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.

By contrast, Bush’s fiscal policies were more compassionate toward the rich than toward average Americans. 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 rich 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 goals of reducing government regulation, promoting economic growth, and increasing 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 on global warming, 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 won confirmation by a narrow margin. While the Court upheld the rights of homosexuals and stood up to the administration in rulings on the rights of accused terrorists, it also upheld increasing restrictions on abortion and struck down regulations in the areas of gun control, sex discrimination in employment, campaign financing, and business practices.

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, marking the first substantial expansion of the federal government in public education since the 1960s. Promising to end, in Bush’s words, “the story of children being just shuffled through the system,” the law required every school to meet annual testing standards, penalized failing schools, and allowed parents to transfer their children out of such schools. But the law was never adequately funded, and as states struggled to finance the new standards and administer new tests, school officials began to criticize the one-size-fits-all approach. They pointed to family and community impoverishment as sources of student deficiencies, which schools alone could not overcome.

The Bush administration’s second effort to co-opt Democratic Party issues constituted what the president hailed as “the greatest advance in health care coverage for America’s seniors” since Medicare became law in 1965. In 2003, Bush signed a bill authorizing 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 the number of uninsured Americans surpassed forty million in 2008.

One domestic undertaking of the Bush administration found little approval anywhere: its handling of Hurricane Katrina, which in August 2005 devastated the coasts of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi and ultimately resulted in some fifteen hundred deaths. The catastrophe that ensued when the levees in New Orleans broke, flooding 80 percent of the city, shook a deeply rooted assumption of Americans that government owed its citizens protection from natural disasters. New Orleans residents who were too old, too poor, or too sick to flee the flooding spent anguished days waiting on rooftops for help; wading in filthy, toxic water; and enduring the heat, disorder, and lack of basic necessities at the centers where they had been told to go for safety and protection. “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 the injustices and deprivations remaining in American society.