Bush made the decision on the STS but also proposed Orion and Constellation to keep us in the game. It's 2010. The first Orion flight was optimistically scheduled for 2015 and the moon landing for 2019. Just what were we supposed to do with these people in the 5 year, more likely 10 year, period between the end of the shuttle and the launch of Orion? Their jobs were gone regardless.
A lot of them likely would have been working on getting those things designed and built. It takes time to get things like this from the conception stage to flight-ready. For example, the Saturn V was first announced by NASA on January 10, 1962. The first one didn't fly until the Apollo 4 mission on November 9, 1967. So, what was that about a five year period? Sounds about right to me for bringing a new system on line. I'm sure many of the contractor employees now heading for the unemployment office would have been happy to have been working on Orion and Constellation, five year gap or no.
In any case, it beats Muslim Outreach.