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| 2000, Feb. 6 |
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| First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton announced her intention to run for a Senate position for the state of New York in the 2000 elections. | 1 |
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| April 13 |
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| In an antitrust lawsuit filed by the federal government and 19 states, Microsoft was found to be in violation of antitrust law by having used monopoly power to disable its competition. In a landmark case for the corporate United States, it was ordered on June 7 that the corporation split into two smaller companies in order to dilute its monopoly powers. After an appeal of prior rulings, the U.S. Supreme Court refused on Sept. 26 to take the Microsoft case. | 2 |
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| April 26 |
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| The state of Vermont passed a bill recognizing same-sex civil unions as legitimate under state law. Vermont was the first state to enact such a bill. | 3 |
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| June 26 |
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| Two separate organizations, U.S.-based Celera Genomics Corp. and the internationally funded Human Genome Project, jointly announced that each had compiled a working map of the human genome. The remarkable achievement was expected to revolutionize the fields of science and medicine. | 4 |
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| June 26 |
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| The U.S. Supreme Court surprisingly upheld the 1966 Miranda decision that required a suspect to have been informed of his or her rights before confessions could be admissible in court. In Dickerson v. United States, the Court judged a 1968 statute that largely negated the Miranda decision as unconstitutional. Other important precedents upheld by the Supreme Court in the year 2000 were state sovereignty in age-discrimination lawsuits, separation of religion and public education, and the unconstitutionality of state laws banning partial birth abortions. | 5 |
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| Aug. 23 |
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| Attorney General Janet Reno ruled against a fund-raising probe on Democratic presidential candidate and vice president Al Gore. | 6 |
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| Sept. 1 |
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| Amid some criticism by Republican opponents, Pres. Clinton postponed a 20-year-old proposal to begin construction of a national missile defense system. The planned project was aimed at protecting the U.S. from nuclear attack. | 7 |
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| Sept. 20 |
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| In the Whitewater probe, Pres. Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton were cleared of any criminal wrongdoing. The independent counsel cited a lack of evidence against the First Lady and Pres. Clinton, who had been plagued by the scandal throughout his presidency. | 8 |
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| Sept. 22 |
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| As the U.S. faced remarkable worldwide increases in oil prices, Pres. Clinton approved the allotment of surplus oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in order to increase the oil supply and bring U.S. gas prices under control. | 9 |
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| Oct. 12 |
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| In an attack that was apparently orchestrated by Yemeni Islamic terrorists, the Navy warship U.S.S. Cole was bombed while harbored in Aden, Yemen; seventeen sailors were killed and dozens more injured. | 10 |
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| Nov. 2 |
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| The international space station project that was initiated with its first module launches one year earlier reached another milestone when its first crew members were sent into space to occupy the station. | 11 |
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| Nov. 7 |
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| The presidential election remained undecided, the narrowness of the vote margin, particularly in the key electoral state of Florida, being still too close to declare either V.P. Al Gore or Texas governor George W. Bush a definite victor. Congressional elections to the 107th Congress resulted in Republicans retaining a slight majority in the Senate as well as in the House of Representatives. In state elections nationwide, the Republican Party made crucial gains in the state legislatures with the tally of state governorships remaining nearly the same, only one state changing hands. | 12 |
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