The Presidency / The First Year

Gold plate on back of chair that says "the president"

Joe Biden at one year

Presidential experts evaluate the 46th president's first year in office

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Donald Trump at one year

White House veterans and Miller Center scholars evaluate the 45th president's first 365 days

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Featured Video

First Year Project Introduction

Watch this overview of the First Year Project

Flint Water Plant

Infrastructure

The environment of opportunity

The next president should attack child lead poisoning by creating institutions that will keep the problem visible and by finding funding sources that are adequate to the large task of massively reducing lead hazards.
Leif Fredrickson
University of Virginia
Donald Trump and Mike Pence

Politics

End of the honeymoon?

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and other Republicans began claiming, in the election’s immediate aftermath, that Trump had earned a mandate from the voters to work with Congress and adopt the agenda on which he campaigned. Indeed, this kind of mandate rhetoric is common when new presidents, facing polarized parties and low trust in governing institutions, need to defend themselves against critics.
Jeff Chidester, Tony Lucadamo, Molly Reynolds
Baltimore inner harbor

Infrastructure

Reasserting the importance of cities

The Port Covington story underscores two of the central weaknesses of American urban-development strategy.
David Dagan
Johns Hopkins University
White House illustration

Jobs and Economy

Maximizing power with diminished presidential control

Not surprisingly, most candidates routinely offer plans for improving economic mobility in particular or economic growth in general. However, the next president will have substantially less control over the economy than his or her counterparts before the 1970s. This is due largely to two major developments in the economic policymaking process.
Patrick R. O’Brien
Yale University
Microphone

Media and the Press

Not so bully pulpit

If a president gave an Oval Office address and the networks refused to air it, would it make a sound? This is not, most likely, a question that occupies philosophers, but it does cause White House communications staffers to wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.
Jeff Shesol
West Wing Writers