By David Hawkings, CQ Staff

Seventy-seven days will separate Election Day from Inauguration Day, not much time for the president-elect to prepare for the enormous challenges of the next four years. But that is not to say he won’t be making any executive decisions. In fact, either John McCain or Barack Obama will spend much of those 11 weeks forming the core of the new administration, starting by picking the people to run the executive departments and most prominent federal agencies — the group known colloquially as the Cabinet.

It’s one of the government’s most misunderstood institutions. Although not specifically mentioned in the Constitution or in federal law, the Cabinet has been around in an evolving form since George Washington and is now an institutionalized part of the modern presidency, albeit not in the way the civics textbooks generally describe: a sort of presidential board of advisers, or even executive committee, that convenes regularly to hash out the big problems of the day without regard to turf or consequences.

Dwight D. Eisenhower was the last president who even came close to applying that model. George W. Bush and Bill Clinton realized early on that such a system rarely works, because Cabinet members are much more inclined to advocate exclusively for their own positions and fiefdoms in their dealings with the president. And so for the past 16 years executive power has been consolidated in the White House. And neither Obama nor McCain has made any promises about trying to revive the “strong Cabinet” model.

But ending the discussion there misses the point about why it matters whom a president picks for his Cabinet.

Most obviously, once they’re confirmed by the Senate, these people take operational control of most of the functions of the federal government, from agricultural subsidies to zero-based budgeting. Cabinet meetings may often be little more than photo opportunities, but each person the president invites — traditionally the vice president, the secretaries of the executive departments and a handful of other agency heads — is at the center of a significant, if often narrowly focused, power center away from the West Wing. Very few Americans may know who Steven C. Preston is, but the Bush administration’s third secretary of Housing and Urban Development is the boss of 9,000 people and has a budget of $38 billion as he works to address housing affordability and mortgage regulation in a financial crisis rooted partly in the excesses of subprime lending.

Beyond their own executive powers, though, the collected members of the Cabinet make an important statement about both the policy direction and the governing credibility of a new administration. And that’s why, starting Nov. 5, there will be intense public interest in the president-elect’s top appointees. The people he brings before the cameras will telegraph to the nation the initial signals about his approach to presidential decision making.

Both Obama and McCain can be expected to pick people who can lay plausible claim to being fully qualified for whatever jobs they get. But, if the recent past is a guide, an overarching objective will be to assemble a collective that signals a commitment to the notion that the government ought to be run by a team that reflects the nation’s diversity. Clinton set the tone when he set out to create a Cabinet that “looks like America” and ended up with only six white men in his initial core group of 14. Eight years later, there were seven white men among the 14 whom Bush put in charge of the Cabinet departments.

And so CQ’s reporters asked an array of the best congressional, political, academic and lobbying sources on their beats whom they view as the likeliest Cabinet members in their fields of expertise. Some came back with diffuse and diverse lists for both potential presidents, suggesting that the community of interest hasn’t quite figured out the thinking of Obama or McCain in its area. Other reporters saw the opposite: The people they talked to focused almost exclusively on one or two potential names on each side.

But, as expected, the faces on the following pages are a rich collage of rising stars and elder statesmen, senators and House members, governors and mayors, corporate executives and tenured professors, big donors and old friends, men and women, whites as well as ethnic and racial minorities.

Several names showed up more than once. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, it would appear, will have his pick of the litter if his close friend McCain goes to the White House. And a pair of governors, Arizona’s Janet Napolitano and Pennsylvania’s Edward G. Rendell , are seen in more than one top domestic post in an Obama administration.

Five members of the current Cabinet are seen as having strong potential to be retained by McCain. If he’s elected and keeps any of them, it would reflect a typical practice whenever there is a “friendly takeover” of the White House; the last time it happened, in 1988, George Bush asked three members of Ronald Reagan’s Cabinet to stay on.

There’s no modern precedent for a Cabinet member of a president of one party being held over by a new president of another, but this time there’s reason to believe Obama could ask Henry M. Paulson Jr. to keep managing the financial crisis from the Treasury and Robert M. Gates to keep managing the war from the Pentagon. Cabinet holdovers do not have to be confirmed anew by the Senate.

Possible secretaries of the 15 executive departments are listed first on the following pages, in the order they would ascend to the presidency (after the vice president, Speaker of the House and president pro tempore) under a 1947 law that links the pecking order to the longevity of the departments. After that are some potential heads of the EPA and the Office of Management and Budget, along with the U.S. trade representative, all of whom appear likely to be accorded Cabinet rank no matter who becomes the 44th president.