New Staff Struggles to Get in Power Mode : Government: Late parties, no IDs, unfamiliar phones and lack of contact with Bush aides make for a bad day.

For Bill Clinton’s youthful cadre of aides, Thursday was the morning after.

Wednesday night, they partied late. Thursday, dozens discovered that they had to wait for as much as an hour to get through the White House gates because they did not yet have Secret Service identification tags. No one seemed to have anyone else’s telephone number and even many of the computers did not seem to work properly.

In the White House press office, aides struggled to figure out how the machinery of presidential publicity was supposed to work. Making matters worse, the former occupants appeared to have left little behind in their haste to exit.

“You see this,” said one elderly volunteer who came up from Little Rock, Ark., to help the new team settle in. In her hands she held a small container of paper clips.

“These are the only supplies they left us,” she said.

Bush aides, saying that Clinton’s people never bothered to contact them until the last minute, blamed the problems on the new group, giving the whole dispute something of the air of an argument after a bad high school date, complete with disputes about who was supposed to call whom first.

“I never laid eyes on a Clinton person,” said one Bush aide. Told of the complaints from the Clinton staff that they had received no instructions on how to do their jobs, he said: “They have only themselves to complain to.”

On Tuesday afternoon, less than a day before Clinton would take over, Bush press aides were wondering when--if at all--their replacements in the Clinton press office would stop by to find out what the job entailed. They expressed surprise that none had sought out instructions on how the office operated.

And, indeed, Clinton aides stumbled though most of the day, arguing with reporters about whether the White House press corps should be allowed to keep its traditional access to the waiting room outside the press secretary’s office and wrestling with a White House telephone system that left many uncertain of what even their own telephone numbers were supposed to be.

Some parts of the government, of course, continued to function smoothly. As they have throughout the transition, CIA officers gave Clinton the President’s daily intelligence briefing in the morning. And in the White House situation room, which monitors intelligence from around the globe, the staff of career State Department and Pentagon officials continued their duties as if the change of power had never taken place.

Over at the Environmental Protection Agency, David Cohen, career civil servant and special assistant for communications--which means he’s still employed--noted a fact that many Bush loyalists had complained about: Most EPA employees were happier with the election the way it turned out.

Clinton’s new EPA chief, Carol Browner, and the outgoing administrator, William K. Reilly, hold some environmental tenets in common, Cohen noted. So “arguably the transition is going easier for us than it might have been if Bush had won and Reilly quit anyway,” he speculated. “That operates under a set of assumptions that the Quayle gang would have put in someone less favorably disposed to things environmental.”

Across the government, usually obscure bureaucrats got to play secretary for the day. Stanford E. Parris, administrator of the St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corp., got the nod at the Department of Transportation by virtue of being one of the few senior officials at the department who has a fixed term of office and therefore did not leave Washington along with George Bush.

The equally prominent Stuart Gerson, assistant attorney general for the civil division got to fill the top job at the Justice Department. But he modestly chose to stay in his third-floor office rather than move into the grand fifth-floor suite of the attorney general.

At the Department of Health and Human Services, Dr. James O. Mason, Bush’s assistant secretary for health, was running the shop from a distance and actually got to make a decision.

Mason, 62, who will soon become vice president of the Uniformed Services University for Medical Science--the Defense Department’s medical school--was traveling back from Geneva Wednesday after a World Health Organization meeting.

“He’s been phoning in frequently,” said Bill Grigg, a spokesman for the Public Health Service, and in one of those calls OKd the release of a study showing that dental amalgams--those silver fillings in everyone’s teeth--are safe.

“We were originally going to drop his name from the press release but, now that he is acting secretary, we’ll put his name back on,” Grigg said.

Two other Bush appointees, National Institutes of Health Director Bernadine Healy and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David A. Kessler were also back at their desks.

“She’s back in her job,” said Johanna Schneider, a Healy spokeswoman. “The Bush White House called her on Monday on behalf of President Bush and said President Bush was not accepting her letter of resignation.”

Schneider said that the Clinton transition team asked that Healy stay on, “so we’re all here at work, doing our jobs.”

For many officials, the priority for the day was getting to know the new boss. General Services Administration Associate Administrator Kathryn Gaddy said that she “made a total idiot out of myself” when she greeted her Clinton-appointed replacement warmly--”please come down, let me show you the place, I’ll introduce you to everybody and brief you on some of the issues.”

A few minutes later, she said: “Someone told me she was here 14 years ago.”

And at the Interior Department, spokeswoman Stephanie Hanna--a career employee--was delighted to get a call from a reporter with Los Angeles connections. Word has it that Hanna’s new boss is to be a former press secretary at Los Angeles city hall, Ali Webb. And although Hanna could not quite remember the new person’s name, she was eager to ask the question all Washington was asking about the new names on the office door:

“What’s she like?”

Times staff writers Patt Morrison, Marlene Cimons, Doyle McManus, Robert Stewart and Robert L. Jackson contributed to this story.