With the midterm elections less than three weeks away, The Upshot at The New York Times breaks down President Joe Biden’s legislative record in a highly detailed series of graphics.
The analysis compares five large policy bills passed by Congress and signed by Biden in the last year with the major agenda items in the president’s 2022 budget. It does not include the $1.9 trillion American Recue Plan Act passed in March 2021 because that legislation “primarily funded short-term relief programs,” not the long-term plans that were the focus of the review.
The breakdown highlights that most of the spending measures were passed with both Democratic and Republican votes, with four of the five major bills — the infrastructure bill; funding for semiconductors and science; the PACT Act for veterans; and the Safer Communities Act — getting bipartisan support.
The analysis also shows where the legislation fell short of Biden’s goals: “Much of the legislative success was in infrastructure and industrial policy, and most of the administration’s goals that went unmet were in programs that would have directly benefited individuals. Of the social service spending that did pass, about 60 percent was for veterans,” the Times’s Aatish Bhatia, Francesca Paris and Margot Sanger-Katz write.
In all, the Times analysis finds that Biden had proposed nearly $4.4 trillion in new spending, and Congress passed just under $1.5 trillion worth, or about a third of the new funding envisioned. And Biden has proposed $3.6 billion in new revenue, primarily through higher corporate taxes, but Congress enacted about $962 billion in revenue raisers, or 27% of the initial administration goal.
Dive into the details by exploring all the graphics at The New York Times.
