Politico: “The Trump transition’s unprecedented delay in signing the agreements has so far prevented the incoming administration from having any formal contact with federal agencies, including sending in groups of policy advisers known as ‘landing teams.’ It also means they can’t access cybersecurity support or secure email servers for transition-related work, or request FBI background checks for their nominees.”

“Both the Trump transition and the White House confirmed that negotiations on the agreements are still underway. But until the standoff is resolved, Trump’s Cabinet nominees will gain no more insight than the general public into the workings of the departments they’re supposed to run.”

“President-elect Trump has unabashedly surrounded himself with men who’ve said, done or been accused of things that would disqualify them under any other U.S. leader in our lifetimes,” Axios reports.

“It begs the question: Why? Why go to the mat to pick and defend people Trump knows will raise questions about his judgment, heart or morality?”

“In almost every case, there are similarly loyal and tested alternatives. Yet he often goes with the bad boys.”

“People who know Trump best tell us the answer lies in his view of humanity and power. Trump, they say, values loyalty, toughness, street smarts and self-protection foremost — and believes most people do bad things to get, hold and use power. Business and sexual transgressions don’t trouble him like they do other presidents.”

David Sanger: “There is a revenge team, led by prospective nominees with instructions to rip apart the Justice Department, the intelligence agencies and the Defense Department, hunting down the so-called deep state and anyone who participated in the prosecutions of Mr. Trump.”

“There is a calm-the-markets team, which Mr. Trump hopes will be led by Scott Bessent, the Wall Street billionaire who Mr. Trump chose for Treasury secretary. Mr. Bessent can recite the MAGA lines about deregulation and lower taxes but would likely try to make sure Mr. Trump’s most extreme solutions, like inflation-inducing tariffs on foreign goods, do not end the post-election stock market surge.”

“And then there is a government shrinkage team, led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, whose goals are wildly ambitious, to put it mildly.”

Some conservatives are criticizing Donald Trump’s choice for labor secretary, Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR) for being too close to labor unions, Punchbowl News reports.

Dan Balz: “Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy have huge ambitions and no humility about what they are undertaking. What they have talked about amounts to a wholesale attack on federal agencies designed to eliminate thousands of regulations, reduce the federal workforce by an order of magnitude that could cripple the delivery of vital services, and effect cost savings that would amount to nearly one-third of the federal budget, or the entire discretionary part of the budget and then some.”

“All government bureaucracies need occasional overhaul and rejuvenation. Trump’s motivation is more about punishment and retribution. His Cabinet choices point to that.”

“Two financiers are in the running to be the deputy secretary of defense, a competition that pits a publicity-averse private-equity investor against an outspoken venture capitalist,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Trae Stephens, a partner at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund venture-capital firm, is under consideration by President-elect Donald Trump to become the deputy secretary of defense. Billionaire investor Stephen Feinberg, who led the president’s intelligence advisory board in the first Trump administration, is also in the running.”

“The selection of either investor could come as welcome news for the hundreds of new defense startups that have entered the military market in recent years.”

Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a prominent ally of Donald Trump, said voters don’t care who conducts background checks into the president-elect’s Cabinet picks and that Trump would fire members of his administration who don’t follow the policy he sets out, ABC News reports.

A new CBS News poll finds President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration starts off with mostly good will from the public: a majority of Americans overall are either happy or at least satisfied that he won and are either excited or optimistic about what he’ll do as president.

“The prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated.”

— Attorney General-designate Pam Bondi, quoted by the Washington Post in 2023.

“President-elect Donald Trump is keeping secret the names of the donors who are funding his transition effort, a break from tradition that could make it impossible to see what interest groups, businesses or wealthy people are helping launch his second term,” the New York Times reports.

“Mr. Trump has so far declined to sign an agreement with the Biden administration that imposes strict limits on that fund-raising in exchange for up to $7.2 million in federal funds earmarked for the transition. By dodging the agreement, Mr. Trump can raise unlimited amounts of money from unknown donors to pay for the staff, travel and office space involved in preparing to take over the government.”

