Two-Year Review: What Campaign Promises Has Biden Kept Since Clinching White House?

Today marks the second anniversary of President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Biden, like all Presidential candidates, made countless campaign promises to voters. Halfway through his first and possibly only term, what has Biden delivered to voters what promises has he broken or failed to deliver?

It is worth noting that, assuming the fealty of his party, Biden had more power in his first two years of office than he is likely to ever have again. Throughout 2021 and 2022, Democrats held both chambers of Congress and the White House, although it wasn’t complete control since Republicans could still filibuster in the Senate.

As such, if the Democrats were unable to pass meaningful legislation to fulfill a promise in 2021 or 2022, this article will designate those promises as failed or broken, rather than “in progress” or “stalled.”

For example: while it is still technically possible for Democrats to codify Roe v. Wade, it will be virtually impossible for that to happen while Republicans control the House and can utilize the filibuster in the Senate. Such a promise is considered broken because it is unfulfilled, and will likely remain that way for the rest of Biden’s first term.

Promises that the Biden administration attempted to pass but was unable to will be considered failed. The Congress that preceded Biden’s presidency was split, with Republicans holding the Senate and Democrats holding the House. When the 117th Congress came into office along with President Biden, Democrats held both chambers. If anything, it should have been easier to pull through on campaign vows than he expected as a candidate.

Part of making promises is making sure you can deliver on them. The Democrats held more power in 2021 and 2022 than they had since former US President Barack Obama’s first term in office. If Biden didn’t deliver something he promised, that is the result of his failure to corral his party or understand the political reality in Congress.

There is no “A for effort” in politics, either you helped the people you promised to help or you didn’t. If you couldn’t deliver, you shouldn’t have promised.

Promises Biden either completely ignored while in office, only paid lip service to, or actively worked against will be classified as “broken.”

It would take a War and Peace-sized tome to cover every campaign promise made by Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. So instead, we will break down Biden's first two years in office by major issues and discuss what the American president said he would do and what he did.

COVID-19

Without a doubt, the pandemic dominated discussions in the lead-up to the 2020 election, with Biden making a multitude of promises about bringing the COVID-19 fallout to an end. During a September debate with then-President Donald Trump, Biden claimed Trump had “no plan” indicating that he instead had a plan of his own to end the pandemic.

In an archived, March 16-dated campaign website, Biden laid out what that plan entailed: "A decisive public health response that ensures the wide availability of free testing; the elimination of all cost barriers to preventive care and treatment for COVID-19.”

However, that promise vanished from the website after Trump signed the first coronavirus spending package, which included free testing for most patients.

But it was under the Biden administration in 2022 when the government announced it would stop providing free COVID-19 tests, along with therapeutics and vaccines that combat SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the respiratory illness.

This is because the Biden White House is set to declare the end of the public health emergency in April this year, halting government funds for COVID testing, prevention, and treatment.

Biden took significant flak for saying in September 2022 that the “pandemic is over” while hundreds of Americans are still dying from the disease daily.

Biden also promised to never “raise the white flag” with COVID-19, promising to defeat it. But, two years into office the disease still rages on, and help from the government is no longer forthcoming. It seems Americans are on their own when it comes to combating COVID-19 under the Biden administration.

Biden also pledged to make a nationwide mask mandate, but dropped that promise almost immediately, instead only requiring masks on federal property.

The US president did fulfill some of the promises he made about COVID-19. He reached his vaccination goal with ease and did restore the National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, which was established under Obama and eliminated by the Trump administration, but those small victories pale in comparison to the rest of his COVID-19 response, specifically in year two, when the Biden administration seemed to give up.

Verdict: Broken

Education

Biden made four significant promises concerning education: Make community college and high-level training programs free, universal preschool for three and four-year-olds, more funding for historically Black colleges and universities (HSBU) and minority-serving institutions (MSI), and eliminate student loan debt (how much depends on when you listened to him on the campaign trail).

Biden did put the first three of those provisions into his Build Back Better Plan, but the bill languished in the Senate and never cleared the chamber.

Democrats instead settled on a much smaller bill; however, it ditched any mention of free community college or training programs, universal preschool, and lowered the amount of funding for HBCUs and MSIs from his initial promise of $70 billion ($45 billion in the Build Back Better bill) to a partly $2 billion.

Meanwhile, Biden waited until midterm season to take any action on student loan debt, issuing an executive order in August; however, unlike his promises during the campaign, the Biden administration decided to mean-test the program, limiting it to people with incomes of less than $125,000 a year.

While that limitation sounds reasonable, it opened the program up to legal challenges from those who were not eligible. The program has been delayed by the courts, and is set to head to the conservative-leaning Supreme Court in February. It is unclear how they will rule but at least some of the issues could have been avoided if the Biden administration didn’t decide to limit who got the relief.

Biden made some efforts to fulfill his promises, but ineptitude prevented them from succeeding.

Verdict: Failed

Criminal Justice Reform

During the campaign, Biden made sure to distance himself from the “defund the police” movement as much as he could. To the contrary, he promised more money for cops, a campaign promise we can definitively say he fulfilled. The Biden administration not only encouraged municipalities to spend unspent COVID relief funds on police, his 2023 budget proposal included $32 billion in new funding for law enforcement.

As for actual police reform, rather than funding, Biden was more than glad to capitalize on the Black Lives Matter movement during the primary campaign and promised to bring justice for George Floyd and reform the police, eliminating practices such as chokeholds.

During the campaign, Biden promised to create a commission to address policing issues. But, the Biden administration abandoned that plan, which he could have done with a stroke of a pen, and instead focused efforts on the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.

