What’s the actual state of the union? What Biden did — and didn’t do — in the last year

What are 360s? Grid’s answer to stories that deserve a fuller view.

The State of the Union is a chance for Joe Biden to boast about what he’s accomplished, pin blame on others for what he hasn’t and set his political agenda for the coming year.

Ahead of the State of the Union, which Biden will deliver before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, Grid selected items that have long been on Democrats’ wish list, major financial investments and issues that poll as top-of-mind for Americans — and looked at what did and didn’t get done, taking the framework he was working within into account.

A solid conservative majority controls the Supreme Court, which overturned the national right to abortion since the last State of the Union address. Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Still, Biden can point to specific policy achievements, including passing a signature piece of climate legislation and marshaling bipartisan support for aid to Ukraine. From the White House, Biden also forgave $10,000 in student loan debt for many adults.

THE BOTTOM LINE

While Biden often struggled to push his agenda, it’s undeniable that there’s been monumental change in America in multiple areas. Some of that has resulted from the Biden administration pushing its agenda on issues like higher education and marriage equality, and some of it has involved reactions to events around the world.

Here’s how Grid reporters see the last year from foreign policy to the economy, climate, healthcare and marriage equality.

It happens to virtually every American president: an overseas crisis upends U.S. foreign policy or adds a huge, unexpected item to the foreign policy inbox. For Joe Biden, it’s been the war in Ukraine. And in many ways, this crisis has brought surprising results.

Since the Russians invaded Ukraine last February, American leadership has helped keep NATO knitted together and kept Ukraine well-supplied with weapons, ammunition and humanitarian aid. While Vladimir Putin’s overreach and Russia’s own military failings have played their parts, the U.S. can take some credit for the fact that Putin’s “special military operation” — which he clearly believed would be over in a matter of days or weeks — has dragged on for nearly a year and shows no signs of ending. It’s quite possible that Russia will lose the war or at least fail to accomplish anything like its initial aims.

Perhaps most striking for the Biden administration has been the level of bipartisan support for Ukraine. Successive U.S. aid packages have passed with clear majorities, to the tune of more than $100 billion — a staggering figure that dwarfs all U.S. military and humanitarian assistance to the rest of the world. Going forward, circumstances in and outside Ukraine — not least the seating of the new Republican Congress — may challenge that support. But for the moment, this unexpected crisis has led to unforeseen gains: a profound strengthening — and potential expansion — of NATO and a weakening of Putin’s Russia.

As a political matter, meanwhile, the U.S. response to the war has done something else: It’s taken the focus off a foreign-policy debacle that preceded it — the chaotic and deadly American withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. (More on that below).

A punishing year for the U.S.-China relationship

The Trump administration was openly hawkish when it came to China (not to mention openly racist), but one can make the case that Biden’s actions have hurt China more than anything his predecessor did.

On Oct. 12, Biden issued his first national security strategy document, and although it came as Russia was pounding targets across Ukraine, it identified China as “America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge.” It was a powerful, almost bellicose statement, echoing a forceful speech Secretary of State Antony Blinken had delivered three months earlier. “Even as President Putin’s war continues,” Blinken said, “we will remain focused on the most serious long-term challenge to the international order — and that’s posed by the People’s Republic of China.”

When it came to actions, however, nothing moved the needle as much as an October Commerce Department directive that severed China’s access to U.S.-made, high-end semiconductor chips, along with the design software and components used to make them. The top-tier chips power everything from electric vehicles to military and AI technologies, and they are critical to China’s high-tech industry and its goal of achieving dominance in the sector. Commerce’s export controls were aimed at thwarting those goals — and more broadly, they were a punishing step taken in the name of national security and economic competition. The CSIS called the measures “strangling with an intent to kill.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act, which Biden signed into law in August, was a domestic cousin to the Commerce measure, providing $52 billion over the next decade to production and research in the U.S. semiconductor industry.

For all the tensions over Taiwan and human rights, these were concrete U.S. actions that will hurt China. And they made the third “moment” that much more important — because it carried glimmers of hope for the US-China relationship. After meeting Xi Jinping at the November G-20 gathering in Bali, Indonesia, Biden gave a news conference at which he sounded conciliatory and optimistic. Equally important, the Chinese sounded a positive tone as well.

