“President-elect Joe Biden is strongly considering Mike Morell, the former acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, to run the CIA,” the Daily Beast reports.

“But those familiar with the process say that other candidates are still in the mix for the position of the nation’s top spy chief.”

NBC News: “Biden is attempting the high-wire act of balancing diversity demands with ideological fissures between progressives and moderates. He has sought personnel with government experience who aren’t seen as too controversial to gain approval from a divided Senate. Many were confirmed during the Obama administration, some in deputy positions to roles they have been tapped to fill now.”

“So far, he’s giving everybody from progressive activists to centrist Democrats something to be happy about and little to fight over.”

“President-elect Joe Biden is moving quickly to take advantage of government resources for his transition to the White House after the Trump administration ended a 16-day stalemate and announced its intention to begin cooperating with his team,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Mr. Biden’s advisers are making plans to meet with career officials at executive agencies to review hundreds of pages of briefing materials and get up to speed on the inner workings of the federal government. Transition officials began reaching out to agency officials on Monday night, immediately after the Trump administration said it would begin working with the president-elect’s team, a transition official said.”

John Harris: “The most prominent appointment President-elect Joe Biden has made for his new White House team is Chief of Staff Ron Klain — a long-time Biden adviser who went to Harvard Law School and won a prestigious Supreme Court clerkship.”

“The most prominent appointment he has made so far to his cabinet is Secretary of State-designate Antony Blinken — a long-time Biden adviser who went to Harvard as an undergraduate and then moved through decades of prestigious posts in the Washington foreign policy establishment.”

“Wait, you may wonder about this apparent Harvard focus, where is the diversity?!”

“Not to worry. The choice to lead the National Security Council, Jake Sullivan, is a previous Biden adviser who went to Yale, before winning a Rhodes scholarship. And there is still lots of speculation about a likely spot for Bruce Reed, a veteran Biden aide who went to Princeton, before winning a Rhodes scholarship. His choice for Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, is not a long-time Biden adviser but is someone he has known for years. She went to Brown and Yale.”

Ryan Lizza: “It is still early in the Biden transition. There are thousands of jobs to fill. But a similar sense of dread is starting to bubble up from veterans of the Biden campaign, particularly those who were there with the president-elect from the Philadelphia announcement speech to the Wilmington victory speech. The target of their ire? The Obama establishment, which has eclipsed the Clinton name as shorthand for yesterday’s Democratic Party.”

Said one senior Biden official: “The Obama staffers are now cutting out the people who got Biden elected, None of these people found the courage to help the VP when he was running and now they are elevating their friends over the Biden people. It’s fucked up.”

New York Times: “Mr. Trump had been resisting any move toward a transition. But in conversations in recent days that intensified Monday morning, top aides — including Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff; Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel; and Jay Sekulow, the president’s personal lawyer — told the president the transition needed to begin. He did not need to say the word ‘concede,’ they told him.”

“Some of the advisers drafted a statement for the president to issue. In the end, Mr. Trump did not put one out, but aides said the tone was similar to his tweets in the evening, in which he appeared to take credit for Ms. Murphy’s decision to allow the transition to begin.”

John Bennett: Trump goes out with a whimper and a tweet. It was always going to be that way.

“President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team unveiled his picks for top national security positions on Monday. But one post was notably absent from the list: secretary of Defense,” Politico reports.

“Biden-watchers and national security veterans saw the omission as a sign that Michèle Flournoy, the woman who has been rumored for months to be a shoo-in for Biden’s Pentagon chief, might not have a lock on the job after all.”

“While Flournoy is still a strong contender, six people close to the transition say Biden is not entirely sold on the woman who was widely seen as Hillary Clinton’s pick for Defense secretary if she had won the presidency in 2016.”

The General Services Administration has informed President-elect Joe Biden that the Trump administration is ready to begin the formal transition process, CNN reports.

“Since it seems apparent that Joe Biden will be the president-elect, my hope is that President Trump will take pride in his considerable accomplishments, put the country first and have a prompt and orderly transition to help the new administration succeed. When you are in public life, people remember the last thing you do.”

— Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), in a statement calling on President Trump to begin the transition.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) released a statement calling for the presidential transition to begin.

Said Capito: “While some irregularities and fraud have been found and should be punished, there is no indication that these are widespread enough to call into question the outcome of the election.”

Washington Post: “At the heart of this optimism is the belief that politicians on both sides of the aisle get more accomplished when they like each other. And the other business of Washington — the cultural institutions, the diplomatic corps, the gala fundraisers, the hundreds of historical traditions — need bipartisanship to really thrive. They struggled during the Trump administration, when everything became a test of loyalty and the notion that good people could disagree without being disagreeable was laughable.”

“Back to normal will mean more state dinners, a prestigious and glamorous way of reestablishing global ties. And it means that Washington events traditionally attended by the president and first lady for the better part of five decades — the Honors, the Alfalfa dinner, the Gridiron, Ford’s Theatre gala and the correspondents’ dinner — will likely return to their former glory.”

Asked if he expects Republican roadblocks to his nominees, Joe Biden told reporters, “Are you kidding me?”

He then laughed.

“President-elect Joe Biden plans to nominate former Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen, an economist at the forefront of policy-making for three decades, to become the next Treasury secretary,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“If confirmed by the Senate, Ms. Yellen would become the first woman to hold the job.”

CNBC: “Yellen is widely seen as a politically “safe” pick for the role, likely to garner support from Senate Republicans as someone capable of pursing bipartisan compromise during an otherwise fragile time for the economy.”

President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team denied a Bloomberg report that it has asked Federal Reserve governor Lael Brainard to stay at the central bank rather than becoming Treasury Secretary.

Bloomberg said Brainard “emerged as a top contender to become the first female Treasury secretary before the election, but in recent weeks liberal figures in the Democratic party have pushed Biden to choose former Fed chair Janet Yellen for the post.”