George W. Bush & the Death of Small Government Conservatism

On September 11, 2026, the United States of America marked twenty-five years since nineteen men changed the trajectory of American history. It also, whether anyone said it out loud or not, marked twenty-five years since the beginning of the end of a Republican Party built around the idea that government is, in Reagan's words, "not the solution to our problem" but "the problem" itself. The man who presided over that ending was President George W. Bush, and by the time he left office in January 2009, he had built a bigger federal government than any Republican president since before Eisenhower, and arguably more than most Democrats since Lyndon B. Johnson.

The Idea Before the Presidency

To see what Bush would abandoned, you first have to know what "old conservatism" was. The fusion that had run the Republican Party since Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign welded free-market economics, anti-communism, and traditional social values against a common enemy: LBJ’s Great Society liberalism. Ronald Reagan's 1981 inaugural delivered the lines that defined the movement for a generation. Newt Gingrich's 1994 "Contract with America" promised to shrink the government and devolve power to the states. Even Bill Clinton felt compelled to declare in 1996 that "the era of big government is over."

Bush's answer to this orthodoxy was already forming before he even declared his candidacy, and it had specific intellectual authors: Marvin Olasky, a University of Texas journalism professor, published The Tragedy of American Compassion in 1992, arguing that nineteenth-century private charity had done a better job serving the poor with moral engagement than twentieth-century welfare bureaucracy ever had, arguing for routing help through churches and community groups rather than public checks. Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare made a parallel case that the 1960s culture of unconditional entitlement, more than poverty itself, had produced an underclass trapped by the very policies meant to liberate it. Bush, as governor of Texas, absorbed both arguments and began calling the result "compassionate conservatism" years before the 2000 campaign. W. Bush ran on the premise that conservatives had ceded the language of compassion to the left by pretending that the government had no role in addressing suffering, and that the fix was to redirect and expand federal involvement through new community-based channels, not simply to shrink it. The transformation of that ideological instinct into a model of governance was conducted by Karl Rove, Bush's chief strategist since his 1994 run for Texas governor, who saw the new "compassionate conservatism" as the perfect electoral wedge capable of pulling suburban moderates and religious Black and Hispanic voters away from the Democratic coalition that had held them for a generation.

The First Five Weeks

On February 17, 2001, less than a month into office, George W. Bush signed two executive orders revoking the Clinton-era requirement that federal construction contracts use project labor agreements and dissolving the National Partnership Council that required federal agencies to negotiate with public-sector unions. A month later, on March 20, in what AFL-CIO President John Sweeney called the new administration's first substantive act, Bush signed a resolution repealing OSHA's decade-in-the-making ergonomics standard, protecting some 27 million workers at 1.9 million workplaces, on a party-line vote before it had even been in effect two months. The National Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce had fought the ergonomics rule for a decade, and Republican congressional leaders responded by moving a Congressional Review Act resolution within weeks of Bush's inauguration specifically because it was the first rule new enough to qualify.

September 11

On the morning of September 11, 2001, nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers turned four commercial airliners into weapons. American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 struck the World Trade Center; American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon; United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back. Nearly 3,000 people died. The attacks did not come from nowhere. Osama bin Laden had declared war on the United States in 1996, bombed American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and attacked the USS Cole in 2000. The Bush administration, which had entered office focused on tax cuts, education, and compassionate conservatism, became a war presidency in a single morning. Congress authorized the use of force 420–1 in the House and 98–0 in the Senate. NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in its history. Bush’s approval rating reached roughly 90%.

The question was no longer whether to fight, but where, and how far.

Afghanistan: The War of Necessity

Afghanistan was the war America agreed on. The Taliban had hosted al-Qaeda, refused to hand over bin Laden, and paid the price for it. American airpower and Special Forces, working with the Northern Alliance, toppled the regime by December 2001. But the victory was incomplete. Bin Laden escaped at Tora Bora, and the Bush administration soon shifted attention and resources toward Iraq. Troop levels in Afghanistan were kept relatively low. The new Afghan state was built partly through warlords and corrupt commanders, and the army meant to defend it was hollowed out by ghost soldiers and unpaid ranks. The war of necessity quickly became a forgotten war.

