Donald Trump made the first official hire of his incoming administration, announcing 2024 campaign co-chair Susan Summerall Wiles as his chief of staff.
The president-elect’s transition team already is vetting a series of candidates ahead of his return to the White House on 20 January 2025.
Many who served under Trump in his first term do not plan to return, though a handful of loyalists are rumoured by US media to be making a comeback.
A new group of colleagues also now surrounds the 78-year-old Republican.
There are more than 4,000 positions to be filled across Trump’s cabinet and White House, and across the federal government.
Here is a closer look at names in the mix for the top jobs.
Chief of staff – Susie Wiles
Susie Wiles and campaign co-chair Chris LaCivita were the masterminds behind Trump’s landslide victory over Kamala Harris.
In his victory speech on Wednesday, he called her “the ice maiden” – a reference to her composure – and claimed she “likes to stay in the background”.
Wiles was confirmed the next day as the first appointee of his second term – as his White House chief of staff. She will be the first woman ever to hold that job.
Chief of staff is often a president’s top aide, overseeing daily operations in the White House West Wing and managing the boss’s staff.
Wiles, 67, is considered one of the most feared and respected political operatives in the country.
Less than a year after she started working in politics, she worked on Ronald Reagan’s successful 1980 presidential campaign and later became a scheduler in his White House.
In 2010, she turned Rick Scott, a then-businessman with little political experience, into Florida’s governor in just seven months. Scott is now a US senator.
Wiles met Trump during the 2015 Republican presidential primary and she became the co-chair of his Florida campaign, at the time considered a swing state. Trump went on to narrowly defeat Hillary Clinton there in 2016.
Wiles has been commended by Republicans for her ability to command respect and check the big egos of those in Trump’s orbit, which could enable her to impose a sense of order that none of his four previous chiefs of staff could.
Attorney general
No personnel decision may be more critical to the trajectory of Trump’s second term than the appointee to lead the Department of Justice.
After uneven relationships with both Jeff Sessions and William Barr, Trump is widely expected to pick a loyalist who will wield the agency’s prosecutorial power to punish critics and opponents. Department officials are currently working to wind down two federal prosecutions brought against him by Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office.
Among the names being floated for the cabinet post are Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who was both indicted and impeached like Trump; Matthew Whitaker, the man who took over for three months as acting attorney general after Sessions stepped down at Trump’s request; and Mark Paoletta, former legal counsel to then-Vice-President Dick Cheney, who served in Trump’s budget office and argues there is no legal requirement for a president to stay out of justice department decisions.
Homeland secretary
The secretary of homeland security is responsible for handling immigration and border enforcement, and leading the government response to natural disasters.
Tom Homan, a chief proponent of Trump’s immigration approach, stands out as the most likely pick.
He served as the acting director of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) during the first Trump administration, where he backed separating migrant children from their parents as a way to deter illegal crossings. He also made headlines for saying politicians who support sanctuary city policies should be charged with crimes.
He later resigned from his position in 2018, mid-way through the Trump presidency.
But he has been involved in developing Trump’s mass deportation proposals, recently telling CBS’s 60 Minutes programme that it will focus on “targeted arrests”.
“It’s not going to be a mass sweep of neighbourhoods. It’s not going to be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all. It’s ridiculous,” he said.
Though the plan could cost billions of dollars, Homan, 62, has responded: “What price do you put on national security?”
Secretary of state
The US secretary of state is the president’s main adviser on foreign affairs, who acts as America’s top diplomat when representing the country overseas.
Florida Senator Marco Rubio is a major name floated for the position.
Rubio, 53, was most recently under consideration to be Trump’s vice-president – a role that ultimately went to his colleague from Ohio, JD Vance.
A senior member of the Senate foreign relations committee and vice-chairman of the chamber’s select intelligence panel, the Cuban American lawmaker is a China hawk who opposed Trump in the 2016 Republican primary but has since mended fences and worked closely with him.
But some Trump allies criticise him as a “neo-conservative” who fits poorly with Trump’s “America First” agenda. Other possibilities for the position include Trump’s former national security adviser Robert O’Brien and Tennessee Senator Bill Hagerty, who was previously Trump’s ambassador to Japan.
A dark horse for the nomination, however, is Richard Grenell, who served as Trump’s ambassador to Germany, special envoy to the Balkans and his acting director of national intelligence.
Grenell, 58, was heavily involved in the efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 election defeat in the swing state of Nevada and the president-elect prizes his loyalty.
In September, he sat in on Trump’s private meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The former president often claims he will end the war in Ukraine “within 24 hours” of taking office and Grenell has advocated for setting up an autonomous zone in eastern Ukraine as a means to that end – an idea seen as unacceptable by Kyiv.
