WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden ends his term with a gulf between his policy record and his public reputation.
The Democrat spent so much of his time addressing long-term priorities that many voters felt he did not adequately deal with more immediate problems like high inflation that peaked in 2022 and illegal crossings at the U.S. border with Mexico.
Biden's term ends just as many of his major domestic policy achievements are being implemented, meaning that the story of his presidency will continue to be written long after he turns over the White House to Republican .
A look at major elements of Biden's domestic record:
Breaking the pandemic's fever
Within months of becoming president, Biden along with congressional Democrats toward powering the United States out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It provided most households with direct payments of $1,400. State and local governments were eligible for $350 billion in assistance, while school systems got $130 billion. Families received an expanded child tax credit deposited monthly in their bank accounts, while renters had a temporary eviction moratorium. Similar to previous pandemic relief under Trump, there were forgivable loans for small businesses to meet payrolls and expanded unemployment benefits.
There was also $14 billion to distribute the COVID-19 vaccine that led to roughly 70% of the country being fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The funding helped enable growth to roar back — 17 million jobs added, including 5.6 million more jobs than what the Congressional Budget Office forecast before the relief package's passage. But voters increasingly cared about another economic metric that began to creep up:
Inflation's wrath
There was never one single cause for the inflation that hounded Biden's presidency, nor was there a satisfying solution for the public. Republicans were quick to blame the spending from the pandemic relief, relying on forecasts such as those by the economist Larry Summers to suggest that Biden had flooded America with too much money. That political argument obscured a far more complicated reality that involved multiple factors, not just pandemic aid.
Factories around the world shut down during the pandemic. There were not enough computer chips to build new cars, not enough household appliances and not enough shipping containers and dockworkers to get people what they had bought on time. Prices rose because of the kinks in the global supply chain, a challenge the Biden administration sought to unravel by improving the efficiency of U.S. ports.
Domestic oil production was initially slow to ramp up in tandem with the recovering economy, pushing up gasoline prices. Then on Feb. 24, 2022, and energy and food prices shot up further as Biden tapped the strategic petroleum reserve for the second time in his presidency. The consumer price index's annual inflation rate hit a four-decade peak of 9.1% in June 2022. The Federal Reserve jacked up its benchmark interest rates, making mortgage rates and auto loan rates higher as the inflation rate steadily eased though still elevated at 2.7% as of this past November.
Biden noted with pride that inflation had fallen without the recession that many economists had forecast, a talking point that largely failed to resonate with the wider public. He also tried to criticize oil companies he judged as profiteering and food companies that reduced the size of their items through
Labor Department data shows that consumer prices rose a combined 20.8% during the course of Biden's presidency, but people's average weekly earnings rose just 17.4% over the same period. That meant people's incomes didn't keep pace with their expenses — and it, predictably, left people viewing an otherwise healthy economy as weak.
Trouble at the border
As the U.S. economy improved, there was a sharp increase in on the U.S. border with Mexico. The increase in unauthorized immigrants overwhelmed many states and cities while the Biden administration haggled with Congress over how to add more resources for border security. Biden's eventual deal with Senate Republicans was in early 2024. That led Biden to take — too late for public sentiment — the executive actions that Republicans said he should have done all along.
But the impact was clear as government arrests at the southern border topped 2 million in fiscal 2022 and fiscal 2023. That number fell to 1.53 million in fiscal 2024, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Republicans blamed the arrivals for more homelessness and higher home prices, though the economy also benefited somewhat as the migration boosted job growth without adding to wage pressures that could have worsened inflation.
Arrests at the southern border decreased after Mexico took more aggressive actions in December 2023 to curb the crossings and the U.S. government launched an online system called CBP One that let unauthorized people seeking immigration status enter the country with pre-set appointments.
Infrastructure week? More like infrastructure decade
“Infrastructure week†became a punchline during the Trump administration, an event routinely overshadowed by competing news or controversy. Trump had promised to fix the country’s roads and bridges but found little success.