The Kennedy Alliance

President Reagan had campaigned on abolishing the Department of Education outright. Six days into his presidency, George W. Bush unveiled a plan to expand its power dramatically, working with the most unlikely of partners: the late Senator Ted Kennedy, the Senate's most prominent liberal Democrat. Sandy Kress, a Dallas attorney and Democratic Leadership Council member, had worked with George W. Bush on Texas's own accountability statutes and carried that model to Washington DC as Bush's chief negotiator. Kress and Bush's opening move was to invite roughly twenty members of Congress to Austin to talk about education, and the guest list included Republican leaders alongside Clinton Democrats, with Ted Kennedy initially conspicuously absent. Kress then worked the Senate by orchestrating collaboration between both the GOP and the Clinton Democrats specifically to make Kennedy’s exclusion so costly that he would eventually come to the table with President Bush. Kennedy, for his part, ultimately came to the table, and produced unit

The product of this alliance, No Child Left Behind, signed January 8, 2002, imposed standardized testing requirements on every public school in the country and gave Washington DC more direct leverage over local classrooms than any law since 1965. Title I funding for low-income schools rose 45% to 52% between 2001 and 2006, special education funding rose 67% to 75%, and reading-program funding roughly tripled, then quadrupled. The law also directed over $1.6 billion toward charter schools and created the first federal school-choice program, the DC Opportunity Scholarships. No Child Left Behind single-handedly marked the death of the old conservatism, which would have never intervened in the education system to protect children in the way that the Bush Administration did in January of 20002.

The Port Strike

Nine months after signing No Child Left Behind, Bush reached for federal power in a very different arena, using the Taft-Hartley Act, the oldest instrument in the labor-law toolbox.

The contract between the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the Pacific Maritime Association, the employers’ group, expired on July 1, 2002, and talks stalled over new cargo-handling technology, which the union would accept only if the jobs it created fell under its jurisdiction. At stake were about 10,500 dockworkers at 29 ports and roughly $300 billion a year in trade. The White House had been watching since spring. It formed a working group in May drawing on Commerce, Labor, Transportation and the Office of Homeland Security, and by August the Los Angeles Times reported that its options included declaring a national emergency to force an 80-day delay, bargaining port by port to break up the coastwide unit, moving the union under the Railway Labor Act, and using Navy personnel to keep the ports running.

At the end of September the Pacific Maritime Association accused the workers of a slowdown, and locked them out. The union replied that its members were simply following safety rules after five longshoremen had died on the job that year. The American Trucking Associations and other lobbyists soon asked for President Bush to intervene. The union argued that this was the plan all along, that the lockout was a management ploy to draw in the president. The union agreed to a 30-day extension of the old contract that the White House had requested, and the Pacific Maritime Association, which had demanded an extension as the price of ending the lockout, reversed course and refused.

On October 7th, Bush signed an order creating a Taft-Hartley board of inquiry, declaring that a continued lockout would imperil national health and safety. The next day he directed the attorney general to seek an injunction, and within three hours Judge William Alsup had granted a restraining order. The ports were back in action on October 9th. Bush said he was especially worried about the movement of military supplies. The House voted to authorize force in Iraq the next day, and on October 16, the day Bush signed that resolution, Justice Alsup issued the injunction imposing the full 80-day cooling-off period. It was the first use of Taft-Hartley since 1978, and the first against an employer lockout rather than a strike. The judicial order froze the fight for 80 days and left the terms to the parties, who reached a tentative agreement on November 23 and saw the union’s members ratify a 6-year contract on January 22, 2003, by 89.3%. The deal guaranteed fully employer-paid medical benefits, raised pensions by nearly 60%, and gave the union jurisdiction over the new port technology, in return for the dockworkers’ acceptance of the job eliminations the technology would bring.

The Rupture

The Homeland Security Act, signed November 25th, 2002, folded twenty-two existing agencies into a single new cabinet department, the largest government reorganization since the National Security Act of 1947.

The proposal for a cabinet-level department predated the Bush administration and could in fact be traced to the Hart-Rudman Commission, a bipartisan national-security review launched under President Clinton, and its loudest congressional champion after 9/11 was Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman, who introduced legislation in October of 2001 and held nineteen hearings pressing the case. Bush's White House resisted it for two primary reasons at the time: First, it was associated with the Clinton-era commission that the President had no interest in validating. Secondarily, Bush preferred the lighter model he had already built: a White House Office of Homeland Security under Tom Ridge, with no independent budget or statutory authority, run on Ridge's personal relationships across agencies. That model failed in exactly the way that the skeptics predicted. Ridge could not win interagency buy-in to consolidate the INS, Customs, and the Coast Guard on his own authority, and his position as a White House adviser meant he could decline to testify before Congress about it, which Democrats used to paint the whole effort as unaccountable. The Office of Management and Budget's director is reported to have flagged this testimony problem specifically as a reason the cabinet-department model might solve a headache Ridge's design had created.

