Who is Howard Lutnick? What his job as Trump's transition head entails.

The Wall Street billionaire heading up President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team has his work cut out for him.

By Inauguration Day on Jan. 20, Lutnick and his transition co-chair Linda McMahon are tasked with filling some 4,000 positions in the federal government.

Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, a private investment bank, recently told CNN that the operation was going well.

“We are so set up," he said. "I feel great."

During a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden in New York, he told attendees that Trump was going to build “the greatest team to ever walk into government.”

Who is Howard Lutnick?

Lutnick, who joined Cantor Fitzgerald after graduating college and rose to CEO, is also being considered for the job of Treasury secretary, multiple media outlets have reported.

On 9/11, the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald, which were located in New York City’s One World Trade Center, were destroyed in the terrorist attack, killing 658 employees.  His younger brother, Gary, was one of them.

He himself survived because he had taken his son to school for his first day of kindergarten.

Having had to hire many employees after the tragedy, which killed close to 70% of its workforce, he suggested in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that he understood a thing or two about staffing fast.

How big a job does Lutnick have?

Executing a successful presidential transition requires serious planning, said Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group.

Lutnick will be charged with overseeing 4,000 political appointments, with 1,300 of them requiring senate confirmation, Stier said.

“They range from the Attorney General of the United States to the special assistant to the assistant Attorney General for the antitrust division,” Stier said. “There are people who are in the line of control of various agencies, secretaries, deputy secretaries, assistant secretaries, sometimes the principal deputy assistant secretaries.”

It's a long list.

Then there is what Stier describes as “the entourage.”

Those are the chiefs of staff, the deputy chiefs of staff, the special counsels, the senior counsels, the special assistants, he said, adding that while most democracies around the world count their political appointments in the tens, America counts them in the thousands.

“It’s a vestige of the spoils system,” Stier said. “I don't think it serves the public well.”

The late Arizona Senator John McCain had once proposed cutting the number of political appointees.

If Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are looking for ways to create efficiencies in the government, one way would be to reduce the number of political appointees by huge numbers, said Stier, referring to the duo’s appointment as co-heads of a new initiative called the “Department of Government Efficiency.”

“These are jobs they can give to supporters,” he said. “And at the end of the day, I don't think that benefits the taxpayer or the country.”

Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy is a White House Correspondent for USA TODAY. You can follow her on X @SwapnaVenugopal

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump transition will be a big job for Howard Lutnick. Here's why.