Always, always pay close attention to the retained appointed officials after an election.
As a newly elected politician, the rule is this: You retain people from the previous administration where you want to have a cover up of the most serious crimes.
Why cover up?
Maybe you feel they would be overwhelmingly distracting to your new programs. Maybe you feel implicated.
Either way, this particular case:
Geithner - Banking
Gates - Wars (and the current wars' enabler, political ventriloquism, a.k.a. torture)
Check, and check.
As for the rest, you clean house in terms of staff.
Always, always pay close attention to the retained appointed officials after an election.
For such people are reliably far more embarrassed than newcomers for past "mistakes" of the prior administration, for hopefully obvious reasons.
New appointees strongly want to show how bad the predecessor was, and all kinds of dirt comes out with them.
Carryover appointees can be counted on more than newbees to reliably maintain a "forward looking" posture that the newly elected official requires.
By the way, this also is why term limits need to be imposed in the House and the Senate, as already with the Office of the President.