“Mr. Trump is the first president-elect to sidestep the restrictions, provoking alarm among ethics experts.”

“President-elect Donald Trump’s eclectic roster of figures to lead federal health agencies is almost complete — and with it, his vision for a sweeping overhaul is coming into focus,” the New York Times reports.

“Mr. Trump’s choices have varying backgrounds and public health views. But they have all pushed back against Covid policies or supported ideas that are outside the medical mainstream, including an opposition to vaccines. Together, they are a clear repudiation of business as usual.”

President-elect Donald Trump is expected to select Brooke Rollins, a former Trump administration policy adviser, to lead the Agriculture Department, the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Rollins is the president of the America First Policy Institute, a group led by former Trump administration officials that spent months planning for a potential second term. An ally of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, Rollins was once considered a contender to be White House chief of staff.”

Playbook: “In a flurry of Truth Social posts last night, President-elect Donald Trump made a furious pre-holiday-week dent in his list of Cabinet and key sub-Cabinet nominations — naming nine picks in the span of about 70 minutes and ruining happy hour for all the reporters who suddenly had to freshen their pre-writes.”

“Whether by design or by compulsion, the volume and timing of the announcements had the immediate effect of diffusing the scrutiny that might have been trained on any individual nominee. But together they cemented a picture of Trump’s governing echelon as a menagerie of Fox News personalities, ultra-wealthy GOP patrons and MAGA true-believers, with a few genuine surprises sprinkled in. Call it the team of randos.”

“A common thread weaves through many of Donald Trump’s picks for his incoming administration, a quality the president-elect values as highly as loyalty and perhaps even more than conventional qualifications: a flair for television,” CNN reports.

“He has plucked two Fox News stars from their airwaves – Sean Duffy for Transportation secretary and Pete Hegseth to lead the Pentagon. For the agency overseeing Medicare and Medicaid, Trump has turned to Dr. Mehmet Oz, the celebrity physician known for his health show that aired for 13 seasons. His pick for the Department of Education, meanwhile, is Linda McMahon, who co-founded and built a professional wrestling and entertainment empire alongside her husband.”

“President-elect Donald Trump is considering tapping Richard Grenell, his former intelligence chief, to be a special envoy for the Russia-Ukraine conflict,” USA Today reports.

“Grenell, who served as Trump’s ambassador to Germany and was acting director of national intelligence during Trump’s 2017-2021 term, would play a key role in Trump’s efforts to halt the war if he is ultimately selected for the post.”

Wall Street Journal: “Trump told friends shortly before the Bessent announcement that he trusted him to execute the administration’s policies more than any of the other contenders. Trump’s advisers also said that the president-elect, who is known to take appearance into account when hiring, felt that the gray-haired, bespectacled Bessent looked the part.”

“But Bessent’s glide path was upended by an 11th-hour play for the job by Cantor Fitzgerald Chief Executive Howard Lutnick, which culminated in Elon Musk signaling to his 200 million social media followers that he backed Lutnick and viewed Bessent as a ‘business-as-usual choice.’ As the deliberations dragged on, Trump at times expressed frustration with his options—and the many leaks about the process—prompting him to bring additional candidates into the mix.”

Axios: What to know about Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury pick.

Washington Post: “In any other presidential transition, such a showdown and physical confrontation between two top advisers to the president-elect would be a showstopping breakdown in decorum.”

“But in Trump’s freewheeling orbit, the incident was soon forgotten as his team has returned to the patterns of his first term in office — with shouting matches, expulsions from meetings and name-calling, all between the public celebrations and rocket-ship photo ops. As during Trump’s first term, competing factions have begun to run roughshod over each other, sometimes kicking up clouds of dust.”

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR) as his pick to be the secretary of labor, CNN reports.

Chavez-DeRemer lost reelection to Oregon’s 5th District earlier this month.