JUMP TO:

Trip Schedule:

EDT

10:45AM        The President departs the White House en route to Joint Base Andrews
11:00AM        The President departs Joint Base Andrews en route to New Orleans, Louisiana

CDT

12:20PM         The President arrives in New Orleans, Louisiana
12:45PM         The President meets with residents and youth, New Orleans, Louisiana
2:55PM           The President participates in a resilience roundtable, Andrew P. Sanchez Community Center, New Orleans, LA
3:55PM           The President delivers remarks, Andrew P. Sanchez Community Center, New Orleans, LA
5:00PM           The President departs New Orleans en route to Washington, DC

See the Moments

“That’s the story of New Orleans…a city that, for almost 300 years, has been the gateway to America’s soul. Where the jazz makes you cry, the funerals make you dance, the bayou makes you believe all kinds of things. A place that has always brought together people of all races and religions and languages. And everybody adds their culture and their flavor into this city’s gumbo. You remind our nation that for all of our differences, in the end, what matters is we’re all in the same boat. We all share a similar destiny.” —President Obama marking the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans: go.wh.gov/Katrina10 #Katrina10

A photo posted by The White House (@whitehouse) on Aug 29, 2015 at 12:59pm PDT

President Obama, reflected in mirror, stops for lunch in New Orleans at Willie Mae's. Yes the fried chicken was that good.

A photo posted by Pete Souza (@petesouza) on Aug 27, 2015 at 12:19pm PDT

In Treme, I was inspired by the progress & people 10 years after Katrina. It gives us hope, but our work isn't done. pic.twitter.com/LDqsARhnZt

— President Obama (@POTUS) August 29, 2015

.@POTUS pauses to say hello to a darling little boy in Treme pic.twitter.com/9B0mQkZ8OA

— Valerie Jarrett (@vj44) August 27, 2015

Trying out the new full frame update and wanted to see how a vertical looked. This is during the President's round table briefing in New Orleans yesterday. DSLR FYI.

A photo posted by Pete Souza (@petesouza) on Aug 28, 2015 at 6:20am PDT

And here's an example of the new full-frame Instagram option for horizontals. Another photo from yesterday's visit to New Orleans.

A photo posted by Pete Souza (@petesouza) on Aug 28, 2015 at 8:07am PDT

"We were in Tremé, and we saw returning residents living in brand new homes, mixed income, new homes near schools and clinics and parks, child care centers, more opportunities for working families." —President Obama on meeting the people of New Orleans today 10 years after Hurricane Katrina #Katrina1

A photo posted by The White House (@whitehouse) on Aug 28, 2015 at 7:59am PDT

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Get the Facts

Since taking office, President Obama has made it a key priority to continue and expedite the recovery and rebuilding efforts since Hurricane Katrina, the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, by:

• Supporting the needs of survivors
• Bolstering the recovery efforts already underway by state, local, and federal officials by cutting red tape to deploy important resources quickly
• Investing in hard-hit communities
• Ensuring that affected communities build back stronger and more resilient
• The President has directed his Administration to take an all-of-nation approach — to work closely with and support the work of all of our partners, including state and local governments, tribal and volunteer organizations, the private sector, and families

10 years after Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf Coast is building back stronger and more resilient:

98% of families displaced by Katrina are back in their homes.

We've provided more than $5.2 billion since 2009 for rebuilding schools, hospitals, roads, police and fire stations, and historic museums and buildings.

Read more on the Administration's post-Katrina recovery efforts.

See what community-building programs are already at work in your area with this interactive map.

Share how you’ve seen these programs at work in your community. If you’ve got a photo, share that with us, too.

More on Resilience Planning

President Obama is making the biggest commitment in American history to reduce carbon emissions and slow the impacts of climate change.

I remember when the Obama administration’s version of WhiteHouse.gov first launched in 2009. I didn’t work here at the time, but I — like so many others — visited theWhite House website to 1. See what all the fuss was about; and 2. See how the Obama administration had decided to put its own unique stamp on the web presence of the presidency. The site was beautiful and sleek, formal and inspirational — and it got accolades as a result.

We’ve made a lot of improvements since then — to the blog and elsewhere across the site — but we never consider it “done.”

There’s been real progress in this administration towards a more transparent, attentive, and responsive government for the American people — and we think the White House brand and web platforms should be emblematic of that progress. The only way to accomplish that is to be nimble and continue improving up until the end.

There are obvious external factors pushing us toward change, as well. The sources and means by which folks get information, both as consumers and as citizens, are constantly evolving — we’ve got to keep up and meet people where they are.