Then, in Spring of 2002, the FBI's Phoenix memo and the Minneapolis field office's warnings about Zacarias Moussaoui both surfaced publicly around the same time, making the existing coordination structure look dangerously improvised. Bush reversed publicly on June 6th, 2002. Over the next five months, George W. Bush was insistent on stripping civil-service and union protections from employees transferred into the new DHS, which Senate Democrats refused to accept. Bush chose to make that refusal a campaign issue on “Democratic obstruction”, causing Democrats to lose the Senate that November in results widely attributed in part to the homeland-security fight. The Democrats reversed course within weeks, and the bill passed in a form close to what Bush had demanded all along.

The Iraq War

As early as January of 1998, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and other future Bush administration figures signed an open letter through the Project for the New American Century urging President Clinton to remove Saddam Hussein from power, as the containment policy was failing. PNAC's September 2000 report, Rebuilding America's Defenses, went further, warning that the kind of transformative military buildup its authors wanted would likely require "some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor" to become politically possible. When several of the same men took office in January 2001 and September 11 provided exactly that kind of catalyzing shock, the intellectual groundwork for redirecting the response toward Iraq specifically, not just al-Qaeda and Afghanistan, was already years old.

Inside the Bush administration, the pressure to make that redirection ran through a fairly narrow channel: Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby. These two figures pressed the CIA repeatedly and directly for material supporting the case for invading Iraq. Wolfowitz, as deputy defense secretary, argued for Iraq as a priority within days of 9/11. Saddam's Iraq had, unquestionably, possessed and used weapons of mass destruction before through the 1988 Halabja massacre and the broader Anfal campaign killed tens of thousands with chemical weapons. Through the 1990s, Iraq waged a sustained deception campaign against UN inspectors and expelled them outright in 1998.

The Iraq War was sold on the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat that could not wait. After the Gulf War, UN inspectors found that Iraq had weaponized 30,000 liters of anthrax, botulinum toxin, and aflatoxin, and had produced two to four times the amount of most agents it declared. UNSCOM’s January 1999 report identified 360 tons of chemical warfare agents, 1.5 tons of VX nerve agent, and 550 filled chemical munitions that remained unaccounted for. Iraq obstructed inspectors for a decade, denying access, sanitizing sites, destroying documents, and expelling UNSCOM entirely in 1998.

Between May and June 2004, the Iraq Survey Group recovered 53 chemical munitions, including a 152mm binary sarin artillery projectile with a 40% concentration of sarin. The CIA’s Operation Avarice purchased and destroyed at least 400 Borak rockets, some containing sarin that analysis showed to be “purer than the intelligence community had expected given the age of the stock.” In 2014, the New York Times revealed that American troops had secretly found roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells, or aviation bombs in Iraq between 2004 and 2011. The Pentagon withheld information on the finds from the public and from Congress. The Duelfer Report acknowledged that Iraq’s “rebuilt chemical industry, though still not up to pre-Gulf war capacity, had a ‘breakout capability’ to produce large quantities of sulfur mustard CW agent.” Abd al-Tawab Mullah Huwaysh, Saddam’s deputy prime minister and head of the Military Industrialization Commission, told investigators that Saddam had asked him how long it would take to restart chemical agent production. Experts estimated mustard gas could be produced within six months, and one source said it could be done in days if production equipment were sacrificed.

Today, Iraq holds democratic, competitive elections and has done for two decades, though its democracy is shallow, its institutions are weak, and its sectarian divisions never fully healed. The consequences are still unfolding.

Iraq: Who Got Paid?

KBR, then a Halliburton subsidiary (the company Vice President Cheney had run as CEO from 1995 to 2000) won a no-bid contract in March 2003 to restore Iraq's oil infrastructure, a deal significant enough to force the Pentagon to reopen it to competing bidders. KBR collected at least $39.5 billion in Iraq-related federal contracts over the following decade, and by February 2007, Pentagon auditors had flagged $2.7 billion paid to Halliburton and its subcontractors as excessive or unsupported. In February 2007, the Washington Post exposed squalid conditions at Walter Reed's outpatient wards, traced in part to a 2006 decision to privatize facilities management and hand a $120 million contract to a firm run by a former senior Halliburton executive, cutting staff from over 300 to under 60. The Army Secretary resigned within two weeks.