Biden loved to ding Trump over the $1 trillion he signed into law in November 2021 that was achieved on a bipartisan basis. There have been 66,000 projects announced so far with a price tag of $568 billion, but major projects such as the Brent Spence Bridge in the Cincinnati area and new rail tunnels on the East Coast will take several years to finish — a delay that smothered some of the oomph the work may otherwise have carried with voters. The Biden administration has stressed that it was quick to stand-up an array of new programs, yet what mattered politically were the delays in showing visible impacts in people's lives.
The delays also have serious policy implications, possibly hurting Biden's efforts to encourage more people to buy electric vehicles. The law allocated $7.5 billion to build a network of charging stations, but the spending has been slow. , the Federal Highway Administration said just 214 operational chargers had been built in 12 states, though 24,800 projects are slated nationwide. That shortfall has occurred as China has begun to aggressively increase its own production of EVs in a challenge to U.S., European, Japanese and Korean automakers.
Biden told USA Today this month that he wished there had been more shovel-ready projects and he expressed regret that he didn't do a better job of branding all the benefits and projects his policies helped start.
Computer chips, AI and the competition with China
For years, China bested the United States in manufacturing by having its government invest in factories. The Biden team decided to compete by pushing a bipartisan measure in 2022 that would invest $52 billion in . That investment helped bring the production of the most advanced chips to the United States and lessen the dependence on Taiwan and South Korea, where the possible loss of access to shipping lanes could upend the U.S. economy.
The support became even more important as artificial intelligence emerged as an economic force, prompting a Biden executive order in 2023 to guide the emerging technology. But just like infrastructure, the new factories supported by the law will largely take time to finish and ramp up production, meaning that much of Biden's legacy could unfold during Trump's presidency.
The misnamed Inflation Reduction Act
In August 2022, Biden signed into law the Democratic-backed Inflation Reduction Act, which to reduce the immediate inflationary pressures and, despite its name, served as a grab bag of policies.
The measure included $783 billion in various incentives and policies to promote renewable energy and address the impact of climate change, as well as subsidies for people getting insurance through the Affordable Care Act. Biden proudly called the law “the single-largest investment in climate change anywhere in the world," but the comment reflects both the magnitude of the law and the relatively modest efforts in the past to tackle the climate challenge.
Biden paid for this spending in part by enabling Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices, reducing costs for taxpayers but with the new prices from the first round of negotiations only going into effect in 2026. The administration also made changes to the tax code and boosted funding for the IRS, increasing the revenue collected from wealthier taxpayers.
Biden ultimately admitted that climate change provisions that could shift America's energy sources further away from fossil fuels was more important than the short-term political messaging that he was trying to bring down prices.
“I wish I hadn’t called it that because it has less to do with reducing inflation than it has to do with providing alternatives that generate economic growth,†Biden said at a 2023 fundraiser in Utah, adding that he still believes that with the law “we’re literally reducing the cost of people being able to meet their basic needs.â€
Taking on pocketbook issues and bipartisanship
Biden took a two-prong approach on issues that largely eluded the public radar. He tried to notch some bipartisan wins with Congress on gun violence, health care for military veterans and gay marriage. But his appointees running federal agencies focused on changing rules in hopes of helping consumers and making the economy more transparent, in some cases getting companies to voluntarily scrap hidden fees.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau this month finalized a rule to remove $49 billion in from people's credit reports. Another finalized rule limits charged by banks and credit unions. Three major apartment rental sites agreed to list hidden fees tied to leases after the Housing and Urban Development Department pushed. The finalized a rule last year requiring airlines to provide cash refunds when flights are canceled or significantly changed.
With Republicans blocking tax hikes, the national debt grew
Biden's term is ending with the national debt's trajectory looking worse.
CBO figures show it's costing three times as much to service the debt as when Trump left office. The pandemic is responsible for some of that, with the annual budget deficit topping $3 trillion in 2020 during the last year of Trump's first term. The deficit was $2.77 trillion in fiscal 2021 because of additional pandemic aid, but it never returned to pre-pandemic levels as the yearly shortfall that needed to be financed by debt in fiscal 2024 was $1.83 trillion.
The Biden administration proposed budgets with tax hikes to lessen the debt, but Republicans blocked the measure. GOP lawmakers counter that Biden's student debt forgiveness worsened the debt. Many of Trump's own 2017 tax cuts are expiring after this year, with the incoming president pledging more cuts that could further raise budget deficits without sharp spending cuts.
