Tracking Joe Biden’s First 100 Days: What We’ve Seen So Far and What to Expect

This Thursday, April 29th, marked 100 days on the job for President Joe Biden. Over this time, the President has made some radical policy changes through executive actions while promoting and signing into law an enormous spending bill and plans additional spending bills for this summer totaling trillions more in spending. Here’s a brief review of what we’ve seen so far and what to expect moving forward.

Following up on his campaign spending pledge, President Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer teamed up in late January and devised a scheme to skirt procedural norms and ram through a $1.9 Trillion partisan spending bill, which was signed into law on March 10th. Republicans in Congress had proposed a more strategic, targeted approach at half that level but were rebuffed every step of the way. Earlier this month, the White House released its annual budget proposal to Congress for FY22 to the tune of $1.5 trillion, keeping defense spending flat but boosting non-discretionary spending by 16%. Add to this an expected “infrastructure” plan with a bottom line of $2.3 Trillion dollars that Democrats plan to push this summer. By now, I’m sure you are thinking: Who is going to pay for all of this? The answer is everyone, but Democrats are hiding that fact by targeting the corporate tax rate, which will impact prices, jobs, and investments.

The Democrats and President Biden seem set on passing massive spending bills totaling over $5 Trillion dollars in less than a year and doing so using the budget reconciliation process – which will require every Democratic Senator to vote in favor with a tie-breaker cast by the Vice President. This partisan way of legislating is doing nothing to unite the parties our address the “spending fatigue” many Americans are beginning to feel from the trillions of dollars already spent addressing the virus. Many election experts are predicting that the American people will reject the overreaching big government, spend and spend agenda in the 2022 election cycle.

On America’s southern border with Mexico, the situation has been deteriorating rapidly on President Biden’s watch. President Biden’s rhetoric on the campaign trail has increased the number of people looking to immigrate to the US, with many waiting at the southern border for access and others crossing illegally. That rhetoric, compounded by 94 immigration-related actions like the ” Executive Order on Creating a Comprehensive Regional Framework to Address the Causes of Migration, to Manage Migration Throughout North and Central America, and to Provide Safe and Orderly Processing of Asylum Seekers at the United States Border,” is what has caused a deluge of immigrant caravans to begin moving north towards the United States, overwhelming border enforcement.

Strangely, President Biden’s handling of the border crisis isn’t making the news, but the American people are keenly aware. According to public opinion data provided by pollster Rob Autry over the weekend at the House GOP retreat in Orlando, “Seventy-five percent (75%) of voters see the border situation as a crisis or a major problem” and “independents trust Republicans over Democrats to handle the issue of immigration by +16.”

The first 100 days of the Biden presidency have seen a flurry of executive actions, including reversing many Trump-era executive orders, more spending on progressive priorities, and a crisis at the border that the American people seem aware of, but that the media seems uninterested in covering under this administration. More executive actions and more spending are on the way. The Biden administration just rolled out their “American Families Plan,” which to pay for more spending would hike taxes on small businesses at the worst possible time. If President Biden hopes to make his next 100 days more productive and inclusive, he should abandon efforts to pass progressive bills with no Republican input, realize that hiking taxes during a recession is not a wise idea, and extend a hand to the other side of the aisle to work together on the worsening border crisis.