Today, we released a brand-new version of the White House blog that’s reflective of those efforts. Here’s what that looks like.

A new way of visualizing a given day at the White House.

For some time now, we’ve served you the President’s schedule and the Vice President’s schedule on WhiteHouse.gov a daily basis, but we realized we weren’t actually making it truly useful.

How embarrassing: We were being transparent by laying out the events of the President’s day, but it was both difficult to find and a dead-end.

Whether you’re visiting WhiteHouse.gov looking for a specific piece of content, following a link from another site back to our platform, or you’re simply browsing — we want you to have a great experience that both gives you what you were looking for and introduces something you didn’t know was there. That’s how interacting with your government should be.

So what did we change?

We integrated the daily schedule into a streamlined daily feed, housed alongside the rest of the day’s relevant content. 

Now, when you visit the schedule, you’ll get additional context for the day’s events — timely content that will make your visit fruitful. 

We gave you more options on how to browse.

You can quickly skim through the daily schedules.

You can scroll through the feed.

Or, you can subscribe to the schedule feeds to view them from wherever you’d like.

We’re providing more direct links to relevant content.

Say goodbye to “pinch and zoom.”

Have you had to pinch and zoom to read our content on your mobile devices? As of today, that’s a thing of the past on the White House blog. Now you can easily view all the content of a given post across your devices — and it’s faster and more accessible.

We’re not done yet.

These are just a few things we’ve done recently, but there’s certainly more room to improve, and we’re enlisting your help to do it.

Share your feedback to help us further improve your experience with our site.

Tell Us What You Think

Project information: Creative direction and requirements by Ashleigh Axios, design by James Hobbs, and project management by Amanda Stone.

President Obama is keeping his promise to make sure you can easily see where your taxes are going.

Here’s how it works: Enter a few key pieces of information, and the Taxpayer Receipt gives you a breakdown of how your taxes are spent on America’s priorities, like education, veteran benefits, and health care. This year, the tool is designed to work across devices, so you can use the tool on your phone or tablet as well as your laptop or desktop computer.

Enter your income tax; the total amount of federal income taxes for 2014. This amount should be on your income tax return, line 11 of Form 1040EZ or line 55 of Form 1040.

Get your 2014 federal taxpayer receipt

Want more tax and budget info?

• Learn more about how President Obama's budget would reduce the deficit.
• Explore where your tax dollars would go and see what percentage of the federal budget is dedicated to different program areas.
• See how two starkly different tax plans would impact you.

Interested in embedding the tax receipt in your site, blog, or other platform? Select the "< / >" symbol in the tool to grab the iframe code.

Are you a citizen developer interested in using government data or tools? Visit WhiteHouse.gov/Developers.

And for regular updates on other exciting happenings on WhiteHouse.gov, follow us on Twitter: @WHWeb.

Last night, we released the first-ever responsive White House homepage. Here's what that means: The WhiteHouse.gov landing page now displays content in a consistent way, no matter which device you're using — desktop, laptop, mobile phone, or tablet. This also means that we're helping you find the most relevant content as quickly as possible.

This is a landmark change in a series of improvements to our online platforms to make them more accessible, user-friendly, and in line with modern best practices. And this is just the first phase in revamping the White House homepage. We will continue to iterate on the design and features, rolling out enhancements along the way.

Over recent months, we have released a series of responsive features and sections. These updates have included popular events like the State of the Union, as well as informational pages like the biographies of Presidents and First Ladies which receive a high volume of visitors every day. And over the next couple of months, we'll update some features we think you'll find useful as well as some popular sections including Latest News (also known as the White House blog) and the White House Press Office.

This section-by-section approach to upgrading WhiteHouse.gov lets us prioritize improving parts of the site that will be most valuable to you, enables us to roll out new features quicker and more frequently, and allows us to receive and incorporate your feedback along the way to help guide our efforts. Historically, projects like this have been undertaken as a single, large-scale overhaul for a whole site. The downside of that model is that it requires foreseeing exactly what the end product needs to be at the outset, and as a result, often misses the mark. The processes we're using now are known as "iterative design" and "agile development," and reflect a larger user-centric effort within the Federal government to transform the ways we design, build, and deliver technology.

Our design and development teams here at the White House have been using this model for several years, and we are part of a growing trend within the government – now being led in part by the efforts of groups like GSA’s 18F and the U.S. Digital Service, who are also looking to recruit talented design, development, and digitally-savvy problem solvers to do meaningful work solving problems within the United States government.

Our new homepage is just the latest example of our efforts to better serve the public.

Do you have feedback for how we can better serve your needs on WhiteHouse.gov? Let us know here.

