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The author queries what happened to the neighborhood‐oriented decentralist programs of the 1960s and 1970s since the advent of the Reagan administration, and to what extent the President can dominate the domestic political agenda in this area or any other? To answer his question, he looks at the broad history of participatory politics since Johnson's Great Society, and then at the harsh realities of the present Administration's proposed cuts, showing the depth of these changes and the techniques which add to presidential authority. The author concludes, as a result of his investigation, that the President does, more than at any other time in recent history, have the power to set a national agenda, and "that this heralds—for the forseeable future—a substantial weakening of the decentralist, neighborhood‐oriented programs and community‐based organizations. The main emphasis of the paper is an examination of the era which has been called "Presidential governance" in which the whole of the nation's politics can be controlled outright or substantially directed by the man in the White House. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]