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Samantha Power, who resigned as senior foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama, is back on his team

Samantha Power, the Harvard professor who was forced to resign from Barack Obama's presidential campaign last spring after calling Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton "a monster," is now advising the president-elect on transition matters relating to the State Department -- which Clinton is slated to head.

Power is listed on Obama's transition Web site as part of the team reviewing national security agencies. Her duties, according to the site, will be to "ensure that senior appointees have the information necessary to complete the confirmation process, lead their departments, and begin implementing signature policy initiatives immediately after they are sworn in."

In short, she is part of a team that is likely to work directly with Clinton, a potentially awkward situation for the two women. Obama is expected to officially announce Clinton as his choice for secretary of state after the Thanksgiving holiday.

Transition officials declined to comment. A spokesman for Clinton did not respond to an e-mail sent yesterday evening. Power has been on the list of review team officials since mid-November; the Associated Press first called attention to her presence on the list yesterday.

But people close to the transition suggested too much was made of Power's comment at the time, and said that she has made moves to bury the hatchet with Clinton and that the senator accepted those efforts.

If so, that could pave the way for Power to reemerge as a key adviser for the new president after being barred for months from appearing on television as a foreign policy surrogate for Obama.

Power, who is close to Obama, resigned March 7 after being quoted in the Scotsman newspaper saying that Clinton "is a monster" and that "she is stooping to anything. . . . The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive."

The same day the comments were published, Power was forced to resign. In a statement at the time, she said she made "inexcusable remarks that are at marked variance from my oft-stated admiration for Senator Clinton and from the spirit, tenor, and purpose of the Obama campaign."

Then locked in a tight battle with Obama for the Democratic nomination, Clinton responded with a statement urging donors to contribute to show that "there is a price" for the kind of attack politics that Power's comment represented.

After leaving the campaign, Power remained active in the public debate. In an Aug. 13 article in the New York Review of Books, she argued that Obama had an opportunity this year to reverse the decades-long advantage that the Republican Party had with voters on national security and foreign policy issues.

"Although few have focused on this, the Democratic Party today is also in a strong position to show that it will be more reliable in keeping Americans safe during the twenty-first century," she wrote. "If the party succeeds in doing this, it will not only wake up the United States and the world from a long eight-year nightmare; it will also lay to rest the enduring myth that strong and wrong is preferable to smart and right."

Power was at one time considered a contender for a top post in an Obama administration. But her name has not surfaced recently, and she is not listed as a lead official on the State Department review team.

Obama officials have said the review teams will review agency policies, budgets and structures with an eye toward recommending to the new secretaries what is working and what is not.

After emerging from his home in Chicago for an early workout, Obama spent most of the day ensconced in a downtown office building where he held discussions with Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.; John D. Podesta, who was President Bill Clinton's chief of staff; Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.); and senior campaign advisers. At his campaign headquarters nearby, aides began stripping posters from the walls and disbanding the sprawling organization that helped propel the senator from Illinois to a decisive victory over Republican John McCain on Tuesday.

Amid new indications of a weakening economy, the president-elect must now decide how to insert himself into the most pressing issues facing the nation over the next 75 days, particularly the global economic summit that President Bush will convene in Washington on Nov. 15 and a new economic stimulus package being pushed by Democrats when a lame-duck session of Congress begins days later.

Leading the Obama-Biden Transition Project are Podesta; Valerie Jarrett, a close friend of Obama's; and Pete Rouse, Obama's former Senate chief of staff. Its work can be monitored online later at www.change.gov. Obama hopes to quickly name a Treasury secretary, a decision that will set the tone for his relationship with the battered financial world, and is expected to name his chief of staff, most likely Emanuel, this week.

In remarks delivered from the Rose Garden, the current occupant of the White House called Obama's election "uplifting."

"It will be a stirring sight to watch President Obama, his wife, Michelle, and their beautiful girls step through the doors of the White House," Bush said. "I know millions of Americans will be overcome with pride at this inspiring moment that so many have awaited so long. I know Senator Obama's beloved mother and grandparents would have been thrilled to watch the child they raised ascend the steps of the Capitol and take his oath to uphold the Constitution of the greatest nation on the face of the Earth." First lady Laura Bush also called Michelle Obama to offer her congratulations.

Bush and Obama showed early signs of cooperation, with the president inviting his successor to visit the White House "as soon as possible" and promising to help make the changeover a smooth one.

With the economic summit on the horizon, a Bush administration official said the White House is "consulting closely with the president-elect's team," but could not say whether Obama or one of his representatives would be included in the meeting with 20 foreign leaders next week. "This effort will obviously straddle the two administrations, and it will be up to the president-elect as to how he would like to have input," the official said.

But in bureaucracies across the government, federal agency chiefs ordered their staffs to welcome the next president's aides and to begin preparing for an influx of appointees, a process that will place special emphasis on the departments of Treasury and Defense at a time when the nation is waging two wars and attempting to stave off further economic decline.

After weeks of speculation about who might fill the Treasury post, financial industry and Obama sources said the list includes Timothy F. Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Lawrence H. Summers, who was Treasury secretary at the end of the Clinton administration and has been a close adviser to Obama on the economy.

Geithner has been deeply involved in the government's response to the nation's economic crisis since it began in September. While he has extensive knowledge of the financial system, he is not as well known to Obama as is Summers.

Obama could also draw from his core economic team, which includes former Treasury secretary Robert E. Rubin, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker, and Laura D'Andrea Tyson, who chaired Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, the sources said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly for the president-elect.