The Money Question

When Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill raised concerns in 2002 that a second round of tax cuts, on top of a trillion dollars already enacted, would widen a deficit the country could no longer afford, Dick Cheney reportedly replied, "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. We won the midterms. This is our due." The Bush administration saw deficit spending not as a regrettable cost of governing, but as an entitlement earned by electoral victory. The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts were not, in their overall distribution, progressive: they delivered 36% to 38% of their total benefit to the top 1% of earners, a group receiving average annual cuts near $78,460 by 2004 against $250 for the bottom fifth of households, a gap that widened as the cuts phased in. They cost an estimated $2.6 trillion through 2010 and turned a projected surplus into a structural deficit. At the same time, admittedly, they created a new 10% bracket, doubled the child tax credit to $1,000, and delivered a real average cut of roughly $1,730 to 43 million married couples through marriage-penalty relief.

The Nationalist Instinct

For his first eighteen months, Bush flirted with economic protectionism. Facing an International Trade Commission recommendation on steel imports, Bush's economic and diplomatic principals met in February 2002 to decide, with US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick and Vice President Cheney favoring the imposition of tariffs. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan had already lobbied Dick Cheney directly to reject the idea, arguing that the bipartisan free-trade consensus built over the previous decade was too valuable to spend, and that tariffs violating the World Trade Organization would confuse the coalition Bush needed for other trade priorities. Robert Zoellick's own motive was tactical, as he believed that the tariffs could buy the domestic political support required to pass Trade Promotion Authority in the Senate. Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio held a combined share of the 270 electoral votes Bush would need in 2004, and steel tariffs of up to 30%, announced March 5, 2002, were a direct way to appeal to those voters. Twenty months later, the World Trade Organization ruled the tariffs illegal, while the European Union responded with a targeted threat, drawing up retaliatory tariffs aimed specifically at politically sensitive American exports, Florida citrus among them (Florida being not incidentally the state that had decided the 2000 election by 537 votes). By late November, top White House advisers were recommending Bush drop the tariffs to avoid a trade war, and he lifted them that December.

By the time he left office, Bush had grown the number of countries with which the U.S. held free trade agreements from three to sixteen, signing bilateral deals with Chile, Singapore, Australia, Morocco, and Bahrain, and pushing CAFTA-DR through in 2005 over fierce opposition from labor unions and sugar-state Republicans alike, every one of them following the same template as Bill Clinton's NAFTA: lower tariff walls, deeper global integration, and a promise to displaced workers that growth elsewhere would make them whole, a promise that did not hold in the steel towns and furniture counties hollowed out over the following decade.

Regulation First

After Enron and WorldCom wiped out billions in shareholder value, Bush signed Sarbanes-Oxley on July 30, 2002, the most sweeping expansion of federal regulation over corporate governance since the New Deal securities laws. The internal deliberation here is less colorfully documented than the tariff fight, but the shape of it is clear enough: this was a bill authored by a Democratic senator (Paul Sarbanes) and a Republican congressman (Michael Oxley) that Bush's own instincts would ordinarily have resisted, and the record shows no serious internal faction arguing against signing it. The politics made the calculation simple, with the stock market reeling and the word "Enron" a daily front-page presence, the business community's own complaints about compliance costs carried no realistic path to a veto. It created a new regulatory board to police the auditing industry, imposed criminal liability on executives certifying false statements, and required costly new internal-control assessments at every public company in America. Bush signed it anyway.

Federalizing Elections

Less discussed than No Child Left Behind but just as sharp a break, the Help America Vote Act, signed October 29, 2002, in direct response to the 2000 Florida recount, created the first federal Election Assistance Commission and imposed the first binding minimum standards on how states run federal elections. It passed the House 357-48 and the Senate 92-2, a near-unanimous, low-drama consensus born directly of the trauma both parties had just lived through in Florida. The pressure here came almost entirely from Congress and the shared embarrassment of the recount.

Money Without Treaties

On May 24, 2002, Bush and Putin signed the Moscow Treaty, cutting deployed strategic nuclear warheads to between 1,700 and 2,200 by 2012, the lowest levels in decades, ratified by unanimous Senate vote in March 2003 with Richard Lugar and Joe Biden leading the effort. Where Bush broke more sharply from Cold War convention was his preference for coalitions of the willing over binding multilateral bodies: the Proliferation Security Initiative, announced in a May 2003 Kraków speech, built a voluntary partnership to interdict WMD shipments entirely outside any UN framework, a design that carried the fingerprints of arms-control skeptics inside the administration (John Bolton at the State Department chief among them) who consistently preferred flexible, non-binding arrangements to formal treaties they viewed as constraining American freedom of action. In December 2003, Muammar Qaddafi announced he would abandon Libya's chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs, a decision widely credited to both quiet diplomacy, and the demonstration effect of Iraq next door. Quickly, Libya became a rare case of a hostile regime voluntarily surrendering an active weapons program rather than being forced to.

