Gaming the System

Philip Shenon has this report in the New York Times:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 14 — For now, the most powerful law-enforcement official in the federal government is a 47-year-old lawyer little known outside Washington.
Or inside Washington, for that matter.
He is acting Attorney General Peter D. Keisler, who is running the Justice Department until a new attorney general is confirmed by the Senate to replace Alberto R. Gonzales. Mr. Keisler had been in charge of the department’s civil division.
The No. 2 and No. 3 officials are also acting — acting Deputy Attorney General Craig S. Morford and acting Associate Attorney General Gregory G. Katsas. More than a quarter of the department’s 93 United States Attorneys around the country are “acting.”…

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….

But recess appointments often subject the White House to criticism that it is trying to circumvent the Senate confirmation process. And because there is relatively little time left in the Bush administration, there may be less pressure, or need, to consider them. The indefinite appointment of acting officials might have the same effect of circumventing Congressional oversight of nominations for what remains of the Bush presidency.
While exact comparisons are difficult to come by, researchers say that 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….

No cabinet agency has been more hard-hit by vacancies in senior posts than the Justice Department.
Its ranks have been depleted in recent months, which may be a reflection in part of the scandals that engulfed the department under Mr. Gonzales, especially the furor over the firing of several United States attorneys last year for what appear to have been political reasons.
Peter Carr, a spokesman for the department, said “We are confident in the individuals who are leading their respective offices in an acting capacity — these are veteran department lawyers with significant experience.”
The heads of the department’s civil rights, natural resources and tax divisions are all “acting,” as are the directors of the elite Office of Legal Counsel and the Office of Legal Policy.
The acting head of the counsel’s office, Steven G. Bradbury, who functions as the department’s lawyer, has found himself under intense scrutiny with the disclosure last week that he was the author of a pair of secret legal opinions that endorsed brutal interrogation techniques for terrorism suspects in the custody of the C.I.A. The acting attorney general, Mr. Keisler, has relatively little experience in criminal prosecutions.
He has worked in the department’s civil division since 2002 and, before that, had spent most of his career in private practice in Washington or as a law clerk. He may be best known in Washington legal circles as one of the founders of the conservative Federalist Society.

So is this good news or bad news for the country? Well... the positive is that "acting/interim" type folks are rarely swashbuckling, energetic evildoers. The obvious negative is that these folks have nothing to lose from stonewalling, hindering, and refusing to cooperate with oversight investigations into the sins of their disgraced predecessors, and their bosses in the Cheney/Bush (mal)administration.