Among other things, Biden reassured Xi that the U.S. still maintains its “One China” policy — i.e., in no way supporting an independent Taiwan; and the two sides agreed to a reboot of collaboration on climate change and “global financial, health and food stability.” It was noted that Xi - who until then hadn’t left his country because of the pandemic - was willing to shake hands with Biden, who came to Bali nursing a cold.

The meeting and its aftermath recalled the gentler elements of Blinken’s July address: “We are not looking for conflict or a new Cold War,” he said then. That statement still holds — but on Friday, thanks to the discovery of a Chinese balloon hovering over the U.S. and the Pentagon’s determination that it was on an espionage mission, Blinken canceled a planned visit to China. He was meant to have been there this weekend. A U.S.-China thaw will have to wait.

Biden’s signature legislative achievement

The country’s biggest-ever swing at tackling climate change came from the legislative rather than executive branch, but Biden’s fingerprints were all over the surprise deal that resulted in the Inflation Reduction Act. The legislation provides $370 billion in funding for clean energy, efficiency upgrades and other climate-friendly stuff, and experts have said that fully implementing it would reduce the United States’ greenhouse-gas emissions as much as a 42 percent from 2005 levels by the end of this decade.

The legislation’s passage was a surprise success for a cornerstone Biden policy, which the administration introduced the previous year in a framework known as Build Back Better. On-again/off-again negotiations with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) ended up killing that proposal. But months later, with Manchin finally on board and the IRA signed into law on Aug. 16, the president could finally say that the U.S. had a plausible plan for fighting back on climate change.

Biden meets Dobbs with a push for medication abortion

The second year of the Biden administration overlapped with the end of federal abortion rights.

The Supreme Court’s June 2022 verdict in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization upended the long-standing national right to abortion, quickly fracturing access nationwide. The Biden administration has countered by working to expand access to medication abortion.

In January, the Food and Drug Administration finalized a policy that allows retail pharmacies to dispense mifepristone, one of two drugs used in medication abortion. At least three major chains — CVS, Walgreens and Rite Aid — have said they will do so in at least some locations. (The other drug used in medication abortion, misoprostol, has long been available from pharmacies.)

Medication abortion has its limits: The FDA says abortion pills can only be used through the tenth week of pregnancy. And some states have attempted to ban the pills outright — even though the FDA says they are safe and legal — or require doctors to dispense them directly to patients, in violation of FDA rules.

Border Policy Lens

A year of Title 42 will-they-or-won’t-they drama

Much of Biden’s border policy has revolved around the unpredictable course of Title 42: a Trump-era policy that the Biden administration opposed. However, when it came time for the policy to expire, the Supreme Court left it in place — and Biden, for his part, relied on the continued existence of Title 42 to announce a new immigration policy.

Title 42 was implemented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2020 to stop the spread of covid by allowing for the rapid expulsion of migrants who crossed the border illegally. Although the Biden administration has criticized Title 42, in actuality, the administration has expanded the program.

Biden’s border control program, announced last month, gives the Department of Homeland Security more power to expel migrants into Mexico. These expulsions are only possible because of Title 42, which although was set to expire in December 2022, has been extended, with a final decision on the policy due in June.

A significant element of Biden’s new plan is an expanded parole system, which was already in place for qualifying Venezuelans but will now include migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti. However, the parole system comes at the expense of more migrant expulsions, and, again, leans heavily on Title 42.

A roundabout way to deliver on a progressive promise

From the moment Joe Biden was elected, progressive groups began pressuring him to forgive some or all of the $1.7 trillion in outstanding student loans. In August, he finally delivered, promising to wipe away $500 billion in debt. Republicans denounced the plan and launched a swift legal counterattack. The Supreme Court will hear arguments later this month.

Observers think there’s a good chance the six-member Conservative majority will nullify Biden’s loan scheme. Combined with his free community college plan falling victim to the Manchin-Sinema Build Back Better bloodbath of 2021, that would seem to leave the president with no gains on a signature domestic policy issue: solving the crisis of college affordability and student loan debt.

