Goodbye Obama, hello Trump: how will the presidential handover work?

Former New Jersey state senator Rich Bagger, who worked for Christie in New Jersey, is executive director. Publicly-identified members include former Heritage Foundation president Ed Feulner, former Navy officer and longtime adviser to the Boston Consulting Group Ron Nicol, private equity fund chairman William Walton, former chief economist at Bear Stearns David Malpass, former House member Mike Rogers, retired army lieutenant general Joseph Keith Kellogg, former Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell, Reagan attorney general Ed Meese, George W Bushs director of the office of personnel management Kay Coles James, former George HW Bush economic adviser and Romney transition alumnus William Hagerty, former George W Bush liaison to health and human services and Romney alum Jamie Burke, and former Dick Cheney domestic policy aide Ado Machida.

The immigration team is reportedly exclusively made up of staffers with ties to Senator Sessions.

How many posts will Trump have to fill?

There are about 4,000 positions in the executive branch, including the White House, that are filled by appointment. About 1,200 of those positions (not including federal judges) require confirmation by the Senate, including Cabinet nominees and agency heads.

It generally takes between six and nine months to fill all the positions requiring Senate approval, and well over a year to fill the mid-level positions not requiring confirmation.

What challenges will Trump face?

Very few members of Trumps transition team will have any familiarity with the post-election transition process. Vetting nominees is an often-fraught process in which administrations quite regularly miss or think unimportant parts of their preferred appointees backgrounds that may be disqualifying think Zo Bairds undocumented nanny, Tim Geithners tax mistakes and Bernard Keriks undocumented nanny, mistresses and gift-taking.

Though the transition is allocated $5m from the federal budget, it often costs more to complete Obamas cost $9m, and he relied on his donor base to fund the costs above and beyond that which was allocated by the government.

And, while the external focus is often on the nominees and policy planning process, there are hundreds of quotidian tasks that need to be accomplished, like setting up the technological infrastructure of an administration, assigning office space and equipment, ordering stationary and the like, which can easily be lost in the shuffle. In 2009, the first 50 Obama staffers found themselves with no computers or paper on which to start their jobs after the inauguration.

What happens if there are any difficulties with appointments?

Because of the Democrats decision in 2013 to eliminate the ability of the minority party to filibuster nominations, Trump is likely to encounter little effective opposition in the Senate to confirming his nominees.

It is nonetheless standard practice for all of an administrations 4,000-plus appointees to tender their resignations on inauguration day. In many cases, their jobs will be done by career agency staff on an interim basis until the positions are filled. Its unclear whether the Trump administrations reported intention to make it easier to fire non-appointed government employees will enter into effect while those employees are tasked with making his government function.

Has it always run smoothly in the past?

In addition to problems with appointees and the well-documented Travelgate scandal of the Clinton administration, the outgoing Clinton administration removed the letter W from many of the White Houses computer keyboards in addition to the more standard memento-taking by rogue staffers, earning them opprobrium from the General Accounting Office in 2002. George W Bush and Obama both warned staffers not to play pranks on the next administrations staffers in subsequent years.