WASHINGTON — For the first year of Joe Biden’s presidency, it looked like Democrats were on the verge of creating the social safety net of their dreams.
The coronavirus pandemic had already prompted Congress in bipartisan agreement to boost unemployment insurance and dish out stimulus checks to even the poorest Americans — a significant breakthrough.
Democrats under Biden seized the momentum in March 2021, quickly passing another relief bill that sent a third round of stimulus checks and even created a child allowance, worth as much as $300 per kid, for almost all parents in America.
“I think this will be one of the things that the vice president and I will be most proud of when our terms are up,” Biden said a few months later as the payments started. “This has the potential to reduce child poverty in the same way that the Social Security [program] reduced poverty for the elderly.”
But the payments, contrived as advance refunds of the child tax credit, were only temporary, and the big plan to make them permanent — alongside new child care subsidies, paid leave for workers and universal prekindergarten — was stymied in part by dubious concerns from within the Democratic Party on how parents would spend the money.
And so Biden, who may have hoped to be as consequential a president as Franklin D. Roosevelt, the author of the New Deal and its foundational supports for workers and older adults, has to settle for less — but not nothing. Biden will be leaving office having made his mark on the federal safety net in a number of ways.
Sharon Parrott, the president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, an influential liberal think tank, said two changes under Biden are particularly significant: a permanent increase in food benefits for 22 million households, and a boost to health care premium subsidies for 20 million people. Republicans may hesitate to undo either one, given the potential backlash from voters.
“Nothing is immune from congressional action,” Parrott told HuffPost. “But they’ve been in place now since 2021 and have really helped.”
The higher food benefits have lifted more than 2 million people above the poverty line, while 4 million would go uninsured if it weren’t for the enhanced premium support. The latter policy will expire at the end of the year, however, if Republicans don’t proactively keep it going.
In short, while Biden may not have revolutionized the U.S. political economy like Roosevelt, whose reforms banished poorhouses to the annals of history, Biden made policy marginally more favorable to workers and families.
In his farewell address this week, Biden touted the overall success of the American economy, which was buoyed by the aggressive relief bill he signed into law, rather than any lasting social policy he’d put in place.
“Instead of losing their jobs to an economic crisis that we inherited, millions of Americans now have the dignity of work; millions of entrepreneurs and companies creating new businesses and industries, hiring American workers, using American products,” Biden said.
Unfortunately for Biden and Democrats generally, most people hated the economy of the last four years, thanks to price inflation that may have been the single biggest contributor to President-elect Donald Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris. Higher prices made people feel poorer, and it’s possible that the retrenchment of federal spending after 2021 did so as well, though no such nuance shows through in consumer surveys.
As part of the pandemic response, Congress temporarily jacked up benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which provides a monthly food allowance to 22 million households with an average benefit of $366. But as those temporary increases began to expire in 2021, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a dramatic change to the way benefits are calculated, basing it on food consumption patterns rather than just inflation. The change resulted in a permanent across-the-board increase of more than 20% in benefits for families.
“Hunger is a political condition,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) told HuffPost this week. “We have the resources. We know what to do. We’ve lacked the political will. And Biden, to his credit, stepped up again.”
Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.), the chair of the House Agriculture Committee, which oversees SNAP, has led Republicans in accusing Biden of overstepping his administrative authority in expanding the benefits, which Republicans said should only be adjusted for inflation. The change is relatively large, costing the federal government an estimated $300 billion over a decade.
“It really was an abuse, in terms of legacy,” Thompson told HuffPost. “The administration can always make a ‘marketbasket’ adjustment based on inflation, but they played all kinds of manipulations with that, which is just wrong.”
Indeed, Republicans are already proposing cuts to the food program when Trump retakes the presidency. Thompson has advocated for curtailing the USDA’s power to change the Thrifty Food Plan, which is the name for the benefit formula. Other Republicans have suggested undoing the Biden increase completely, though such a change would likely prove unpopular even among Republicans in the House of Representatives.
The child tax credit will be a live issue this year. Republicans want to reauthorize their own temporary changes to the credit that they made as part of their 2017 tax bill, which expanded the credit to help cover for other tax changes that were disadvantageous for families. And some Republicans, including Vice President-elect JD Vance, have talked about increasing the credit as a means of encouraging people to have more kids.
“I think that there’s still room here on the child credit for negotiation,” said Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), the top Democrat on the House tax committee.
Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the top Senate Republican on taxes, told HuffPost that Republicans most likely want a mere continuation of current policy, not an expensive revamp.
“We’re still looking at all the pieces. We haven’t started finalizing any decisions yet,” Crapo said.
The Democratic child tax credit expansion, costing more than $100 billion annually, led to the sharpest reduction of child poverty in modern U.S. history. For six months, American parents got to experience the kind of monthly support that is typical in every other advanced country on Earth.
Democrats were on the verge of continuing the child tax credit beyond that point, but couldn’t get agreement from then-Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.), who told his colleagues that he feared parents spent the money on drugs.
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An authoritative paper published this month, examining surveys of time use trends among parents and nonparents, concluded that “evidence does not support policymaker concerns about increased parental substance use” in households that received the funds.
Parents told HuffPost in December 2021, as the credit was about to expire, that they spent the money on necessities.
As one mom said, “If it was not for that tax credit I don’t know what I would do.”