Republicans have defined the term in the almost the exact opposite way. Former president Donald Trump has called Bidenomics “total economic surrender to China and other foreign countries.” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) calls it “blind faith in government spending and regulations.”
Beyond the partisan talking points, how has “Bidenomics” changed the U.S. economy?
Since taking office, the president has pushed through dozens of changes and personnel appointments that have upended everything from how workers unionize to how large corporations merge. Biden and his aides have sought to revive domestic manufacturing through a clean energy boom, while also trying — with mixed success — to expand the federal safety net.
Biden’s advisers say the president wants an attempt to move beyond the “trickle-down economics” that defined the last four decades in Washington. Biden frequently says past administrations focused on tax breaks for rich people and corporations, but that he aims instead for “growing the economy from the bottom up and middle out.”
The underlying idea is that new government investment “crowds in” additional investments from private companies, a break from past belief that constraining the public sector would free the private sector to grow more. The result is a federal government that intervenes directly much more than it’s done in decades — to boost unions, block corporate monopolies, and spur economic and industrial growth, among other goals.
“The idea of trickle-down [economics] is if the public sector stops investing — if it just disinvests in our public infrastructure — the private sector will come in and make up the difference,” Jared Bernstein, the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told Washington Post Live last month. “Joe Biden knows that’s always been wrong, and that, in fact, it’s backward.”
Republicans see “Bidenomics” not as a coherent doctrine, but a collection of sometimes contradictory policies designed to please various interest groups in the Democratic coalition. Critics in both parties have blamed Biden’s attempts to spur growth for exacerbating the highest inflation rates in four decades, and courts have repeatedly blocked his attempts to increase competition among corporate giants. Even to his allies, the execution of Biden’s overarching vision has been, at times, uneven and incomplete.
“Bidenomics is much less a coherent approach to economic policy and much more a grab bag of subsidies designed to advance key interests of the Democratic Party coalition,” said Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank.
Here are five key parts of Bidenomics — and how they’ve fared over the president’s first two years in office.
Biden’s first major economic act was to sign the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion stimulus aimed at pushing past the recession caused by the pandemic. Determined to avoid the sluggish growth that characterized the recovery from the Great Recession under President Barack Obama, Biden argued that “the biggest risk is not going too big … it’s if we go too small.”
The result, in part, was the fastest-growing economy in decades. The nation’s gross domestic product surged by roughly 6 percent — a level not seen since the 1980s — as the unemployment rate plummeted and the number of new small businesses soared. The president is fond of emphasizing that the United States has had the fastest recovery among the Group of Seven industrialized Western economies, which he and many economists attribute to the rescue plan. And growth has powered on for two years, including 2023 so far.
But economists are still debating how the rescue plan contributed to inflation. Price increases have proven perhaps Biden’s central political liability, even though Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and supply chain snarls — two factors largely beyond the president’s control — exacerbated the crisis. And although inflation has eased recently, voters still rank it as a top concern.
Biden has frequently vowed to be “the most pro-union president” in history.
Seth Harris, who served as Biden’s labor adviser in the White House, said the president’s most consequential pro-union action wasn’t a labor initiative per se — it was the rescue plan, which gave workers greater power at the bargaining table as the number of job openings per worker exploded.
But Biden has taken other key pro-union actions: appointing staunch labor allies to the National Labor Relations Board and Labor Department; tying infrastructure grants and other federal funds to unionized labor; and meeting publicly with leaders trying to unionize their workplaces, like Starbucks and Amazon, among other measures. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, and interim Post chief executive Patty Stonesifer sits on Amazon’s board.) Jennifer Abruzzo, the Biden-appointed general counsel at the NLRB, has directed staff to ensure union supporters return to work after retaliatory firings, pushed for tougher penalties on firms that violate labor laws and tried to ban mandatory anti-union meetings.
