Apparently many of the high-up people in government had decided to leave this losing presidency early:

With only 15 months left in office, President Bush has left whole agencies of the executive branch to be run largely by acting or interim appointees — jobs that would normally be filled by people whose nominations would have been reviewed and confirmed by the Senate. In many cases, there is no obvious sign of movement at the White House to find permanent nominees, suggesting that many important jobs will not be filled by Senate-confirmed officials for the remainder of the Bush administration....While exact comparisons are difficult to come by, researchers say the vacancy rate for senior jobs in the executive branch is far higher at the end of the Bush administration than it was at the same point in the terms of Mr. Bush’s recent predecessors in the White House....“You’ve got more vacancies now than a hotel in hurricane season,” said Paul C. Light, a professor of public service at New York University and one of the nation’s best-known specialists on the federal bureaucracy. “In my 25 years of studying these issues, I’ve never seen a vacancy rate like this.”

Grover Norquist once referred to shrinking the size of government as "starving the beast". I guess Bush has stumbled on one way of achieving this objective: be so incompetent and unpopular as president that no one in their right mind will want the jobs associated with you, thus crippling the effectiveness of government. However, given the horrid performance of prior top people in this administration (Gonzales, Rumsfeld, "Brownie"), these faceless, interim appointees will likely do splendidly in comparison. It simply can't get any worse (fingers crossed).