Bush had promised to govern as a “compassionate conservative.” Embracing the nation’s diversity and following in Clinton’s footsteps, he appointed African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans to his cabinet. A devout born-again Christian, he immediately established the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, funding religious groups to run programs for prison inmates, the unemployed, and others. Conservatives praised the initiatives, which encouraged private institutions to replace government as the provider of welfare, but others charged that they violated the constitutional separation of church and state. Federal courts ruled in several dozen cases that faith ministries were using government funds to indoctrinate the people they served. More substantial was Bush’s achievement of legislation authorizing a $15 billion anti-AIDS program in Africa that eventually saved millions of lives.

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By contrast, Bush’s fiscal policies were more compassionate toward the rich. In 2001, he signed a bill reducing taxes over the next ten years by $1.35 trillion. A 2003 tax law slashed another $320 billion. The laws heavily favored the wealthy by reducing income taxes, phasing out estate taxes, and cutting tax rates on capital gains and dividends. They also provided benefits for married couples and families with children and offered tax deductions for college expenses.

The tax cuts helped turn the budget surplus that Bush had inherited into a mushrooming federal deficit—the highest in U.S. history. In 2009, the deficit surpassed $1 trillion as the government struggled to combat a recession. By then, the national debt had risen to $9.6 trillion, making the United States increasingly dependent on China and other foreign investors, who held more than half of the debt.

Bush used executive powers to weaken environmental protection as part of his larger agenda to reduce government regulation, promote economic growth, and increase energy production. The administration opened millions of wilderness acres to mining, oil, and timber industries and relaxed standards under the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. To worldwide dismay, the administration withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997 by 178 nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

Conservatives hailed Bush’s two appointments to the Supreme Court. In 2005, John Roberts, who had served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, was named chief justice. When the moderate Sandra Day O’Connor resigned, Bush nominated Samuel A. Alito, a staunch conservative who was narrowly confirmed. While the Court upheld the rights of homosexuals and stood up to the administration on the rights of accused terrorists, it also upheld increasing restrictions on abortion and struck down regulations in the areas of voting rights, gun control, sex discrimination in employment, and business practices. Its five-to-four ruling in Citizens United v. FEC (2010) gutted regulation of election campaign financing by holding that such spending was a form of speech protected by the First Amendment.

In contrast to the partisan conflict over judicial appointments and tax and environmental policy, Bush won bipartisan support for the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, a substantial expansion of the federal government into public education. Promising to end, in Bush’s words, “the story of children being just shuffled through the system,” the law set national standards and imposed penalties on failing schools. But the law was never adequately funded; school officials criticized the one-size-fits-all approach and pointed to poverty as a source of student deficiencies, which schools alone could not overcome. In 2015, Congress returned considerable control to the states and local districts.

President Bush’s second effort to co-opt Democratic Party issues constituted what he hailed as “the greatest advance in health care coverage for America’s seniors” since Medicare began in 1965. In 2003, Bush signed a bill providing prescription drug benefits for the elderly and also expanding the role of private insurers in the Medicare system. Most Democrats opposed the legislation because it subsidized private insurers with federal funds, banned imports of low-priced drugs, and prohibited the government from negotiating with drug companies to reduce prices. The law was a boon to the elderly, but medical costs overall continued to soar, and 40 million Americans remained uninsured.

One domestic undertaking of the Bush administration found little approval anywhere: its response to Hurricane Katrina, which in August 2005 devastated the coasts of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi and ultimately took some fifteen hundred lives. The catastrophe that ensued when the levees broke, flooding 80 percent of New Orleans, shook many Americans’ deeply rooted assumption that government would protect citizens from natural disasters. New Orleans residents who were too old, too poor, or too sick to evacuate spent days waiting on rooftops for help; wading in filthy, toxic water; and enduring the heat and disorder at the centers where they had been told to go for help. “How can we save the world if we can’t save our own people?” wondered one Louisianan. Since so many of Katrina’s hardest-hit victims were poor and black, the disaster also highlighted racial injustices and deprivations remaining in American society.