The Largest Entitlement in 40 Years

The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act, signed December 8, 2003 and universally known as Medicare Part D, expanded federal obligation on a scale unmatched since LBJ created Medicare and Medicaid. The strategic case inside the White House was Karl Rove's: he believed, explicitly and on the record, that giving seniors a permanent drug benefit through Medicare rather than through a private alternative would convert them into a durable Republican voting bloc, converting what conservatives had always treated as a Democratic advantage into a Republican asset. The legislative architecture came from Louisiana Republican Rep. Billy Tauzin, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who fought specifically and successfully to bar Medicare from negotiating drug prices directly with manufacturers, a policy that saved the pharmaceutical industry tens of billions of dollars and that Tauzin, ten months after the bill passed, went to work for personally: PhRMA hired him as its president at a reported seven-figure salary. He was joined in the post-passage revolving door by Senate architects John Breaux and Don Nickles, both of whom left Congress to lobby for the same industry. Separately, and more seriously, CMS Administrator Tom Scully reportedly threatened the agency's chief actuary with firing if he shared internal cost estimates (roughly 25-50% higher than the $400 billion figure the administration presented to Congress) before the House vote, which passed by the narrowest of margins, 220–215, with 25 Republicans opposed as a matter of principle over the size of the new entitlement.

Gay Marriage: The Big Split

Bush endorsed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in February 2004, and again in 2006. Both attempts failed. His own vice president had already staked out different ground, and had done so since before Bush ever ran. As far back as 2000, Dick Cheney said the question of state recognition of relationships should be left to the states, that "people ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to." In August 2004, six days before the Republican convention, a voter in Davenport, Iowa asked him directly about gay marriage, and Cheney, whose daughter Mary is gay and was running his own campaign operations at the time, answered without deflecting to the party line: "Lynne and I have a gay daughter, so it's an issue our family is very familiar with. With respect to the question of relationships, my general view is freedom means freedom for everyone." He would go further after leaving office, endorsing full marriage equality outright by 2009. This was the sitting Vice President of the United States publicly declining, in the middle of a reelection campaign, to echo his own president's signature conservative position, on live national television, six days before his party's convention was set to make that position a centerpiece, a rift the two men are not documented as ever having resolved between themselves.

NATO Expansion

On March 29, 2004, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia formally joined NATO, the largest single expansion in the alliance's history, extending the Western security umbrella into territory the Soviet Union had once controlled outright, fulfilling, in the administration's framing, the promise of a Europe "whole and free" the elder Bush had first articulated after the Berlin Wall fell.

Homeownership Policy

Bush's broader domestic vision, branded the Ownership Society, aimed to expand access to homeownership, health savings accounts, and retirement assets. Its most concrete achievement began with a June 2002 announcement at HUD headquarters, the first presidential visit there since LBJ, setting a goal of 5.5 million new minority homeowners by decade's end. The results, for a time, were real: national homeownership hit a record 69-69.4% in 2004. Black homeownership reached an all-time high near 49-49.7%, a rate the country has still not matched since. Hispanic homeownership rose from about 46 to nearly 50%. For the first time in American history, a majority of minority Americans owned the roof over their heads.

However, unfortunately a disproportionate share of those new homeowners were steered into subprime loans, and the families who achieved the dream in 2004 were disproportionately the ones who lost it in 2008.

The New Marshall Plan

If any single Bush-era policy makes the case for taking his record seriously hardest to dismiss, it is also the one most reliably traced to the president's own personal conviction. In his 2003 State of the Union, Bush proposed committing $15 billion over five years to combat HIV/AIDS in the developing world. The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) became the largest commitment any single nation has made to fight one disease. Accounts from speechwriter Michael Gerson and from Secretary of State Colin Powell describe a president who had been personally moved by the scale of the African AIDS crisis and who pushed the program's ambition past what some of his own budget advisers initially proposed, over quiet skepticism from fiscal conservatives worried about the price tag and from public-health traditionalists who doubted an American-run treatment infrastructure could work at that scale in the developing world. When it began, fewer than 50,000 people in all of sub-Saharan Africa were on antiretroviral treatment.

By March 2008, PEPFAR alone had brought that to 1.7 million.

