New Team in Town

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Transfer of power begins as Reagan's emissaries descend on Washington

The man of the hour and his wife attended services at the Bel Air Presbyterian Church and then went into seclusion. The President-elect spent the week riding, chopping wood and relaxing with Nancy on their California ranch. But from midweek on, Ronald Reagan's emissaries streamed into Washington, packing the "redeye" overnight flights from the West Coast. Said one adviser: "A lot of tired people are trying to get things going." They faced one of the most intricate tasks in democratic government: arranging a transfer of power from a defeated Administration to an incoming regime vastly different in philosophy, policies and, of course, personnel.

The mood could not have been more businesslike. The advance guard of as many as 500 Reaganites who were soon to be working on the transition checked into nine floors of a drab eleven-story M Street office building, where it found rooms sparsely furnished with gray metal desks. Doors bore hand-lettered signs identifying the functions of the people who would be occupying the offices (congressional liaison, agricultural task force) but not yet their names. In the seventh-floor mail room, nine volunteers sorted sacks of letters addressed to Reagan into 100-odd cubbyholes. The largest box, for resumes and job requests, filled up so quickly that two more had to be added. Within minutes, they were overflowing too.

The boss of the transition teams, Edwin Meese III, arrived Wednesday morning--personable, affable, cheery. A few hours later he herded 30 or so staffers to the White House for a meeting with their opposite numbers in the Carter Administration. The standing-room-only crowd jammed a small auditorium usually used by the First Family to watch movies. Said one participant: "There was a smattering of rookie winners and losers, the type who muttered snide comments and made noticeable grimaces." But the top men urged harmony. White House Chief of Staff Jack Watson, who is overseeing the transition from the Carter side, opened with gallows humor: "Now we're going to have the exchange of prisoners." But he soon turned serious, telling the Carter people: "This is not a time for political debate. Continuity is the watchword."

So began a transition that will pick up its pace this week, when the President-elect comes down from the Santa Ynez Mountains. Reagan was scheduled to fly to Washington Monday for the first of three weeklong visits before his Inauguration. At a CIA briefing he will tell Director Stansfield Turner that he will be replaced. On Thursday, Reagan will visit with the man he defeated so resoundingly Nov. 4. While their husbands confer, Rosalynn Carter will show Nancy Reagan around the White House living quarters.

Reagan's aides were already sketching the outlines of the Administration-to-be in surprising detail. Main items:

Policy. Caspar ("Cap the Knife") Weinberger, head of Reagan's budget policy group, said the new boss would hold federal spending in fiscal 1981, which began Oct. 1, to $620 billion, about $25 billion below the levels contemplated by Carter. Reagan's advisers accepted a proposal by Texas Senator John Tower to add $3 billion to the $157 billion in military spending recommended by Carter this fiscal year. Military pay would be raised an extra 2%, on top of the 11.7% increase already moving toward enactment. Tower also advocated an increase in military outlays of 10% a year after 1981, adjusted for inflation, just about double what Carter had planned. Reagan may accept that goal, but his economic advisers are likely to quarrel with Tower's idea that beefing up U.S. military power should have priority over balancing the budget.

The Republican economists were shaping a tax package that included not only Reagan's cherished 30% cut in income tax rates over three years but substantial benefits for business as well. Also under consideration was a one-year moratorium on all new federal regulations, except "emergency" health and safety rules.

Government Organization. Reagan is close to deciding on a radical departure: a kind of "executive committee" to help him run the Government. It will number six to eleven people, and be composed of Cabinet members and people of roughly equivalent rank. The council would meet regularly with Reagan to discuss the whole range of Government problems; each member would be responsible for developing policy recommendations for a broad area of the Government and, once Reagan approved them, seeing that they were carried out. Cabinet members on the committee would in effect be responsible not only for their own departments but for others too. Reagan successfully tried something like that idea when he was Governor of California.

However, said one sympathetic but skeptical Republican Congressman, "the notion of having a few trusted people coming in on big decisions --that's O.K. But it's awfully difficult to get more than two or three people together who have these broad interests. The Secretaries of State and Defense can't set housing policy; they have neither the inclination nor the time."

To oversee the operation of his Administration, Reagan created a powerful new White House staff position with the title of Presidential Counsellor. The post will be filled by Meese, prime organizer of Reagan's campaign, who will have to work closely with the chief of the White House staff, James Baker. A Houston lawyer, Baker labored so successfully for George Bush in the primaries that he was quickly hired by the Reaganites after his man quit the race.

Reagan's Cabinet appointments, however, are still a matter of speculation. George Shultz was widely mentioned as a possible Secretary of State, but is taking so active a role in coordinating Reagan's economic-policy advice that he now seems more likely to become Secretary of the Treasury, a job he held under President Nixon, or chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

Democratic Senator Henry Jackson's acceptance of a post on Reagan's military advisory panel strengthens his chances of becoming Secretary of Defense; that would give the Cabinet a bi-partisan aura. The leading candidates for Secretary of State, if Shultz does not get the job, are now William Simon, a former Secretary of the Treasury, and Alexander Haig, former Nixon chief of staff. Thomas Sowell, a black conservative economist at Stanford's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, may enter the Cabinet as Secretary of Labor or Education.

To the dismay of Reagan's New Right followers, the lists of candidates for top jobs are dominated by moderate-conservative veterans of the Nixon and Ford administrations. Richard Viguerie, a leading right-winger, complained angrily that "there is not a hard-core conservative in the lot. Was it the Ford-Kissinger-Rockefeller wing of the party that has been promoting Reagan for 16 years?"

Eventually Reagan will have to fill 3,000 Government posts. To help him choose candidates for the top 50 or so positions quickly, he has given semiofficial status to his kitchen cabinet, composed mostly of longtime California business men friends. They dominate an 18-member Transition Appointments Committee, which is meeting in Los Angeles under the direction of William French Smith, Reagan's personal lawyer and a potential Attorney General.

As they arrived in Washington last week, Reagan's transition monitors were on the alert for signs of such chicanery by an outgoing Administration as transferring political appointees to the career civil service rolls. Carter's aides promptly pledged they would do nothing of the sort. Watson ordered action on "all major policy questions" deferred until the new Administration takes over.

All of which must have stirred in Jimmy Carter memories of the transition he presided over only four years ago. The President startled White House correspondents by walking unannounced into a routine briefing, where for 45 minutes he was by turns rueful, wry, wistful -- and subdued. Asked about a meeting with Reagan, Carter replied that he was available "whenever is convenient for him. I have not quite so heavy a schedule these days as I have had in the past."

What would he do after Jan. 20? Not run for office again, he said, or go back to the peanut business; that would be "in appropriate for an ex-President." Instead, said Carter, he would work on his memoirs, write a book on the presidency, lecture, maybe teach, and "become a good fly fisherman."

--By George J. Church. Reported by Simmons Fentress and Walter Isaacson/Washington

With reporting by Simmons Fentress, WALTER ISAACSON

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