There have been setbacks as well. Biden’s push to pass the PRO Act — a sweeping proposal to give unions more power, and labor’s top legislative priority — was defeated in Congress. And some labor advocates were unhappy with Biden’s handling of rail workers’ threat to strike last year, which the president ended by approving legislation forcing workers to accept an agreement reached by their leadership that they had previously rejected.
The ultimate success of Biden’s push to reverse four decades of declining union power remains unclear. The rate of union membership fell last year, but the number of workers in a union overall increased by about 2 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And unfair labor practice charges jumped 16 percent during the first six months of this fiscal year, according to the NLRB.
Revive domestic manufacturing through green energy
Biden has signed three sweeping economic laws aimed in part at reviving U.S. manufacturing — one to bolster the domestic semiconductor industry, another to repair the nation’s crumbling infrastructure and a third to spur the clean energy industry.
These bills have other key goals — the Inflation Reduction Act took aim at climate change, for instance, and the infrastructure law was primarily intended to improve decaying public works. But the laws are linked by the belief that the United States should bring back supply chains sent across the world over decades of globalization, through a mixture of new tax incentives, trade restrictions and domestic subsidies.
The White House has touted early signs that these efforts are working, even before most of the money has been spent. The Treasury Department has found spending on manufacturing plants has exploded, with a particular boom in electronics and computers. Taking advantage of the generous new credits, clean energy firms are rushing to construct new plants and facilities, spreading billions in new investment across the country.
But challenges have emerged. The United Auto Workers have expressed frustration that the administration has awarded loans to EV battery manufacturers without mandating any wage or benefit protections, reflecting broader fears that the clean energy revolution may hurt organized labor. (Administration aides may have little choice in that matter, as they are implementing a law they barely managed to pass through Congress.) And the United States has enormous ground to make up: The number of manufacturing workers has risen about to its pre-pandemic high, but it remains far below what it was for much of the 20th century.
Another core plank of “Bidenomics” has been to try to mute the power of large corporations, particularly by breaking up monopolies and cracking down on “junk fees.”
Met by opposition in Congress, Biden’s antitrust agenda has largely fallen to Lina Khan, who the president selected to lead the Federal Trade Commission. Khan has transformed the agency, pushing it to be far more aggressive in blocking large corporate mergers, and the Department of Justice has stepped up similar efforts. Business executives speak of a “chilling effect”: The number of monthly merger notifications fell by roughly 40 percent from 2021 to 2022, according to government data compiled by White & Case. Still, Khan has suffered some setbacks in the courts, recently losing a case over Microsoft’s takeover of Activision Blizzard.
Biden has also taken aim at “junk fees” — hidden costs from companies that make services appear cheaper than they are. The administration has moved to eliminate credit card late fees, require airlines to disclose full prices for tickets and force cable providers to list service prices. And the administration is also pushing new rules to ban corporations from requiring workers to sign overly broad agreements not to work for competitors.
The least successful part of Bidenomics has arguably been the president’s attempts to expand the U.S. safety net.
Biden spent much of 2021 trying to persuade Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) to approve the biggest expansion of social programs since the 1960s, including new child care benefits, housing subsidies for the poor and new dental benefits for seniors. Manchin ultimately blocked the president’s “Build Back Better” proposal, although some elements were included in the Inflation Reduction Act that passed in 2022.
That law included several new health care provisions: measures to lower prescription drug costs for people on Medicare, a new cap on insulin payments, and a two-year extension of bigger subsidies for families who buy health insurance on the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges. The Biden administration has taken other actions to expand the safety net — including making food stamps more generous for millions of Americans and making it easier for children to stay on Medicaid — although they remain far from the large-scale change the president initially sought.
Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt per borrower was struck down by the Supreme Court. But the administration is searching for other ways to cancel large amounts of student debt and has already taken numerous measures to do so, including by dramatically expanding a program that allows borrowers to pay what they can afford.
The rescue plan also included a temporary measure to expand the Child Tax Credit, which some experts estimated brought millions of parents out of poverty, but the expansion expired at the end of 2021.