By the time Bush left office, it had supported treatment for more than 2.1 million and care for over 10.1 million, exceeding its own original targets, and in July 2008 Bush signed a reauthorization for up to $48 billion more, tripling the original commitment. Every administration since, of both parties, has extended it; the program has cumulatively saved an estimated 26 million lives and helped prevent nearly 8 million infant HIV infections, ranked by global health researchers alongside smallpox eradication as one of the most successful public health interventions of the modern era.

The President's Malaria Initiative, launched in 2005 with $1.2 billion, dramatically expanded bed-net distribution across more than a dozen African nations, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, created January 2004, restructured a portion of American foreign aid to reward demonstrated good governance rather than simply subsidize need. Together they represent the largest sustained expansion of American humanitarian commitment abroad since the Marshall Plan.

Katrina: Limits Exposed

Compassionate conservatism's reach met its sharpest limit on August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. Confidential footage and transcripts of the administration's own briefings, later obtained by the Associated Press, show FEMA Director Michael Brown telling Bush and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff directly, the afternoon before landfall, that he was "concerned about their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe," while a hurricane specialist voiced "grave concerns" about the levees on the same call. Bush asked no recorded questions during that final briefing and told state officials instead, "We are fully prepared." Chertoff, appearing relaxed in a polo shirt from Washington, would fly to Atlanta rather than Louisiana in the storm's immediate aftermath.

Four days later, Bush told Good Morning America, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," a claim the briefing tapes directly contradict, though the White House later drew a technical distinction between levees being "overrun" (which was discussed) and "breached" (a structural failure). On the ground, FEMA regional director Marty Bahamonde was sending increasingly frantic updates from inside the Superdome as early as August 28, warnings that Brown later claimed, contrary to the documentary record, he had not fully absorbed until days afterward. The response at every level of government was slow, and its consequences fell overwhelmingly on the city's poorest and Black residents, more likely to live on flood-prone, historically redlined ground and less likely to have means to evacuate.

Federal aid, calculated partly off pre-storm home values from decades of discriminatory disinvestment, left Black homeowners receiving on average $8,000 less than white homeowners with comparable damage. In a Pew poll taken days later, 66% of Black Americans said the response would have been faster for mostly white victims. Only 17% of white Americans agreed. Bush himself, in New Orleans that September, acknowledged the disaster had exposed "deep, persistent poverty" with roots in "a history of racial discrimination."

Bypassing the Courts

The New York Times revealed in December 2005 that Bush had secretly authorized the NSA to monitor Americans' international communications without the warrants FISA required, using a lower "reasonable basis" standard than probable cause, and the internal fight over this program produced one of the most dramatic documented confrontations of the entire Bush administration. The legal argument came substantially from Vice President Cheney, David Addington, and Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, who built the theory that the President's wartime authority permitted the surveillance without congressional or judicial sign-off. On the night of March 10, 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft lay sedated in intensive care following gallbladder surgery, and Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who now held the Attorney General's powers, had already refused to recertify the program's legality.

White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card went to the hospital that night to seek Ashcroft's signature anyway. Comey raced to intercept them, and FBI Director Robert Mueller ordered the agents guarding Ashcroft's room not to let anyone remove Comey if the White House team tried. When Gonzales made his appeal, Ashcroft, barely lucid, lifted his head from the pillow and told the two men that Comey held the authority that night, then said no. Bush reauthorized the program regardless, without Justice Department sign-off, for roughly three weeks, until Comey, Ashcroft, Mueller, and OLC head Jack Goldsmith made clear they would resign en masse rather than continue. Bush backed down, ordering changes to bring the program within limits the Justice Department would certify.

Reform Failure: Social Security & Immigration

Fresh off reelection, Bush's 2005 State of the Union proposed allowing younger workers to divert Social Security payroll taxes into personal investment accounts, the most significant attempted restructuring of the New Deal's signature program since 1935. Bush had signaled the intent immediately after his win, telling reporters, "I earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it." Karl Rove and campaign manager Ken Mehlman built the effort as an extension of the 2004 campaign itself, as a coordinated, permanent-campaign-style operation of town halls and local media designed to move public opinion the way a candidate moves voters, rather than the way a president typically moves legislation. Despite this effort, Gallup found approval of Bush's handling of the issue fall 16%, from 48-64% disapproval, between the State of the Union and June, and the more the president explained the plan in public, the less popular it became, a near-total inversion of how the Rove playbook was supposed to function.

