Biden's Legacy: He Didn't Build That
After four years, the president leaves behind a long, expensive record of non-accomplishment.
As President Joe Biden exits the White House, it's worth looking back—not to his presidency, but to more than a decade ago, when Barack Obama was president and Biden was still second in command.
In July 2012, Obama delivered a speech in which the signature line was, "You didn't build that." The speech was, among other things, an address about the size of government, the efficiency of the public and private sectors, and the value of government in getting big things done.
"We've already made a trillion dollars' worth of cuts," Obama said. "We can make some more cuts in programs that don't work, and make government work more efficiently." But ultimately, he argued, government was responsible for so much private success. "If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help," he said. "There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business—you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."
The speech became a point of political contention, with Republicans and their allies saying that Obama was insulting small business owners, and Democrats and media fact-checking organizations—but I repeat myself—insisting that his remarks had been willfully misconstrued and taken out of context. If you want, you can read the entire speech here.
But let's set aside the partisan context quibbling for a moment, and just focus on that one key passage: "Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business—you didn't build that."
Over the last four years, President Biden supported the investment of billions of dollars of taxpayer money in infrastructure—and, in particular, high-tech green energy infrastructure such as high-speed rail, rural broadband, and electric vehicle charging stations.
And what happened was: He didn't build that.
The money was authorized, but the projects didn't come to completion. As Politico reported last month in an overview of Biden's signature green energy infrastructure projects, "a $42 billion expansion of broadband internet service has yet to connect a single household. Bureaucratic haggling, equipment shortages and logistical challenges mean a $7.5 billion effort to install electric vehicle chargers from coast to coast has so far yielded just 47 stations in 15 states." According to Politico, Congress authorized more than $1 trillion in spending for Biden's major climate, clean energy, and infrastructure programs, but more than half of it "has yet to be obligated or is not yet available for agencies to spend." Many of the big projects that received either subsidies or tax breaks under Biden are still essentially imaginary, and some may not happen at all, depending on what President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress choose to pursue.
Even projects that Biden himself is personally invested in haven't paid off: Biden has long subscribed to a romantic fantasy of passenger rail, and his administration sent more than $3 billion to further fund California's long-delayed high-speed rail system. The rail project was supposed to connect Los Angeles with San Francisco, but it's currently years behind schedule and $100 billion over budget—and is now struggling to complete a much shorter, much less useful line between Merced and Bakersville, which are not exactly global economic hubs. There is currently no completion date, or really any actionable plan at all, to actually connect L.A. and San Francisco. Biden threw billions at a worthless project, and America got nothing for it.
Over and over again, that's what happened under Biden: Vast sums were spent or authorized, but nothing came of it.
He didn't build that.
This is especially ironic given that many Democrats and some of their allies began Biden's presidency with an emphasis on what some progressives called "deliverism."
Democrats, this argument went, needed to do more than just talk about issues people already liked. They needed to push an agenda that made a real, visible difference in people's lives. They needed to demonstrate that they could deliver in ways that mattered.
Yet as Biden exits the Oval Office, it's clear he failed to deliver.
Even Biden himself has sometimes seemed to understand this. At the end of 2023, after months of touring the country to make the case that his policies improved the economy, he'd failed to move the needle. According to CNN, Biden expressed "deep frustration that he can't show off physical construction of many projects that his signature legislative accomplishments will fund" and "griped that even as he travels the country to tout historic pieces of legislation like the bipartisan infrastructure law, it could be years before the residents of some of the communities receiving federal funds see construction begin."
So: Things were moving slow. A lot of money had been authorized or spent, but very little had been built. Surely someone was in charge here? Who in the world could that be?
Much of the center-left commentary about Biden's failures to build has focused on regulation and bureaucratic process requirements, which they argue have frustrated government-backed projects in addition to private developments.
There is something to that. In particular, Biden's commitments to appeasing both labor unions and regulation-happy progressive policy crusaders have made it harder for anyone, public or private sector, to get big things done. And it's notable that, as Biden's failures have become more clear, Democratic-sympathetic pundits like Ezra Klein have increasingly emphasized the negative impact of regulatory barriers. It's good to see liberals wake up to the blunt stupidity of so many laws.
But Biden's problems run deeper than mere red tape. While running for president, he positioned himself as the reasonable avatar of a Democratic party that was mainstream and moderate: "I am the Democratic party," he said in a September 2020 debate. But Biden's insistence on placating Democratic-party aligned interest groups, on almost never saying no to any group on the left, on declining to demand accountability from his deputies and department heads, on staffing his administration with arch-progressives with graduate degrees from the Elizabeth Warren School of Regulating Everything, especially in combination with his age-related decline, made it more like the opposite: The Democratic party was Joe Biden.
The Biden presidency was more like a neighborhood council meeting, with a lot of stakeholders but no clear lines of authority or prioritization. No one was in charge. Biden didn't just fail to deliver. He failed to build, because he failed to lead.
The contrast with the private sector is revealing. The most notable train project in the United States during Biden's tenure wasn't California's doomed high-speed rail, or some Amtrak upgrade that justified the billions this administration sent their way, but the Brightline in Florida. For sheer wow factor, the biggest engineering project of the Biden tenure was almost certainly SpaceX's reusable rocket catch. Yes, SpaceX has significant business with the government, but it's fundamentally a private enterprise, operating with private goals and direction. America can still build big things. But Biden's top-down, bureaucratic approach has failed to do so.
Libertarians and small-government types might respond that it's good that Biden didn't get much done, and that government has no business involved in any of these projects. But even if some of the funding eventually gets clawed back, Biden presided over an enormously expensive amount of nothing.
And what the myriad project failures show is that Biden failed on his own terms. At times, he has seemed to recognize that his presidency has borne little fruit, and not just in private griping reported by the press. In his farewell address to the nation this week, he promised that the best was yet to come, if only Americans have patience: "It will take time to feel the full impact of all we've done together," he said. "But the seeds are planted, and they'll grow, and they'll bloom for decades to come."
Biden, in other words, wants to take credit for anything good that happens after he leaves office. Given the unimpressive track record of Biden's policies so far, it's worth being skeptical about whether there will be much of a bloom. But even supposing that all those supposed seeds eventually bear fruit, that still means that Biden himself didn't finish the job. Somebody else will have made that happen.
That's his defense of his record of non-accomplishments: Biden didn't build it, but maybe someday, somebody else will? It's not much of a legacy, but it's what he's got.
