Staffing the top levels of the executive branch is a high-priority task for new presidents. Roughly 4,000 presidentially appointed positions are spread across the executive branch, and appointees to the most senior positions (nearly 1,200) require Senate confirmation. Throughout the 2020 presidential campaign, then candidate Joe Biden promised to select a diverse set of appointees. This article examines President Biden's commitment to this pledge as well as the pace at which the Senate confirmed his first tranche of appointees. To assess President Biden's performance during the first 300 days of his administration, I compare his record to his three immediate predecessors (Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump). The data reveal that while President Biden fulfilled his promise by appointing record numbers of women and non-Whites, the pace at which these appointees were confirmed was much slower than those of his three predecessors.

Kenneth Feinberg, one of the nation's foremost public service lawyers, delivers the 22nd annual Henry J. Abraham Distinguished Lecture—“Unconventional responses to unique catastrophes: Tailoring the law to meet the challenges"—at the Miller Center and via online webinar. He discusses his experiences as a U.S. attorney; chief of staff to Senator Edward M. Kennedy; specialist in mediation and alternative dispute resolution; special master of the U.S. government's September 11th Victim Compensation Fund and for TARP Executive Compensation; and administrator of funds to victims of the BP Deepwater Horizon Disaster, 2013 Boston Marathon terrorist bombings, Agent Orange, asbestos, DES, and Holocaust enslaved labor. He also served as the chair of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation Board and arbitrated the fair market value of the Zapruder film that captured JFK's assassination. The Abraham Distinguished Lecture honors renowned constitutional law scholar Henry J. Abraham (1921–2020), who was James Hart Professor of Government, Emeritus, at the University of Virginia.

Eric and Eliot dissect the war in Ukraine and discuss Eliot’s articles in the Atlantic and Foreign Affairs. What is the new phase of the war? Are Russian forces exhausted, what is their strategy? How will the Ukrainians counter? Is the Biden package enough? Eliot asks Eric about the lessons of Ukraine for other parts of the world and his Bulwark article on ending the policy of strategic ambiguity for Taiwan. Should we settle in for a long war of attrition?

A panel of Miller Center experts and guests examine the economic impact and global financial ramifications of Russia’s war in Ukraine. In particular, the panel assesses whether Russia is likely to experience an all-out crisis, and if so, how it might affect the European economy and global financial markets. Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic and with hopes for some recovery on the horizon, does this evolving crisis stymie the long-anticipated world economic recovery?