Internally, the White House's own commission staff director, Charles Blahous, is reported to have used the failure of his own personal-accounts-only option to achieve full solvency as an argument to the President that stripped-down private accounts alone could not work without also cutting future benefits or raising taxes, undercutting the version of the plan Bush had found easiest to sell. By Hurricane Katrina's landfall that August, the initiative was already, in one contemporary account, "on life support". The storm finished it off by consuming the last of the political capital and public attention Bush had staked on the effort, and congressional leaders quietly let it die rather than force a vote. Tellingly, Bush would later cite the failed push itself, rather than any of his successful expansions, as among his proudest domestic efforts, arguing it proved the issue could be campaigned on safely even if not won.

Bush pushed comprehensive immigration reform in 2006 and again in 2007, pairing tighter enforcement with a path to legal status and an expanded guest-worker program, in partnership with the unlikely bipartisan pairing of Ted Kennedy and John McCain, the same Kennedy who had crossed the aisle for No Child Left Behind five years earlier, and the same John McCain who would run for president in 2008. The coalition against it came from both directions simultaneously, and the documented opposition on the right was unusually personal. Conservative talk radio treated the bill as a betrayal. Rush Limbaugh said the fight had "broken the back of the president's loyalist base," Laura Ingraham accused Bush of implying that his critics didn't love America, and Michael Savage called the bill's supporters traitors outright. Bush inflamed rather than calmed this on May 29, 2007, telling reporters that opponents who wanted to "kill the bill" were using fear tactics, a comment his own base heard as an accusation of bad faith from their own president. On the left, the coalition was no more unified: DNC chair Howard Dean called the guest-worker provisions "indentured servitude," the AFL-CIO opposed them outright, and the Congressional Black Caucus split sharply, with only 9 of 43 members backing a liberalized bill sponsored by one of their own. The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 collapsed in the Senate that June, failing a cloture vote by a wide margin with defections from both parties. Both critiques (that it was amnesty, and that it built an exploitable underclass by design) had merit, which is part of why no coalition strong enough to overcome either one ever cohered. The failure left the system unreformed nearly the next two decades.

Drawing the Line at Home

When a bipartisan Congress tried to expand children's health coverage, Bush said no, twice. In 2007 the House and Senate twice passed legislation adding $35 billion over 5 years to extend SCHIP to roughly 10 million children in families too well-off for Medicaid but unable to afford private insurance, funded by a cigarette tax increase. Bush vetoed the first bill on October 3, warning it would "federalize health care". He vetoed an essentially similar compromise that December. The stated rationale was that the income eligibility expansions would pull families who could plausibly afford private coverage onto a government program, and that while Medicare Part D served seniors with no private alternative, SCHIP's expansion, in his framing, competed with one. The House came within 13 votes of overriding the first veto, with 44 Republicans breaking with the President. The program limped along on temporary funding until full reauthorization passed in February 2009, one of the incoming Obama administration's first acts.

Quite strangely, the same president who built PEPFAR for children abroad drew the line at a comparable program for children at home.

Raising the Wage Floor

After Democrats retook Congress in 2006 partly on a promise to raise the minimum wage for the first time since 1997, the House passed an increase 315-116 in January 2007 with 82 Republicans in support. Bush did not champion it, and the White House in fact warned of potential harm to small business, the standard argument of every Republican administration since the wage floor was created, but George W. Bush signed the final version May 25, 2007, raising the wage from $5.15 to $7.25 in three steps by mid-2009, after Democrats attached small-business tax relief to secure his signature.

Regulating Energy

The Energy Independence & Security Act, signed December 19, 2007, raised federal fuel-economy standards for the first time in over three decades, mandated a major expansion of renewable fuel use, and set in motion the phase-out of the incandescent light bulb.

Conservation

In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act. The Act became one of his fastest conservation tools. Across his presidency he protected roughly 230 million acres of public land. It is one of the odder facts about George W. Bush that he picked the same tool back up and used it on a scale that rivals Roosevelt’s. On February 27, 2006, he made a remnant of the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan a national monument, the 390th unit of the National Park System, part of a seven-acre site holding the remains of about 15,000 people. On June 15, a week after the Act’s centennial, he proclaimed the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument, renamed Papahānaumokuākea the following year. It covered about 140,000 square miles of reef, atoll and open ocean, at the time the largest protected marine area in the world.

Two weeks before leaving office he did it again, but bigger. On January 6, 2009, he designated three more Pacific monuments (the Marianas Trench, Rose Atoll and the Pacific Remote Islands), banning drilling and mining at all three and commercial fishing at the latter two. Together they covered some 195,280 square miles. The decision was fought inside his own White House. According to the Washington Post, Laura Bush pushed for the reserves while Dick Cheney and some Northern Mariana Islands officials argued that restricting fishing and mineral exploration would hurt the region’s economy, and sovereignty over the islands’ waters was part of the objection. The package left Bush having protected more of the ocean than anyone else in the world. Add the 2006 and 2009 designations and the total is roughly 335,000 square miles, about 214 million acres, not far short of Roosevelt’s 230 million.

