Not so sleepy Biden’s $1.9trn plan is the trump card marking a momentous 100 days in office
With trillions of dollars invested in the US economy and recovery programmes that have drawn comparisons with the presidency of Franklin D Roosevelt, Joe Biden’s short time in office has already proved an eyeopener. Here, our Foreign Editor runs the rule
HOW many of you reading this remember watching the television news reports by BBC North America editor Jon Sopel at the height of the Donald Trump presidency?
I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who often thought that Sopel sometimes looked like a very tired man indeed.
Reading Sopel’s wonderful online account of the change from the Trump to the Joe Biden presidency the other day, I perhaps now have a better understanding of why the BBC’s man in Washington occasionally might have looked a bit beleaguered during those Trump years.
“No middle-of-the-night Twitter storms, no payments to porn stars, no rollicking MAGA rallies,” Sopel recalls of those heady times.
“The transition from Trump to Joe Biden has been like going from a daily crack pipe to a small bottle of low-alcohol beer once a week,” Sopel wryly observed in his piece, adding that far from being a transitional and “boring presidency”, Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office might just prove to be “transformational”.
Personally, I’ve always felt that the 100 days milestone was somewhat arbitrary, a little over-hyped perhaps, and not necessarily a very accurate report card on a US president’s political direction of travel.
As The New York Times columnist Michelle Cottle noted last week, it’s a time at which a president’s early moves are sliced, diced and spun for all the world to judge. “How many bills has he gotten passed? Whom has he appointed? How many executive orders has he signed? Which promises has he broken? Which constituencies has he ticked off?”
Presidential shift
THIS time, though, the marker of 100 days in office, which for President Biden fell last Thursday on April 29, seems different, not least because it’s hard to imagine a more abrupt and contrasting presidential shift than from Trump to Biden.
Such is the shape and scale of the policies that Biden has set about implementing that
This time, the marker of 100 days in office seems different, not least because it’s hard to imagine a more abrupt and contrasting shift than from Trump to Biden
some are already comparing him to Franklin D Roosevelt (FDR).
This in itself, of course – as The Economist magazine pointed out yesterday – is something of a “recurrent trope” in American politics. It’s one whereby pundits “scour the actions of the first 100 days of a new president’s administration and compare it, usually unfavourably, with the productivity of the first 100 days of FDR’s term” in which he managed to pass 76 pieces of legislation, 15 of them nation changing.
It was FDR, as we know, who, in his opening spell in office, helped exorcise the spectre of American fascism and started the building of a US welfare state alongside his now famous series of New Deal programmes of public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations aimed at promoting economic recovery during the years of the Great Depression.
It was FDR, too, who was the first to use the 100-days marker to take stock of those early New Deal accomplishments.
Joe’s not sleepy
HISTORY is not lost on the current US President so perhaps it was no surprise that Biden also scheduled his first major address to Congress last week to coincide with the 100-days signpost. A little over a year ago, the idea that “sleepy Joe” – as Trump derisorily referred to Biden – would have been able to enact with such speed and sweep the policies he is now implementing would have seemed far-fetched.
“Biden is off to an excellent start, arguably one of the best since Roosevelt,” The Economist magazine cited David Gergen, political commentator and a former adviser to four presidents of both US parties, as saying last week. Gergen is just one of numerous observers convinced that comparisons with FDR are justified.
So, just what is it that Biden has done that draws such parallels with FDR and are they as radical as they appear? What can we expect from his administration in terms of domestic and foreign policy beyond the 100 days? For as is almost always the case, issues often arise that dampen or even thwart the best intentions of any US president.
In searching for answers to the first of these questions it’s worth remembering that Biden took office with America in a parlous state. It was country confronting what he called a quartet of “converging crises” – a lethal pandemic, economic uncertainty, climate change and racial injustice.
The pandemic aside for now, perhaps the greatest of Biden’s immediate political challenges was the need to neutralise the toxic politics of the Trump era.
As one recent New York Times op-ed pointed out, this after all was a climate in which was spawned “a large reality-free zone in which the bulk of Republicans buy the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen”.
On the economic front too, whatever strategy Biden was going to adopt had to be bold to say the least, and it doesn’t get much
bolder than the eyewatering $4 trillion, roughly one-fifth of US GDP, that his administration has committed for investment in the country.
It is, in short, the sort of sum that carries the kind of transformational possibilities that Sopel alluded to in his online article about the presidential transition. In its constituent parts this programme is also the kind of fiscal commitment that spurs most of the FDR New Deal comparisons.
$1.9trn rescue plan
CHIEF among these is Biden’s $1.9trn American Rescue Plan that will help stimulate roughly seven per cent US economic growth this year. The bulk of the “Rescue Plan” will be spent on $1,400 cheques for middle-class Americans, extending unemployment payouts, and substantive aid to state and local governments.
Some of this will help support Americans through the vaccine rollout, which has been a strikingly impressive motif since Biden took office with more than 200 million shots administered in his first 100 days, partly with funds from the stimulus.
To put these financial packages in context, they are almost double the size of the stimulus measure that President Obama was able to pass in the aftermath of the financial crisis.
This, too, before Biden’s $2.3tn for the American Jobs Plan to upgrade US infrastructure, and the $1.8tn American Families Plan proposed last week, which would bring US child, parental and worker benefits into line with most other wealthy nations.
