Officials of the federal General Services Administration yesterday presented America's new vice-president elect, Mr Dick Cheney, with the keys to the official Washington city centre offices where the incoming team will be based for the next five weeks.
The US's new Republican government is formally known as the Bush-Cheney administration, but the hand-over signalled that it might be more accurate to call it the Cheney-Bush team.
While it was left to Mr Cheney to take yet another of the important steps towards installing the new government in the US capital, President-elect George W. Bush went to church and held private meetings in Austin yesterday, much as he has done for most of the past month.
In the weeks since election day it has been Mr Cheney who has set up the Bush transition team, who has interviewed potential members of the administration, and who has taken charge of negotiations with congressional leaders about the legislative agenda.
The government-in-waiting had been based in Washington's Virginia suburbs, near to Mr Cheney's home, while the court wrangles in Florida were being played out. Now they can begin moving in to 90,000 sq ft of offices two blocks away from the White House.
Just as important, Mr Cheney also got access yesterday to $5.3m set aside in the federal budget to pay for the transition.
"We're moving forward with the transition," Mr Cheney said. "Things are going well." For a man who suffered a fourth minor heart attack only last month, Mr Cheney is being forced to set a demanding pace and carry out a punishing schedule as he takes up a role which seems more akin to that of prime minister than the traditional marginal vice-presidential role.
Mr Cheney exemplifies the much noticed fact that many of the most important posts in the new Bush administration will be taken by people who also worked for the new President's father when he was in office a decade ago. But his background - as a former congressman, White House chief of staff and defence secretary - also fills in many of the gaps in Mr Bush's own experience.
Two jobs, in particular, have fallen on Mr Cheney's shoulders as the Republicans strive to complete their administration building in a much shorter timeframe than they had expected. They have only half the normal time - just 37 days .
The first is to recruit nearly 7,000 people to fill political jobs in Washington which will be vacated when the Clinton administration leaves town in five weeks' time.
Already, Mr Cheney has 16 assistants working through more than 20,000 applications. The bulk of these have come over the Internet, but transition officials say they believe thousands more have been caught up in the Christmas post.
Mr Cheney's second major preoccupation is his negotiations on Mr Bush's behalf with political leaders in the legislative branch of the government on Capitol Hill.
Every few days, Mr Cheney goes up to Capitol Hill for face-to-face meetings with key legislators. So far, all of his meetings have involved members of his own party caucuses, but Mr Cheney has said he intends to meet Democratic leaders soon.
This week, Mr Cheney went up to Capitol Hill to discuss legislative plans with the Senate finance committee chairman Mr Charles Grassley, a crucial ally in any tax-cutting package. He also had meetings with five moderate senators, including Ms Olympia Snowe of Maine and Mr Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who are insisting the new administration puts its pledges of bipartisanship into practical effect.
Undoubtedly, the most pressing factor in setting the administration's agenda is the looming slowdown in the American economy, which will make it much more difficult for the new team to keep such campaign promises as tax cuts, partial privatisation of the social security pensions scheme and building the national missile defence system.
That is one reason why many observers predict that the new administration will try to deliver a headline-grabbing but politically easier measure such as increasing military pay as its first big goal.