The Six Weeks That Settle the Argument

If one moment settles whether Bush governed as a small-government conservative, it is the autumn of 2008.

Facing systemic financial collapse, George W. Bush did not respond with market discipline. On September 6, he placed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, together backing trillions in American mortgages, into federal conservatorship, structured to hold Treasury's ownership warrant at exactly 79.9% of common stock, 1/10th of a point below the threshold that would have forced the entire multi-trillion-dollar balance sheet onto the federal government's own books, an engineering choice that tells you the administration understood precisely what it was doing and chose the accounting label that admitted the least of it.

Ten days later, the Federal Reserve extended an $85 billion loan to AIG in exchange for nearly 80% of its equity, an outright government takeover of a private company. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke were the two men driving nearly every decision in this sequence, and Bush's own role, by every documented account, was to be briefed by them and to back their judgment rather than to independently weigh the alternatives. One retrospective account of the period puts it plainly, that Bush went to the Rose Garden to ask Congress for TARP funds "because he had been briefed" by the two officials who "fully understood the gravity of the situation," not because he had reached that conclusion through his own deliberation. When Paulson and Bernanke needed to convince a skeptical Congress on September 18, they walked into Speaker Pelosi's office and, by Bernanke's own account, opened with calculated alarm rather than technical argument: "I am a student of the Great Depression," he told the assembled congressional leadership. "Let me state this clearly."

On October 3, Bush signed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, creating the $700 billion TARP program to inject capital directly into the banking system.

Ten days after that, Paulson summoned the CEOs of the nation's nine largest banks to Treasury and, with Bernanke and New York Fed President Timothy Geithner beside him, informed them the government would be taking equity stakes. And they’d be taking them, whether they wanted the capital or not.

This was, by dollar value, the largest peacetime expansion of the federal government's direct role in the private economy in American history, larger than anything FDR attempted, executed by a Republican administration over the private objections of many free-market conservatives in its own party.

Unfortunately, Fannie and Freddie's executives departed with existing compensation intact. AIG's counterparties, including Goldman Sachs, were paid out on derivative contracts at full value rather than forced to accept losses. No senior Wall Street executive was criminally prosecuted for conduct connected to the crash. Shareholders were largely wiped out. The people who ran the firms, and the firms on the other side of their bets, were made whole at public expense.

Teddy's Ghost

In 1910 at Osawatomie, Theodore Roosevelt gave "New Nationalism" its name, arguing that a modern industrial nation required a federal government strong enough to discipline concentrated private power, not one content to referee from the sidelines. Though George W. Bush never challenged the establishment the way Roosevelt did, and never articulated a coherent governing philosophy, his administration rhymed with Teddy far more than it did with Taft, Goldwater or Reagan. Bush used the federal government to discipline corporate accounting, guarantee benefits for the elderly, nationalize mortgage guarantors and insurers, build foreign humanitarian commitments, and attempt to close the racial wealth gap in homeownership.

"Small government" is not the name for that governing instinct, but neither, quite, is "progressive.” After all, his tax policy and social politics put a hard ceiling on that word. But what he actually built was the greatest precedent for state economic action any modern Republican president has left behind since Roosevelt, and it is worth learning exactly where he got it right, where he got the mechanism right and the accountability wrong, and where compassionate conservatism's own theory of change collided with the same corporate capture this movement exists to fight.

25 Years On

George W. Bush will not be remembered as a progressive reformer. And we do not claim that he was. But the presidency that unfolded between January 2001 and January 2009 was not, and could not have been, a continuation of the small-government conservatism that had defined the Republican Party since Goldwater and Reagan. It built a new cabinet department, nationalized the mortgage market and the country's largest insurer, created the largest new entitlement in a generation, imposed the most significant regulation of corporate America in decades, and launched the largest humanitarian commitment to global health of any nation in history. And for a time, America believed in this vision whole-heartedly. Twenty-five years after September 11 set this presidency in motion, its true legacy is that it broke, quietly and almost accidentally, the neoliberal coalition that had held the American right together for two generations and left behind both a Republican Party still arguing about what should replace it. The “old church” of conservatism died somewhere between No Child Left Behind, and Freddie Mac, and nobody has been able to rebuild it since.