But Biden has another card to play: A complex but far-reaching plan to alter existing federal student loan forgiveness regulations in a way that would effectively make community college free. The process is convoluted — students would essentially borrow $12,000 and then not have to pay it back unless they earn an unusually large amount of money after graduation. The benefits for college affordability could run into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

The new debt forgiveness plan is all the more important given two difficult events on deck for later this year: the Supreme Court’s probable decision to ban affirmative action for Black and Hispanic students and the resumption of mandatory student loan payments after more than three years of suspension due to the pandemic. A great deal will be riding on Biden’s ability to manipulate the complex machinery of federal regulation to solve a problem that Congress can’t or won’t address.

Biden’s biggest move has been … inaction

The biggest story in the economy in 2022 was the relentless rise of interest rates. The Federal Reserve hiked the rate it controls from near zero to over 4 percent, the fastest pace of increases since the early 1980s — in order to fight inflation, itself running at highest level since the early 1980s.

What’s noteworthy is how Biden has let the Fed do its work.

He has not objected to the Fed’s interest rate policies even as some progressive Democrats have begun to voice their displeasure. Unlike Trump, Biden has respected the Federal Reserve’s independence — while also making it clear that he’s counting on them to bring inflation down — though he’s not afraid to take some credit for himself when things go well.

These hikes have so far had a mixed effect on the economy as a whole. Inflation heated up this summer but is now falling; the stock market declined by around a fifth in 2022 but is up so far this year. Homebuilding slowed down dramatically and homeownership became out of reach for many even as home prices fell. (It’s because mortgage payments went up.)

Progress at a snail’s pace

In the case of Afghanistan, a trauma for the Biden administration still lingers — as does a dangerous limbo for tens of thousands of Afghans who risked their lives to serve the U.S. and were left behind in the chaos of the American withdrawal.

“Helping these Afghans is more than a priority for us,” Blinken said soon after the fall of Kabul in August 2021.

Eighteen months later, progress has come — but at a snail’s pace.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, 88,500 Afghans have been resettled in the U.S., most of them evacuated in the last days of the American presence. An estimated 74,000 Afghans who worked for the U.S. are still in Afghanistan and trying to get out. The majority have completed applications for Special Immigration Visas (SIVs) but remain stranded thanks to a fundamental Catch-22: Having completed their applications, would-be evacuees must be interviewed in person by a U.S. official. The problem? There are no U.S. officials left in Afghanistan to conduct those interviews.

“It’s leaving people trapped in Afghanistan,” Jeff Phaneuf, a director at the advocacy group No One Left Behind, told Grid. “The backlog very much remains, despite minor improvements.”

Others who have made it to the U.S. have endured dangerous odysseys or benefited from good fortune. Grid reported the story of Wazir Gul, who served with the U.S. as a security officer at Bagram Airbase and escaped thanks to the dogged work of an American who had served at his side and a dangerous dash to the Kabul airport. And this week, Reuters reported on more than two thousand Afghans who have taken a dangerous and costly 11-nation journey to reach the southern border of the U.S.

In 2022, a bipartisan group in Congress introduced the Afghan Adjustment Act, legislation aimed at streamlining the visa process and providing more paths for residency in the United States. Congress failed to pass it.

Marriage Equality Lens

Same-sex marriage: getting ahead of the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court’s June decision to overturn Roe v. Wade set off alarm bells among Democrats that challenges to the court’s past same-sex marriage ruling could be next, sparking Congress to eventually take a rare and unexpected step: proactively passing a same-sex marriage bill.

The Respect for Marriage Act, which garnered some bipartisan support in Congress, doesn’t enshrine a constitutional right to same-sex marriage the way the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision did. It does take some steps to protect same-sex marriage, however, if the court were to overrule Obergefell. (So far, there are not any major challenges to Obergefell working its way through the court system.)

The Respect for Marriage Act overturned the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act and requires states to recognize a same-sex marriage performed in other states, giving same-sex couples the option to have a recognized marriage even if their state banned the practice in the future.

The new law highlighted how Biden, who signed it in December, has evolved with his views of same-sex marriage over time. He had voted for DOMA as a senator but later helped pave the way for Democrats’ embrace of gay marriage when, as vice president in 2012, he publicly said he was “absolutely comfortable” with the concept — a comment that put him at odds with the Obama administration and reportedly nudged former President Barack Obama publicly embrace gay marriage.

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What’s the actual state of the union? What Biden did — and didn’t do — in the last year