Read more on design and development at the White House:

• President Obama is the first President to write a line of code
• The 2016 Budget: How we're using open government tools
• Enhancing the 2015 State of the Union with new digital tools
• Turning government data into better public service
• Using human-centered design for the federal government
• Learn why innovative job-training programs are important
• Announcing the National Week of Making

Are you a citizen developer interested in using government data or tools? Visit WhiteHouse.gov/Developers.

And for more regular updates on other exciting happenings on WhiteHouse.gov, follow us on Twitter @WHWeb.

“Welcome to the Easter Egg Roll. But as you’ve heard, this is the fifth anniversary of Let’s Move. And we’re celebrating by taking over the Easter Egg Roll with Gimme Five…We’re asking Americans of all ages to give me five ways they’re leading a healthier life — five jumping jacks, eating five new vegetables, maybe doing a Gimme Five dance. You name it.” — The First Lady

Learn more about the White House Easter Egg Roll and the First Lady’s #GimmeFive Challenge.

As celebrated on the third Monday in February each year, Presidents’ Day is yet again upon us.

This is often the time of year students across the country study U.S. Presidents, especially Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, both of whom have birthdays celebrated in February. Luckily, we’ve revamped our Presidents’ pages in time for the holiday, so whether you’re a student or adult, you can more easily buff up on American history.

18th Century

1. George Washington
2. John Adams

19th Century

3. Thomas Jefferson
4. James Madison
5. James Monroe
6. John Quincy Adams
7. Andrew Jackson
8. Martin Van Buren
9. William Henry Harrison
10. John Tyler
11. James K. Polk
12. Zachary Taylor
13. Millard Fillmore
14. Franklin Pierce
15. James Buchanan
16. Abraham Lincoln
17. Andrew Johnson
18. Ulysses S. Grant
19. Rutherford B. Hayes
20. James Garfield
21. Chester A. Arthur
22. Grover Cleveland
23. Benjamin Harrison
24. Grover Cleveland
25. William McKinley

20th Century

26. Theodore Roosevelt
27. William Howard Taft
28. Woodrow Wilson
29. Warren G. Harding
30. Calvin Coolidge
31. Herbert Hoover
32. Franklin D. Roosevelt
33. Harry S. Truman
34. Dwight D. Eisenhower
35. John F. Kennedy
36. Lyndon B. Johnson
37. Richard M. Nixon
38. Gerald R. Ford
39. James Carter
40. Ronald Reagan
41. George H. W. Bush
42. William J. Clinton

21st Century

43. George W. Bush
44. Barack Obama

The Presidential biographies on WhiteHouse.gov are from “The Presidents of the United States of America,” by Frank Freidel  and Hugh Sidey. Copyright 2006 by the White House Historical Association.

Related Content:

Inside the White House: Letters to the President
Every day, President Obama reads ten letters from the public in order to stay in tune with America's issues and concerns. "Letters to the President" is an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the process of how those ten letters make it to the President's desk from among the tens of thousands of letters, faxes, and e-mails that flood the White House each day.

All the President’s Pens
Why do presidents use so many pens to sign legislation? Former White House Staff Secretary Lisa Brown explains.

Catching Up with The Curator: The Presidential Seal
Go inside the White House with White House Curator, Bill Allman, as he talks about the Presidential Seal and shows you a sample of the locations it is hiding in plain sight.

Catching Up with The Curator: Presidential Portrait of Theodore Roosevelt
Go inside the White House with White House Curator, Bill Allman, as he gives insight behind President Theodore Roosevelt's portrait in the East Room.

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Need health coverage?
Learn more about plans that are tailored to you at HealthCare.gov.

Related Content:

• 2014 Saw the Largest Coverage Gains in Four Decades, Putting the Uninsured Rate at or Near Historic Lows
• View the latest in the series "The Faces of Health Care"
• View more of the most shareable Health Care content

President Barack Obama delivers the State of the Union address in the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., Jan. 28, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Amanda Lucidon)

President Barack Obama delivers the State of the Union address in the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., Jan. 28, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Amanda Lucidon)

On Tuesday, January 20 at 9pm ET, President Obama will deliver his sixth State of the Union Address.

This year there will be more ways than ever to take part in the State of the Union, including new ways to take in the remarks, to share exclusive content with your social networks, and to share your experiences. There will also be opportunities to discuss President Obama’s remarks with White House officials immediately following the address.

If you plan on watching from home, we will be streaming an enhanced version of the speech on WhiteHouse.gov/SOTU that features graphics, data, and charts that help explain issues and policies the President is discussing alongside the remarks. You can also tune in live on YouTube, Google+, and through our mobile apps.

