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Clinton and Trump Campaigns Are Buzzing About the Race … for the Cabinet

The presidential election is more than two months away, but both campaigns have set up offices in Washington to plan transitions to the White House.Credit...Al Drago/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump have yet to face off in their first debate, but both candidates have already moved teams into a plush marble-and-glass office building a block from the White House, where they are vetting résumés, sketching out organizational charts and otherwise planning the transition to a Trump or Clinton administration.

The jockeying for jobs that usually consumes the two and a half months between Election Day and Inauguration Day is well underway in Washington, with people swapping their notional lists of cabinet officers and speculating about who might get the plum deputy posts just under them.

Speculation on the Republican side has been somewhat subdued, in part because Mr. Trump’s personnel preferences are something of a mystery. But on the Democratic side, Mrs. Clinton’s persistent lead in the polls has made it hard for her supporters to resist the urge to measure the drapes. And no area is more rife with jockeying than national security, with Mrs. Clinton, a former secretary of state, in the rare position of having worked with dozens of the people she may employ again.

“There has been a lot of talking going on, and now that it looks like she’s going to win, there is even more,” said Vali R. Nasr, a former adviser to Mrs. Clinton at the State Department who is now the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

The Clinton campaign’s choice of Thomas E. Donilon, a former national security adviser to President Obama, to oversee this part of the transition reflects continuity with the Obama administration and underscores the differences between 2016 and 2008. When Mr. Obama became president-elect, he faced a Democratic foreign policy establishment that was split between those who supported him and those who backed Mrs. Clinton, but was eager to be back in power after eight years of Republican rule.

This time, Mrs. Clinton would get to choose from a largely unified Democratic Party, with a strong bench of policy makers in diplomacy, defense and intelligence who have served in the Obama administration. And she would have the option of drawing from Republicans who have publicly disavowed Mr. Trump, including Michael V. Hayden, a former director of the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, and Robert B. Zoellick, a former United States trade representative.

“Because there has been such a massive defection of the Republican foreign policy bench,” Mr. Nasr said, “in a way, she has come to inherit three-quarters of the foreign policy establishment.”

There are other reasons for this early start in the transition, chiefly a new law that aims to make the handoff between the White House and the incoming administration more formal and less frenetic than in the past. On Thursday, both campaigns met with the White House chief of staff, Denis McDonough, and other senior officials to discuss how the Obama administration planned to handle the transition.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, the head of Mr. Trump’s transition team, represented the Trump campaign, while Ken Salazar, a former interior secretary under Mr. Obama, represented the Clinton campaign. Mr. Salazar is the chairman of what the campaign calls the Clinton-Kaine Transition Project.

Neither campaign is eager to discuss the process in detail for fear of looking presumptuous. Brian Fallon, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said fewer than 10 people were working in the offices at 1717 Pennsylvania Avenue, a number that would not grow beyond two dozen until after Nov. 8 — and then only if Mrs. Clinton won.

None of the job seekers are eager to talk either, at least on the record, but they are trying to show their usefulness in other ways. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has already designated 35 people to serve as coordinators or senior partners for its foreign policy advisory committee. They oversee groups that are churning out position papers on counterterrorism, cybersecurity, democracy and human rights, and global development.

The peculiar nature of this campaign, several members said, had made the advisory job, in some ways, less relevant. While the advisers had expected to write papers defending the Obama-Clinton reset policy with Russia, for example, Mrs. Clinton is instead facing a candidate whose coziness with President Vladimir V. Putin has become an issue.

Another major difference between 2008 and 2016 is that Mrs. Clinton is not a Washington neophyte, as Mr. Obama was. To some extent, she does not need anyone to tell her whom she should hire.

“What makes Hillary different than almost any other candidate is that she knows a lot of people in the national security area,” said Dennis B. Ross, who served as a special envoy for her in the State Department before moving to the White House to coordinate Middle East policy. “There’s a combination of familiarity and people she came to know and respect in different situations.”

Aside from Mrs. Clinton herself — and perhaps her husband — the person most influential in filling the administration’s national security jobs is likely to be Jake Sullivan, her senior policy adviser, who had the same role under Mrs. Clinton at the State Department. Mr. Sullivan has long been viewed as a prime candidate to be national security adviser, though his broad portfolio in the campaign suggests he could also end up as White House chief of staff.

In either job, people close to the campaign said, Mr. Sullivan would have a lot of say over who got the marquee national security posts: secretary of state, defense secretary and C.I.A. director. Michèle A. Flournoy, a former under secretary of defense in the Obama administration, is viewed as a clear favorite to be defense secretary because, among other things, it would allow Mrs. Clinton to make history by putting a woman in charge of the Pentagon.

The outlook for secretary of state is murkier, in part because Mrs. Clinton held the job herself and presumably has strong views on what kind of person she wants. Unlike Mr. Obama, who sought major public figures like Mrs. Clinton and John Kerry to be the nation’s chief diplomat, Mrs. Clinton, advisers said, might prefer a trusted and reliable facilitator of her policy.

That has led to speculation about William J. Burns, a low-key former deputy secretary of state who runs the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mr. Burns is trusted by Mrs. Clinton and is close to Mr. Sullivan, who worked with him on the secret negotiations in Oman that led to a nuclear deal with Iran. Mr. Donilon’s name also figures in speculation about secretary of state, as well as C.I.A. director.

For the C.I.A. post, Mrs. Clinton could also pick Michael J. Morell, whom she got to know when he was acting C.I.A. director in the Obama administration, or Michael G. Vickers, a former senior C.I.A. official and under secretary of defense for intelligence. Both recently wrote op-ed articles sharply critical of Mr. Trump and favorable to Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Morell also works as a senior counselor at Beacon Global Strategies, a consulting firm started by Philippe Reines and Andrew Shapiro, two former close Clinton aides who could return to a Clinton White House. Among the firm’s other founders is Jeremy Bash, a former chief of staff to Leon E. Panetta when he was defense secretary. Mr. Bash is advising the Clinton campaign on cybersecurity and is in the hunt for a job as well.

While gossiping about jobs is a Washington parlor game, some veterans caution that the early handicapping is nearly always wrong. In November 2008, James B. Steinberg and Gregory B. Craig, two former officials in President Bill Clinton’s administration who supported Mr. Obama in the campaign, were viewed as the top two contenders for national security adviser.

Neither got the job, which went to a dark horse, James L. Jones, a retired Marine Corps general. And of course, Mr. Obama had an even bigger surprise in store: Mrs. Clinton as secretary of state.

Find out what you need to know about the 2016 presidential race today, and get politics news updates via Facebook, Twitter and the First Draft newsletter.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Campaigns Are Buzzing Over Big Race (for Cabinet). Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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