Predictably, that bill stalled in the Senate and will likely never pass. To save face, the Biden administration issued an executive order on the second anniversary of Floyd’s death, although that order was largely ceremonial and reiterated existing policies and did not meaningfully impact the nation’s 18,000 local police forces.

While it did ban chokeholds by federal agents, it did not incentivize local police stations to follow suit. Additionally, its national database of police misconduct is only mandatory for federal agencies but not state or local forces.

Biden also promised to eliminate cash bail, but that issue has been largely ignored once in office.

His promise to decriminalize marijuana has likewise fallen by the wayside as his move to pardon and expunge federal marijuana convictions only affected a tiny sliver of the population. Biden did instruct his attorney general and the secretary of Health and Human Services to review marijuana’s class I classification. That would be a good first step towards federal decriminalization, but there has been no visible movement on that since.

Abandoning the commission, which would have been easy in favor of a bill that was always unlikely to pass, and then cynically signing an executive order on the date of Floyd’s death to save face, showcases such incompetence that it is tempting to call it intentional, especially when combined with Biden’s increase in police funding.

But since it is impossible to know what conversations the Biden administration had while making these decisions, we will give him the benefit of the doubt and say that for now, it was a failure.

Verdict: Failed

Codify Roe v. Wade

To be completely fair to Biden, he was never a big supporter of abortion rights. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s when he was a senator, Biden consistently voted against using federal funds for abortions and also voted in 1983 to prohibit federal workers from using health insurance for abortion services.

Still, Biden continually said his position on abortion had evolved and during the primary campaign called Roe v. Wade the “law of the land” and promised to push laws codifying it if the Supreme Court threatened it.

Last year, the Supreme Court not only threatened it, but essentially eliminated it in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization case. Despite the decision being leaked to the press months before it became official, Democrats and Biden sat on their hands and used the issue to motivate their base in the 2022 midterms.

Biden promised at that time to codify Roe v. Wade after the midterms if voters delivered for him - although that was not quite a campaign promise since Biden was already elected, it ranks as an election promise as it was made just before the midterms.

Immediately after the midterms, even before some races were called, Biden admitted he didn’t think there were enough votes in Congress to codify abortion rights. While passing legislation would have been difficult before the midterms, it is all but impossible now. Rather than making a last push before losing control of Congress, Democrats instead lamented that their defeat after the midterms was simply not as bad as expected.

Verdict: Broken

Health Care

Biden made a few promises about health care outside of COVID itself. He was one of a smattering of Democratic primary candidates who definitively shunned Medicare for all, promoting instead the same public-option candidate-era Obama promised before he settled with a government-managed marketplace of private insurers.

Senate Democrats did introduce a bill but it has stayed in committee ever since, and there seems to be no push by Democrats to bring the issue up again.

Biden’s other major health care promise was to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. On this issue, Biden did deliver, albeit heavily delayed. In August, legislation passed that rescinded a previous law that prevented Medicare from negotiating drug prices. It won’t go into effect until 2026 and we won’t know what drugs are included until this fall, but it has passed.

Verdict: Partially Delivered

Diversity in the Government

Biden promised to appoint the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, and he ultimately delivered on that promise. He's also delivered on holding a diverse cabinet - at least in highly visible positions.

Biden also reversed a ban on transgender Americans in the US military, also fulfilling a promise to direct federal resources to protect transgender women, including enhanced support for the National Center for Culturally Responsive Victim Services. Grants were funded by the Office on Violence Against Women for transgender-serving organizations, among other programs.

While Republican states are introducing anti-transgender legislation at a rapid pace, the Biden administration has done more than past administrations to protect transgender people. Whether that is enough to combat the rise in transgender hate is another question, but there is little argument that can be made against Biden fulfilling his promise to increase diversity and use federal resources to protect transgender people.

Verdict: Delivered

Foreign Policy

Biden promised to “end the forever wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East” and “end our support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen.”

Biden ended the war in Afghanistan, but that was already planned by Trump; in fact, Biden extended the war from Trump’s planned withdrawal in May 2021 to September 2021 to give forces and allies in the area more time to prepare.

However, the withdrawal was a highly publicized failure with allies being left behind and the Taliban quickly overwhelming the US-backed Afghan government. It is hard to imagine it would have been much worse if the US had stuck to its treaty with the Taliban and left in May as the previous administration promised.

On Yemen, Biden has done a complete 180-degree turn. After promising to make the Saudi government pariah, he has not only authorized the sale of billions of dollars in weapons, he also told the Justice Department to extend immunity to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman for his role in the alleged torture and murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Then there are the US' deteriorating relationships with both China and Russia. When voters filled out their ballot for Biden and his promise to "elevate diplomacy," proxy-wars and dangerously aggressive actions were not likely what they had in mind.

Verdict: Broken

Workers’ Rights

Biden promised support for unions. He as recently as June, vowed to be the “most pro-union president in American history.” His campaign website gave pages of lip service to unions, promising to support them and providing facts and figures about how important unions are to economic equality and workers’ rights.

That all went out the window once he sided with the railroad companies and forced rail workers back to work last December. Rail workers, who had been working with no paid sick leave, were threatening to strike unless they got sick leave. Congress, led by Democrats, ultimately passed a bill preventing rail workers from striking. More Republicans voted against the bill than Democrats and Biden quickly signed it.

The bill originally included seven paid sick days for rail workers - about half of what rail workers were demanding, but even that was stripped from the bill. A separate bill was written specifically to provide seven paid sick days, but that predictably failed. Rail workers were forced to continue working without significant progress being made to address their concerns.

You cannot claim to be pro-union while signing and promoting legislation that prevents a union strike and force union workers to accept a deal they didn’t agree to.

Verdict: Broken