The presidency of George Washington began on April 30, 1789, when Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the United States, and ended on March 4, 1797. Congress passed the Tariff of 1789, the Tariff of 1790, and an excise tax on whiskey to fund the government and, in the case of the tariffs, address the trade imbalance with Britain. He exercised his presidential veto power for the first time on April 5, 1792, to stop an apportionment act from becoming law. The bill would have redistributed House seats among the states in a way that Washington considered unconstitutional. After attempting but failing to override the veto, Congress soon wrote new legislation, the Apportionment Act of 1792, which Washington signed into law on April 14. At the same time, Hamilton's funding proposal, a plan in which the federal government would assume debts incurred by states in waging the Revolutionary War was failing to garner enough support to pass.