WASHINGTON - President-elect Barack Obama's transition team has signaled to Eric Holder, a senior official in the Justice Department in the Clinton administration, that he will be chosen as attorney general, but no final decision has been made, people involved in the process said Tuesday.

Holder would be the first black to serve as the nation's top law enforcement official. As a top adviser to Obama, he has long been considered the front-runner for the job of attorney general because of his extensive record as a prosecutor and a judge and a well-honed reputation inside Washington. Obama's advisers appear to have overcome concerns that Holder's involvement in a presidential pardon scandal as President Bill Clinton left office in 2001 might cloud Holder's nomination.

Word that Holder, now in private practice as a partner at the Washington law firm of Covington and Burling, was likely to be nominated as attorney general leaked out as Obama began settling on other members of his team and signaling his policy priorities upon taking office.

Obama is set to hire Peter Orszag, director of the Congressional Budget Office, as the White House budget director, people involved in the transition said. They said the leading candidate at this point for another top post on the economic team, director of the National Economic Council, is Jacob Lew, who was Clinton's budget director.

While Obama has yet to name any of his Cabinet secretaries, his early choices for White House staff positions and the names currently at the top of the list for staff and Cabinet jobs suggest his administration could be heavily stocked with Democrats who served under Clinton.

In his only public appearance Tuesday, Obama indicated that he intended to move rapidly on one of the most ambitious items on his agenda, tackling climate change. Speaking to a bipartisan group of governors by video, the president-elect said that despite the weakening economy, he had no intention of softening or delaying his aggressive targets for reducing emissions that cause the warming of the planet.

"Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all," Obama said. "Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response." He repeated his campaign vow to reduce climate-altering carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent by 2050 and invest $150 billion in new energy-saving technologies.