Executive transitions are a weird creature - they begin the day after victory using work they did while they were still running for the office. The agency is itself quasi-governmental, having power only over itself and drawing funding and resources in a way that only happens every four years.
Which is why the conservative scandalmongering over Obama's transition site is so skull-crushingly stupid.
There seem to be two big "controversies" surrounding the site: the first is that it was built using Blue State Digital tools and rests on a .gov domain, the second is that it asks for contact information for people who contact the transition. First, let me say that I oversaw the websites for both the transition office and the Governor's office in Ohio, so I'm speaking from what some might call "experience" and others might call "crippling libtard moonbat idiocy".
A transition office needs to be off the ground ASAP, moreso in the case of the President than in the case of any other executive office in the land. It's a testament to their planning that they had something ready to go as soon as the government name servers could be pointed to them, and rather obvious that whatever they put up was going to be designed using private-market resources - simple logic dictates that. As to the use of a .gov domain, well, they're likely receiving government funding and government salaries to do what's fundamentally government work. Mix those two things and change.gov is a pretty damn likely outcome.
The second thing is why there's a nefarious page asking for all sorts of awful and terrible personal information. Well, it's a fucking constituency page. You ask for information so that you can better manage people's needs and help them. See the Indiana Governor's office, or California's or Oklahoma's - these things called "computers" can be used to great effect to manage "electronic records" for people who "contact" you.
It's not just that all of this is readily explainable - it's that it's actually the most efficient and accessible method of doing this. Auspicious beginning, conservatives - blaming a governmental agency for using government resources to do government work. Next up: Obama demands incredibly expensive around-the-clock security!
