TRANSITION ODDITIES.

I'm on a John Podesta conference call detailing Obama's transition plans, and he noted that the whole operations is expected to cost around $12 million. But Congress, as is tradition, is only appropriating $5.2 million (does transition adjust for inflation?). So the Obama team is fundraising about $7 million more for transition operations. They've got various ethical strictures on that effort to ensure that it's not hijacked by lobbyists, but it still seems weird that the President-Elect has to direct his campaign team to scrounge up the money in order to ensure that the federal government is well-staffed on January 20th.

Update. Alyssa Rosenberg writes:

Congress didn't even have a mechanism for funding the transition until 1963, when it passed the Presidential Transition Act and allocated $900,000 for the transition. In 1976, that number went up to $3 million total, $2 million for the president-elect's team, and $1 million for the outgoing president's.

In 1988, the Presidential Transitions Effectiveness Act bumped the total number up to $5 million, an amount that the Government Accountability Office said at the time "provides adequate public money to eliminate the need for private funding for presidential transition." Twenty years later, that's no longer the case, obviously. The $200,000 is for training appointees, and is provided through the Presidential Transition Act of 2000, sponsored by old favorites Fred Thompson and Joe Lieberman.

These numbers are flat. They're not adjusted for inflation. And thus, the Obama fundraising machine has to ride one more time.