President Biden has used his final weeks in office in part to remind voters of some of his more significant accomplishments during his four years in the White House.
While Biden’s presidency has been somewhat overshadowed by the way he dropped out of the 2024 race and President-elect Trump’s subsequent Election Day victory, there were still a number of achievements that the president and his team have highlighted that they argue will endure even after Biden leaves office.
Here are five of the accomplishments Biden is touting as his presidency winds down.
Biden and his staff have made a point to remind voters about the situation they inherited, taking office in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic with cases surging once again in early 2021.
While the Trump administration rapidly developed and approved vaccines, it did little to distribute them, which largely fell on Biden and his administration. They also helped steer a complicated economy out of the pandemic. It was a plan Biden often described as “shots in arms and money in pockets.”
Jeff Zients, who eventually served as White House chief of staff, led efforts to coordinate the distribution of vaccines, while Biden elevated Dr. Anthony Fauci after he had been sidelined and largely criticized by Republicans during the Trump administration.
Biden signed the American Rescue Plan in March 2021, a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package that included funding for $1,400 direct payments to most Americans, vaccine distribution efforts, school reopenings, state and local governments and an expansion of the child tax credit, among other provisions.
While the size of the spending package eventually became a flash point in the debate over inflation and whether it pumped too much money into the economy, Biden and his defenders have argued it was critical to getting the country on stable footing.
“Democrats lost like every other incumbent party, but they stemmed the size of that loss by doing a better job than any other incumbent party at navigating post-pandemic economic turmoil,” Bharat Ramamurti, a former economic adviser in Biden’s White House, wrote in an op-ed published Thursday.
Biden took office pledging to restore unity in the country, and while he may have struggled to achieve that, he did manage to sign into law a slew of bipartisan legislation.
The president’s first two years in particular saw a number of bipartisan bills reach his desk at a time when Democrats controlled the House and had the majority in a 50-50 Senate.
Biden signed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure law in November 2021 to fund improvements for many of the nation’s roads, bridges, railways and airports. The infrastructure law became a centerpiece of Biden’s reelection bid while he was still running, as he frequently highlighted the Trump administration’s failed efforts at an “infrastructure week.”
The president signed a bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, which provided billions of dollars in incentives for companies to develop and manufacture semiconductors domestically. While the Biden administration has finalized a number of agreements through the law, many of the economic benefits may not be realized until after he’s left office.
Biden also signed bipartisan legislation in late 2022 that safeguarded marriage equality, codifying federal protections for same-sex couples.
Even after Republicans took control of the House, Biden managed to broker agreements at key moments. In particular, he averted a debt limit crisis when he and then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) reached a deal in late May 2023 to lift the debt ceiling for two years and apply new caps on federal spending over the same duration.
Biden made good on a key campaign promise when he nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to serve on the Supreme Court. She became the first Black woman to serve on the nation’s highest court.
While the president only had the opportunity to nominate one Supreme Court justice, he nominated hundreds of other judges to the federal bench. And the White House has touted the diversity of his nominees in his final weeks in office.
After the Senate earlier this month confirmed the 40th Black woman Biden had nominated for a federal judgeship, White House communications director Ben LaBolt said in a statement that Biden was “proud to have strengthened the judiciary by making it more representative of the country as a whole and that legacy will have an impact for decades to come.”
Biden has appointed 233 federal judges, the same number as President-elect Trump had at the same point in his first term in office. Of those Biden appointments, a majority have been people of color.
The president has also made a point of appointing public defenders. In 2022, he set a record as president for the most nominees who have worked as public defenders to be appointed to circuit courts.
Another of Biden’s most high profile campaign promises was to forgive student loan debt, and while the effort was caught up in various lawsuits, he ultimately found ways to deliver relief to millions of Americans.
Biden’s first attempt at student debt relief was blocked by the Supreme Court in a 2023 ruling. The Supreme Court earlier this year also rebuffed a request from the Biden administration to reinstate a different plan that would lower payments for millions of borrowers.
Biden has instead turned to more targeted efforts.
He has forgiven student loans for many public service workers, targeting teachers, firefighters and other eligible workers who had been paying on their loans for more than 10 years.
Zients, the White House chief of staff, previewed in a memo outlining the final weeks of Biden’s term that the president will announce additional student debt cancellation for public service workers and other borrowers before he leaves office.
The administration earlier in the year said it would forgive the debt of 35,000 people through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.
And the White House in May said it would forgive $6 billion in student debt for borrowers who attended the Art Institutes after it was discovered the school “knowingly misled students” into taking on debt.
Trump has made it clear, however, that he will not be continuing the mass student debt relief Biden has given borrowers and may even try to reverse some of the proposals by the current administration.
While the economy and concerns over inflation were a main contributor to Trump’s victory in November, Biden and his team have been adamant that the economic situation they’re leaving Trump is one of their biggest achievements.
While his presidency has been hampered by stubborn inflation, with rising costs contributing to voter dissatisfaction that ultimately helped put Trump back in the White House, Biden and his allies have repeatedly pointed to millions of jobs added over the past four years, to billions of dollars in investments in American manufacturing, and to the strength of the U.S. economy compared to global peers in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Federal Reserve has cut interest rates twice in recent months, with more cuts possible in the months to come as inflation has generally cooled.
Biden has urged Americans and economists to watch whether Trump produces more jobs than the Biden administration, or leaves office with lower inflation or lower unemployment.
He has expressed some optimism that history will look kindly on his administration’s economic record, especially when contrasted with Trump’s plans to cut taxes for corporations and impose sweeping tariffs on imports.
“The bottom line is, I’m convinced that over time the American public will respond to what is the intention of a party to try and help ordinary people,” Biden told MeidasTouch in an interview published Thursday. “I think the long-term prospects for the country are very good.”
