Experts in the News | Miller Center

How to assess Joe Biden's first year in office

As President Joe Biden completed his first year, the Miller Center hosted a two-hour webinar, featuring Democratic, Republican and independent practitioners and scholars, who assessed his performance. That’s also why I’ve spent the past two weeks in private conversations with two dozen individuals – a bipartisan list of senior government officials, journalists, members of Congress, think-tank researchers, political consultants and nonprofit leaders. The interviews were conducted by 10 terrific UVA undergraduate students, as part of a class I co-taught on President Biden’s first year.

William Antholis

Biden’s ‘A-Team’ Turnover Shows ‘Return to Normalcy,’ Report Finds

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a nonresident senior fellow with Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, published an analysis on Thursday––the one year anniversary of President Biden’s Inauguration––about turnover in the administration in its first year. This was a massive issue under the previous administration.

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas

Breaking silences: Lessons from Tulsa and Charlottesville

In May 2021, Joe Biden became the first president to officially commemorate the Tulsa Race Massacre, which happened exactly 100 year prior, when white mobs destroyed the all-Black Greenwood district, burning more than 1,000 businesses, churches, and homes, and murdering scores, possibly hundreds. President Biden's acknowledgment of that horrific event follows decades of struggle by survivors and local activists to break the silence of the cover-up by Tulsa's white civic leaders. What are the lessons for other cities confronting past atrocities or histories of injustice, such as Greensboro, North Carolina, or Charlottesville, Virginia?

Kevin K. Gaines

‘A-Team’ turnover in the Biden administration: A return to normalcy

Over the course of its first year, President Biden’s team faced several well-documented challenges—but staffing the White House was not one of them. Although he had a truncated transition due to the General Services Administration’s unwillingness to “ascertain” that Joe Biden had won the election, a record breaking 1,136 appointees were sworn in on Inauguration Day. This study focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on turnover in the president’s “A-Team,” defined as senior executive-office positions that do not require Senate confirmation.

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas

First look: Biden's Year One turnover

Scholar Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, who authored the Brookings report, tells Axios the findings reflect "a core stability within the administration" and "not a lot of drama. They're trying to sort of recoup where we were before the Trump administration."

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas

Heeding the Lessons of the Cold War

Mystery guest host (Bill Kristol) joins Eric for a discussion with Johns Hopkins SAIS Professor Hal Brands about his new book the Twilight Struggle. They discuss the lessons of America's cold war strategic competition with the USSR for today's era of strategic competition with China and Russia—the role of strategy, economic competition, political warfare, and more.

Eric Edelman