush, agreed. "Perhaps this will help us avoid the horrid cluster groups and transition teams that go marauding through the federal agencies."

A relatively brief delay, Gray said, is "not as dire because you're happy to work with the career people. Nevertheless, the delays, if they get past Thanksgiving, I think will be very serious on the personnel front."

Staff writers Mike Allen and Ceci Connolly contributed to this report.