Barack Obama has moved quickly to apply to his transition team some of the lobbying and ethics strictures he favored during his presidential campaign.

The transition organization will employ 450 people and operate out of Washington and Chicago until January 20 with a budget of $12 million, transition co-chair John Podesta said today. Almost $8 million will be raised from private donors.

Federal registered lobbyists are barred from donating to the transition, said Podesta, as are political action committees. He said he expected similar restrictions to apply to fundraising for inauguration festivities, although those announcements will come later. Lobbyists are prohibited from engaging in any lobbying work while serving Obama's transition, and cannot work for the transition in the fields of policy expertise on which they lobbied -- if they lobbied for clients in the past year.

                                                                                            -- Alexis Simendinger 

The names of transition advisers, organized by review teams deployed to specific agencies and departments, will be made public as they are cleared, beginning by the end of this week. Transition employees will be identified on the new Obama website, http://www.change.gov/, as part of the government transparency Obama has promised. Transition teams will arrive at agencies to begin working with senior Bush appointees beginning December 17.

As previously reported, members of the transition team must agree to the new "ethics code" in writing. Podesta said that if a transition adviser becomes a registered lobbyist after beginning to work for the transition, they will be barred from lobbying the Obama administration for a year, on any matters on which they worked. Obama also imposed a gift ban on his transition team, similar to the congressional gift ban.

"These are the strictest ethics rules every applied," Podesta said more than once as he fielded reporters' questions. He conceded that it's possible that some transition experts may be barred from advising Obama on a specific matter because they lobbied in the last year, but possess other expertise from earlier in their careers that may be tapped. "That's probably the rare exception rather than the rule," he added, and he invited reporters to scrutinize the backgrounds of transition team members when their names are made public.

"I've heard the other complaint, which is that we're leaving all this expertise on the side," Podesta said, referring to K Street complaints that the "segregation" of lobbyists - a word Podesta used - walls Obama off from well-meaning policy specialists who could be helpful. "So be it," Podesta responded. "That's a commitment that I think is one that the American public respects, and that the president-elect made, and it's one that we intend to enforce during the transition [and] he intends to enforce in his government ... so that the revolving door of Washington ceases to exist."