In the mean time, here’s how to stay updated, and learn more about how you can watch, share and discuss the speech.

• Get email updates: Sign up and make sure you’re among the first to get exclusive content before and after the speech.

• Follow us on Twitter: Make sure you’re following @WhiteHouse on Twitter for news and real-time updates before, during, and after the address.

• WhiteHouse.gov/SOTU: Officially relaunching later this week, WhiteHouse.gov/SOTU will be your number one resource for all things State of the Union and the best place to watch the enhanced livestream of President Obama’s address, featuring charts, graphs, data, and more to help explain the issues and policies he’s discussing alongside the remarks.

Want to learn more about the State of the Union?

Watch the 2014 Enhanced State of the Union below.

Check out all the slides from the speech and see a photo gallery from the 2014 State of the Union.

Watch the behind-the-scenes video on the writing of the 2012 State of the Union.

Watch the 2013 Enhanced State of the Union, see the 2013 enhanced slides, or check out a photo gallery from the 2013 speech.

A responsible end to the war in Afghanistan. A historic agreement to combat climate change. A strong pace of job growth that we haven't seen since the 1990s. 

Overall, 2014 has offered some great achievements for President Obama and the American people. Join the President's Chief of Staff Denis McDonough in taking a look back at this year's most memorable moments -- then share the memories with your friends and family. 

Don't miss out on what else happened at the White House this year — both online and off:

• 2014: A Year of Action
• Our top ten moments with Vice President Joe Biden
• The best @WhiteHouse tweets of 2014

We understand that it may have been awhile since you reflected on how far our nation’s information infrastructure has come and how much the website of the president has changed, so we wanted to zoom out for a second, recap some of the highlights of how WhiteHouse.gov has progressed, and forecast some future improvements that are currently under way.

The first archived WhiteHouse.gov homepage from the Clinton administration.

The original website was created to present the White House as the home of the president, the workplace of the head of state and head of government for the United States, and a living American cultural and historical institution. It was ahead of the curve simply by existing on the “world wide web.” (Which was how we referred to the internet back then.)

In 1994, 2 percent of American households had access to the internet. Source: NSF.gov

On its first birthday, WhiteHouse.gov reported that the average number of daily users had more than tripled in the first year and that almost 150,000 people had signed into the “electronic guestbook.” Plans for the next iteration of the website were already underway.

Throughout the lifecycle of the first website, new features were developed, including that guestbook we mentioned — which wasn’t available on day one, a Presidential welcome message, a vice presidential welcome message, information about the Executive branch, a series of webforms for public or organizational comments, and press releases. Many of these things have lived on in various forms throughout the past 20 years.

The WhiteHouse.gov homepage on the first day of the Obama Administration in 2009.

The Obama administration has carried on the tradition of highlighting the White House as a home, workplace, and historical landmark — and we’ve added a new commitment to transparency, public participation, and collaboration in government that was integrated into the initial website structure and design in 2009. The original website of this administration was built on Drupal 6, an open-source content management system (CMS), so that the website would be more secure and more flexible to change and adapt over time.

The transparency and participation were also carried over in the site design. The design kept users and their needs front-of-mind with intuitive navigation that limited initial choices, but provided an immediate sense of President Obama’s priorities in the drop down menus; email integration that was groundbreaking at the time; a simple and tight style guide of colors and fonts that kept the experience of WhiteHouse.gov unique and professional.

The We the People homepage in October 2014.

In 2011, we launched a new online petitions section, We the People, to give Americans a way to petition their government around the issues they care about — and provide a pathway to receive a formal response. Continuing the trend of making iterative changes to improve government services for the public, the We the People platform has seen a number of upgrades over the past three years, including the addition of a simple signing system in June 2014. As of September 2014, more than 15 million users have participated, collecting more than 22 million signatures on more than 360,000 petitions, and having received nearly 250 White House responses — one of which happened to be the most popular piece of WhiteHouse.gov content of all time. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should check it out.

Here at the WhiteHouse.gov, we're proponents of using "open source" code  — which just means it’s code that anyone else can use, too. But we're not just using open-source code — we're creating it, too. We want to give citizens, coders, and state and local governments a way to use the tools we've built. Just this week, we released something called a “write API” (short for “Application Programming Interface”) for We the People, which allows outside organizations to submit signatures to We the People without having to come to our website. It’s the first and highest profile public write API service hosted by the government.

The WhiteHouse.gov homepage in October 2014.

Today, technology and innovation are fundamental to our ability to hear from and communicate with the public.

