[126]
Many economists and world governments determined that the situation had become the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.[127][128] Additional regulation over the housing market would have been beneficial, according to former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan.[129] Bush, meanwhile, proposed a financial rescue plan to buy back a large portion of the U.S. mortgage market.[130] Vince Reinhardt, a former Federal Reserve economist now at the American Enterprise Institute, said "it would have helped for the Bush administration to empower the folks at Treasury and the Federal Reserve and the comptroller of the currency and the FDIC to look at these issues more closely", and additionally, that it would have helped "for Congress to have held hearings".[124]

Education and public health
Bush undertook many educational agendas, such as increasing the funding for the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health in his first years of office and creating education programs to strengthen the grounding in science and mathematics for American high school students. Funding for the NIH was cut in 2006, the first such cut in 36 years, due to rising inflation.