Musical Chairs in the Seat of Power : Clinton’s transition mission is a daunting one. He must fill 4,000 jobs and set an agenda and budget to usher in his Administration.

The transition of power from one President to the next, arguably the largest institutional undertaking in the world, is in President-elect Bill Clinton’s own words “mind-boggling.”

In the short interim from Election Day to the inauguration on Jan. 20, new policies have to be formulated, an army of positions filled, agency management rethought and restructured, and more incredibly, a whole year’s budget has to be crunched by a novice staff that is at the peak of its power and the nadir of its knowledge.

“At the beginning, the most daunting task is finding out what a transition is all about,” said recent law school graduate Bill Vincent, 28, one of two aides who launched the transition planning effort in August and now serves as a liaison between the Clinton camp and Washington.

He said they amassed an exhaustive presidential transition library and sent a proposed transition strategy in the form of a briefing book to the President-elect, who began reading the weighty document on Nov. 5.

Aides say they must fill about 4,000 job vacancies, up from fewer than 3,000 in 1980, and will be slaving through an estimated 100,000 resumes. “The applicants are all over the place,” Vincent said. “They range from kids fresh out of college applying to be the President’s personnel assistant to people wanting to drive motor vehicles for the President.”

A small staff is frantically typing the resumes into a data base and responding with acknowledgment letters.

The President will personally confirm about 500 to 700 high-level functionaries, says John Trattner, author of the “The Prune Book,” an update of the official guide to U.S. government policy-making jobs, known as “The Plum Book.”

The Clinton campaign initially estimated that a 600-person transition team would descend upon Washington, and notified the General Services Administration. The GSA is required to furnish and supply office space for the transition team, as it would for any federal government agency.

The day after the election, the GSA had readied 300 spaces, but the Clinton team has since decided to scale back its jump from Little Rock, Ark., keeping a high-level cadre of about 75 planners there and sending “substantially less” than 600 to Washington. The team is clearly leaner than the Ronald Reagan militia of 1,550 that flooded Washington for the 1980 transition.

Nonetheless, said Vincent, “there’s literally people wandering all over the place.”

Vincent said the transition strategy is temporarily in flux as the newly appointed transition director, Los Angeles lawyer Warren Christopher, sets priorities. But soon, he said, “executive branch agency teams” will be appointed to gather information from government agencies to ensure that mandatory policies can be continued and to look for ways agencies can be managed or structured more efficiently.

Legislation passed in 1988 provides $3.5 million in public funds for the incoming Administration’s transition needs and $1.5 million for the outgoing Administration. There is no limit on the amount of private money that can be used, however, and often such money is considered essential to help the frenetic transition overcome bureaucratic delays.

For example, printing that is paid for with public funds must be approved by the GSA and be contracted out to the government printing office, a notoriously slow process. Private funds can alleviate the logjam.

Though information-gathering at agencies has yet to begin, the sensitive period really starts when appointees assume their new positions and ruffle the feathers of career employees by upending familiar policies.

“They came in with an agenda . . . they make life real miserable,” said Stuart Rakoff, who worked for an assistant secretary of defense under former President Jimmy Carter and was responsible for much of the office’s transition when Reagan’s people arrived.

Soon attention will also turn to the awesome task of sorting through and reformulating the 1,500-page budget that will be prepared by President Bush for presentation to Congress in January. After 12 years of being out of power, the Democrats will rely heavily on career employees and outgoing appointees for guidance on the budget.

If the general steps of the transition--information gathering, management restructuring, hiring and budget crunching--are widely agreed on, experts disagree on the sequence and emphasis of them.

Stephen Hess, a transition expert at the Brookings Institution, insists that a tiny core of transition managers must first set policy priorities before they choose appointees.

Others say the concentration should first be on selecting the appointees, who then will formulate the policies.

One pundit in Washington recently wrote that Clinton should take a week off to regain the energy to make important decisions, and do nothing but relax and read poetry.

But transition scholar Carl M. Brauer, of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, disagrees. In his book “Presidential Transitions: Eisenhower Through Reagan,” he warned: “It is not a time for quiet contemplation.”