As Joe Biden exits the White House, most of us on the right will judge his presidency as a colossal failure. Despite grand promises of transformation, missed opportunities, bureaucratic dysfunction, and unfulfilled goals that leave Democrats scrambling for talking points heading into 2024 define Biden's tenure.
And even the liberal media is starting to admit it — a true sign that even his biggest advocates are anxious to turn the page. Seriously, when left-leaning outlets like Politico are finally acknowledging what conservatives have been saying for years, it’s a big deal.
Politico recently noted that Biden “spent the first half of his presidency enacting plans to steer at least $1.6 trillion to transform the economy and spur a clean-energy revolution — only to watch those programs become afterthoughts in the 2024 election.” Those initiatives are likely to wither away and die upon Donald Trump’s return to office.
The article even notes that projects touted as game-changers failed to deliver, such as the $42 billion broadband expansion that connected zero households and the $7.5 billion electric vehicle charger program that has produced just 47 stations across 15 states — a far cry from the promised 500,000. Even the much-hyped surge in solar installations hasn’t brought the country anywhere close to meeting Biden’s zero-carbon electricity goals.
And that’s not to say there wasn’t enough time to produce results. Most of this money was appropriated as part of Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan, and the rest was from the poorly named Inflation Reduction Act from 2022.
But someone was able to reap some significant financial rewards, right? Even if it wasn’t the American people.
“I think that we’ll look back years from now, and we’ll say that this is when America had the chance to get in the game and lead in one of the biggest and most important economic revolutions in history," Bob Keefe, executive director of the national clean energy business group E2, told Politico.
Ironically, the Biden administration got in the way of its success. For example, the Department of Transportation’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) mandates derailed the EV charger rollout by requiring grants to "demonstrate how meaningful public involvement, inclusive of disadvantaged communities, will occur throughout a project’s life cycle," and those requirements inevitably delayed critical infrastructure projects.
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It would be more amusing that the Democrats have long championed the very bureaucratic system that sabotaged Biden’s agenda — if it weren’t for the staggering waste of taxpayer dollars. After years of defending its inefficiencies, they now face the fallout of its failures. Biden’s reliance on this system, a hallmark of his party’s governance, has proven to be his undoing.
At least the left is starting to grapple with these truths, albeit belatedly. But don’t expect them to lead the charge for reform. The inefficiency and wastefulness of the bureaucratic state demand a complete overhaul — one that seems ripe for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to address. But something tells me that Democrats will continue to fight efforts to make the government more efficient because, in the end, all this money Biden wasted was never really about results anyway.
Still, Biden’s presidency is a cautionary tale of misplaced priorities and bureaucratic paralysis. As the left begins to admit Biden's failures, we can take some pleasure in knowing that leftists brought it upon themselves.