In 2012, 78.9 percent of American households had a computer at home and 94.8 percent of households with a computer used it to connect to the internet. Source: Census.gov

We’ve been gradually adapting the current iteration of WhiteHouse.gov to meet the evolving needs of the most technology-savvy American public in history – folks who are consuming information in different ways and looking for meaningful opportunities to engage on the topics that matter to them. A big part of this is bringing WhiteHouse.gov directly to the American people, where they are.

About 40 percent of people in lower-income and minority groups say they primarily use their cell phone to go online. Source: Harvard Business Review, PEW

The 2012 White House mobile application in the iTunes marketplace.

Starting in 2010 with the launch of the initial White House iPhone and iPod touch application, we’ve consistently delivered content like livestreams, blog posts, and behind-the-scenes photos and videos into the hands of mobile users. We later released an Android White House application and a number of updates to make all White House apps compatible with the newest devices. The newest update will be available later this year, integrating touch, animations, and a more modern design. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have used our mobile applications to access WhiteHouse.gov content.

In April 2012, we also released a mobile theme — allowing users to more easily see key pieces of our desktop content on their mobile devices.

However, serving reduced content for mobile devices is no longer acceptable.

It’s estimated that mobile users will surpass desktop users by the end of this year. Source: Morgan Stanley

The White House's new, responsive Live section.

We’ve started rebuilding WhiteHouse.gov to be responsive, allowing the same content and design to display seamlessly for users, regardless of their device. Check out our progress so far in the Sharables section, displaying the most shareable content from across WhiteHouse.gov; the 2013 State of the Union page, where hundreds of thousands of users tuned in to watch and participate in the President’s address last year; and our brand-new Live section, where you can tune in to White House events in real time with curated content around the stream to help supplement and inform your viewing experience. A key part of this transition has moving the website to the newest version of Drupal, Drupal 7, where we can continue take advantage of our content management system's ability to keep the website secure and adaptive, but utilizing the latest tools and resources, and having the support and engagement of the open-source community.

While we’re at it, earlier this month, we updated the navigation to better accommodate the needs of our users by making it better demonstrate the changing content on WhiteHouse.gov — for example, adding a "Participate" tab that provides various ways to engage with the White House and administration — and greatly improving the site’s accessibility. We asked our users for feedback on this change and overwhelmingly they reported that the navigation was “much better” than the previous version:

But we have more work to do.

“Outstanding. I look forward to your implementation throughout the entire website.” – Recent feedback from a WhiteHouse.gov user

We’re also updating our style guide to provide an even more consistent brand experience — including the use of webfonts, which we’re happy to report are coming soon; updating our forms to be more integrated into the website; and making the rest of our website fully responsive.

Your feedback is essential to us making improvements that will positively impact your experience on WhiteHouse.gov. So you tell us: What should we work on next?

Related Resources:

• Learn more about our development tools and resources on the White House developers page.
• Share your thoughts on the new Live section on our feedback webform.
• Want real-time updates on WhiteHouse.gov developments? Follow us on Twitter at @WHweb.
• Download the mobile application: iTunes, Google Play

First Lady Michelle Obama greets members of the general public as they enter the Blue Room during their White House tour, Feb. 16, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

The White House is known as “The People’s House” — and since 2009, the Obama administration has made that nickname truer than ever before for millions of guests by opening the White House to as many Americans as possible.

With the new White House Visitor Center opening up, we want to remind you of the ways you can visit "The People's House" from Washington, D.C. or from the comfort of your home.

Request a self-guided tour — Thanks to the work of the White House Visitor Office, over 3.8 million visitors have come through the White House during this Administration. Public tours must be requested through one’s Member of Congress.

Take the interactive tour — Since April 2012, the White House has taken over 1.5 million visitors “inside” the White House through an interactive virtual tour. Visit again and again to: watch exclusive videos; tour the West Wing, Residence, East Wing, and South Lawn; and learn about the use of the White House rooms throughout history.

Take a virtual tour — In 2013, the White House partnered with the Google Art Project and allowed their 360 Street View cameras to capture the rooms that are featured on the public tour. Now anyone, anywhere, can experience the history and art of the White House via their computer.

“Inside the White House” video series — These videos have together taken over 2.5 million visitors behind-the-scenes at the White House. You'll find exclusive interviews with the Marine Sentries who guard the West Wing, a look at the 10 letters President Obama reads each day, and a look inside the process of creating the President's State of the Union address.

Curious who's visited the White House? We're committed to government transparency and have been providing records of White House visitors since December 2009; have a look.

Join the over 1 million visitors who have watched the President and First Lady surprise White House visitors in 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010.

And find out more about what's happening inside the White House by following us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, YouTube, Tumblr, Google+, and more.