USTIN, Texas - Even as George W. Bush dropped loud hints about working on his White House transition yesterday, the real transition office in Washington sat locked and empty, awaiting the arrival of hundreds of administration workers who have yet to be hired.
Some $5 million in federal transition money sat untouched in a bank account. Stacks of ''how-to'' pamphlets lay undistributed. And scores of government affairs experts sat expectantly by the phone, anxiously awaiting news of which team they would be dispatched to advise.
In fact, the long delay in the presidential election has become a source of much hand-wringing in Washington, where ''transitioning'' is as much of a time-honored tradition as other functions of bureaucracy. After decades of shuffling presidents in and out of town a certain way, the conventional wisdom now is that either candidate will come into office hobbled, having fewer than the usual 73 days to hold meetings and scout out government agencies.
But according to several students of the process, including political veterans on both sides, the shortened timetable may come with some advantages - if only because it may limit the public bickering and byzantine maneuvering that often accompany the birth of a new administration. According to Mark Gearan, deputy transition director for Bill Clinton in 1993, the ''delayed transition may actually be a blessing in disguise.''
''It might actually result in a little less government, at least on the front end,'' Gearan said. ''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.''
The brief period could even help spare the president-elect from the mistakes of transitions past - Clinton's infamous gays-in-the-military pledge on Veterans Day 1992, for example, which dislodged him from his intended economic message for weeks. Or President Ronald Reagan's hurried dismantling of the last budget of Jimmy Carter, which led to Social Security cuts, a move that came back to haunt him far beyond 1980.
The transition serves an important purpose. With each new administration comes nearly 3,000 federal appointments, 600 of which must be confirmed by the US Senate. Before they even get that far, top appointees must go through a rigorous vetting by the FBI - a process that can take weeks.
Although both candidates have floated names of possible Cabinet members - and Bush has paraded his likely chief of staff, Andrew Card, in front of news cameras for weeks - the lower-level deputies are impossible to tap at this stage, said Paul Light, a transition expert at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
''The secretaries [of agencies] are easy. It's the second, third, and fourth vertebrae where you start running into trouble,'' Light said.
At the same time, the period between Election Day and Inauguration on January 20 is designed to give the president-elect a chance at a politics-free zone in which to let the American people get to know him and his family, Gearan said.
Clinton laid out his agenda, announcing plans for an economic summit just five days after his election; that, Gearan said, was ''a major piece of the transition, following `It's the economy, stupid,''' his central campaign theme.
Recent past presidents have also used the transition to lay the groundwork for personal relationships with leaders both in Congress and abroad. President George Bush met with both Margaret Thatcher and Democratic US House Speaker Jim Wright before his inauguration, meetings that Gearan described as ''signature moments.''
Whether the transition will have that effect for either Gore or Bush remains an open question. The painful post-election impasse in Florida has only heightened partisan feelings.
''There are questions about what kind of a honeymoon period either of these guys could have,'' agreed Alvin Felzenberg, who studies transitions for the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has published a book on the process.
But that disadvantage, Felzenberg said, could be outweighed by unforeseen advantages, especially in hiring aides from the private sector. ''It might be easier for a president-elect who's been through this kind of post-election trauma to recruit the highest-caliber people, people who might have been reluctant under normal times,'' he said.
With the election on hold, the Clinton Administration yesterday announced it had suspended the usual transition process, ordering federal agencies that had begun transition planning to wait for the announcement of who won. So far, White House spokesman Jake Siewart said, agencies had started forming lists of decisions and issues, ''what's in place, what's not in place, those sorts of things.''
Whenever the outcome in Florida, and hence the presidency, becomes clear, the Clinton Administration will ''spring into action,'' Siewart said. Acknowledging the chaos that followed the Clinton transition - in which several appointments fell through, and the entire cabinet was not in place until well into the first year of the administration - he said White House chief of staff John Podesta had been dispatched to help out, ''to ensure that this could go more quickly in some ways than our own transition did.''
But he sounded relatively unconcerned about the work getting done, even with just 50 or fewer days to work with.
''I'm not sure that a week or two here or there makes an enormous difference,'' Siewart said. ''I expect that the FBI, like other agencies, is probably taking measures to speed that process up as best it can.''
Most political analysts believe Gore would face a smoother ride, if only because he and Clinton have shared so many decisions already. Gore aides have said they do not need to do much early transition planning because he is so familiar with the White House.
Bush officials seem slightly more preoccupied with the move. Despite the governor of Texas's public efforts to appear as though a transition is underway, advisers acknowlege there is only so much that can be done before the presidency is actually decided.
Karen Hughes, the communications director for Bush, said there are still ''questions as routine as who does the GSA [Government Services Agency] give the key to the office'' at 1800 G St. NW, the official transition headquarters in Washington.
''There is a lot of work to be done, and there's a short period of time to begin with, so clearly this will result in some lost time,'' Hughes said. ''This will make the normally hectic transition period even more hectic. But the country has a long history of uniting once elections are behind us, and I expect that will be the case this time.''