As The New Yorker magazine noted last month, Biden himself has spoken about the specifics of such investment and programmes. There is to begin with the 20,000 of roads and “10 most economically significant bridges” he wants to repair, and the 500,000 electric car-charging stations he intends to build.
Prompting further comparisons with the era of FDR, there is even a Civilian Climate Corps, deliberately recalling Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, which employed three million men who, among other things, planted three billion trees.
“It’s not a plan that tinkers around the edges,” Biden said. “It’s big? Yes. It’s bold? Yes. And we can get it done.”
This, say some observers, is a robust policy of state intervention in the economy that is way further to the left than that of his Democratic predecessor President Obama and is not without its risks.
Republican disarray
ON the political front these risks include the absence of any reasonable opposition by a Republican Party still in disarray and able to act as counterweight should the Democrats policies prove excessive. Meanwhile, on the purely economic front, there are other concerns too.
Some economists, notably Lawrence Summers, himself a former US Treasury secretary and adviser to Obama, believe Biden is risking stagflation.
This in economics parlance is a situation in which the inflation rate is high, the economic growth rate slows, and unemployment remains steadily high. Summers puts the medium-term risks of 1970s-style overheating at one in three. “I’m concerned that macro policy is taking excessive risks of overheating,” Summers was quoted by the Financial Times as saying last Thursday.
“Between fiscal and monetary policy, I believe the likelihood is that the US will suffer real inflation or a downturn from the need to contain inflation.”
Sceptics and detractors aside, Biden’s boldness might just pay off and with the latest data showing the creation of the most US jobs in the first 100 days of any presidency since records began, many have found confidence restored. Even critics admit that already Biden has done more than seemed possible when he was sworn in.
So much then for the domestic front but what about foreign policy in these first 100 days?
Again, let’s consider what Biden’s presidency inherited here from Trump, not least the latter’s shying away from unilateral treaties and erratic diplomacy.
‘America first’
SINCE taking office in January, Biden has pretty much stuck to this promise to trade in the “America First” approach of Trump and instead focus on a diplomacy-heavy, human rights-led foreign policy.
The US global trade deficit grew by nearly 40% during Trump’s time in office – the yardstick he most cared about, as Edward Luce recently highlighted in the Financial Times.
Biden, by contrast, has adopted “a much fuzzier measure for diplomatic success – the health of America’s middle class. Every step will be assessed by its impact on ordinary Americans”.
In refuting Trump’s “America First” outlook, observers say Biden’s administration has taken several steps towards that goal, including re-engaging with several international organisations and pressing for
multilateral co-operation on global issues such as climate change. “Biden’s first 100 days pretty much came as advertised,” says PJ Crowley, the former US assistant secretary of state for public affairs under Obama.
But while Biden has a wholly different style from Trump, his foreign policy has not been a “wholesale rebuke” of his predecessor, Crowley told Al Jazeera recently.
In this regard he specifically singles out the Biden administration’s tough line on China. Where team Biden are notably different is in their efforts to re-engage with Washington’s European allies, and its ongoing negotiations for a return to the Iran nuclear deal, which Trump unilaterally withdrew from in 2018.
Countering Beijing’s economic and military assertiveness is a top priority along with promising a more nuanced approach that involves co-operation wherever possible.
Few would argue against President Biden having made a bold and auspicious start
Russian sanctions
BIDEN has also promised to reset Trump-era policies at the southern border with Mexico, and twice already his administration has imposed sanctions on Russia. First, for the alleged poisoning and imprisonment of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and then for a raft of allegations including US elections meddling and hacking of an array of US federal agencies.
But it is perhaps Afghanistan and his decision to end one of America’s “forever wars” that has stuck out in terms of foreign policy decisions in his first 100 days.
The burning question now is whether this is a move America will come to regret, and critics have not been slow to question whether the withdrawal would lead to renewed violence, leaving the Afghan government vulnerable and ill-equipped to hold onto territory, making a peace agreement between the government and the Taliban more elusive.
Perhaps even more than on the domestic front foreign policy priorities can quicky shift and will certainly differ greatly in the time beyond Biden’s first 100 days, even if he understands the dangers from the recent history of US entanglement.
“Biden’s decision to end the war in Afghanistan suggests he understands these lessons but tempering the tendency to meddle will become harder once memories of Iraq and Afghanistan begin to fade,” pointed out Stephen M Walt in a recent article for the magazine Foreign Policy.
“The desire to manage other countries’ internal politics—and the belief it can do so effectively—remains deeply engrained in the United States’ foreign-policy establishment. It is vitally important to resist that instinct because the United States has far more urgent and important tasks to address,” added Walt.
For the moment, both home and away, Joe Biden’s presidency has certainly been one marked by surprising moves. For now, the influence of Franklin D Roosevelt appears to loom over his domestic policy approach as noticeably as FDR’s portrait now hangs over the fireplace in the Oval Office.
It was another great US president, John F Kennedy ,who, in his inaugural address, observed that: “All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this administration.”
That, perhaps, is a more accurate measure of the challenges Biden has before him.
But whether one agrees or disagrees with his policies, few would argue against him having made a bold and auspicious start.