But Grenell’s combative style will likely make him a better fit for national security adviser – a position that does not require Senate confirmation.
Also rumoured for major national security posts are former Trump Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe; Keith Kellogg, a national security adviser to Trump’s first Vice-President Mike Pence; and Kash Patel, a loyalist who staffed Trump’s national security council and later helped block the transition to the incoming Joe Biden administration as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defence. Patel could be the next Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief.
Trump also said he would fire Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI) Director Chris Wray, who he nominated in 2017. Jeffrey Jensen, a former Trump-appointed US attorney, is under consideration to replace Wray.
Defence secretary
Ex-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is among the few former Trump cabinet members who could return for his second term as secretary of defence, where he would oversee the US military.
The former Kansas congressman, 60, served first as Trump’s director of the CIA before becoming his chief diplomat.
A foreign policy hawk and a fierce supporter of Israel, he played a highly visible role in moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He was among the key players in the implementation of the Abraham Accords, which normalised relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
He remained a loyal defender of his boss, often tangling with the press and even joking that there would be “a smooth transition to a second Trump administration” amid Trump’s false claims of election fraud in late 2020.
Another name being discussed is Michael Waltz, a Florida lawmaker who sits on the armed services committee in the US House of Representatives.
Treasury secretary
To be the chief financial officer of his incoming administration, Trump is reportedly considering Robert Lighthizer, a free trade sceptic who led the Republican’s tit-for-tat tariff war with China as the US trade representative.
But at least four others may be under consideration for the role, including Scott Bessent, a billionaire hedge fund manager who has become a major fundraiser and economic adviser to the president-elect; John Paulson, another megadonor from the hedge fund world; former Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Jay Clayton; and Fox Business Network financial commentator Larry Kudlow, who ran Trump’s national economic council.
Interior secretary
North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum was not well-known on the national scene until he launched a bid for president in the 2024 Republican primary.
After making little impact, he dropped out and endorsed Trump, quickly impressing him with his no-drama persona, executive-level competence and wealth.
A software entrepreneur who sold his small company to Microsoft in 2001, he is considered a top contender to lead the interior department, where he will be responsible for managing federal lands and natural resources.
That is an opportunity for him to support Trump’s vows to “drill, baby, drill” and overhaul US energy policy.
Press secretary
The Trump 2024 campaign’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, 27, previously served in his White House press office, as an assistant press secretary.
The 27-year-old Gen-Zer made a bid to become the youngest woman ever elected to the US Congress in 2022, to represent her home state of New Hampshire, but fell short.
She is tipped to become the White House press secretary – the most public-facing position in the cabinet.
Others: Elon Musk, Robert F Kennedy Jr
The past two years have been quite a journey for the nephew of former President John F Kennedy.
An environmental lawyer by trade, Robert F Kennedy Jr, 70, ran for president as a Democrat, with most of his family speaking out against his anti-vaccine views and conspiracy theories as they endorsed Joe Biden’s re-election.
He then became an independent but, failing to gain traction amid a series of controversies, dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump.
In the last two months of the 2024 election cycle, he spearheaded a Trump campaign initiative called “Make America Healthy Again”.
Trump recently promised he would play a major role related to public health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Safety Administration (FDA).
RFK Jr, as he is known, asserted he would push to remove fluoride from drinking water because “it’s a very bad way to deliver it into our systems” – though this has been challenged by some experts.
And in an interview with NBC News, Kennedy rejected the idea that he was “anti-vaccine”, saying he wouldn’t “take away anybody’s vaccines” but rather provide them with “the best information” to make their own choices.
Rather than a formal cabinet position, Kennedy used the interview to suggest he could take on a broader role within the White House.
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, 53, announced his support for the former president earlier this year, despite saying in 2022 that “it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset”.
The tech billionaire has since emerged as one of the most visible and well-known backers of Trump and donated more than $119m (£91.6m) this election cycle to America PAC – a political action committee he created to support the former president.
Musk, the head of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of the social media platform X, also launched a voter registration drive that included a $1m (£771,000) give-away to a random swing-state voter each day during the closing stretch of the campaign.
Since registering as a Republican ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, Musk has been increasingly vocal on issues including illegal immigration and transgender rights.
Both Musk and Trump have concentrated on the idea of him leading a new “Department of Government Efficiency”, where he would cut costs, reform regulations and streamline what he calls a “massive, suffocating federal bureaucracy”.
The would-be agency’s acronym – DOGE – is a playful reference to a “meme-coin” cryptocurrency Musk has previously promoted.
