What Are Some of Joe Biden's Major Policy Agenda Debacles?

As Joe Biden nears his half-term in office as the 46th POTUS, his presidency so far has been riddled with policy failures. Many of the Democrat's much-touted agenda issues have been stalled or left in limbo.

What Biden’s stay in the Oval Office has brought is historic spending, record debt - surpassing $31 trillion, according to a recent US Treasury report, skyrocketing inflation, and looming recession fears. Here are just some of Joe Biden’s policy agenda debacles.

On November 10, a US District Court in Texas struck down Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness program, which was earlier blocked by the Eighth US Circuit Court of Appeals. The latter injunction came after lawsuits were brought by six states challenging the program and the president's authority to act.

While on the presidential campaign trail, Joe Biden proposed an eagerly-awaited student loan debt cancellation plan. In line with Biden’s plan, federal student loan borrowers could see up to $10,000 in debt forgiven. Up to $20,000 could be cancelled for Pell Grant recipients in college. However, ever since he entered the Oval Office, there has been heated debate about the president's authority to personally write off student debts. Some factions of the Democratic Party urged Biden to use executive action over the issue. Biden argued he could offer loan forgiveness under a 2003 law, citing such measures during national emergencies (in this case, the COVID-19 pandemic).

However, the judge ruled on Thursday that, "In this case, the HEROES Act – a law to provide loan assistance to military personnel defending our nation – does not provide the executive branch clear congressional authorization to create a $400 billion student loan forgiveness program."

The hasty American withdrawal from the South Asian country in 2021 that resulted in the Taliban* Islamist group sweeping to power faced bipartisan criticism as “botched.” The Biden administration’s scramble to evacuate embassy staff, other citizens, and collaborators amid the end of the 20-year US-led occupation of Afghanistan prompted senators to question why the Pentagon had failed to predict the rapid collapse of the Western-backed Afghan government led by Ashraf Ghani. Questions were raised as to why the evacuation of US citizens and vulnerable Afghans had not been launched sooner. With voters, Joe Biden’s approval ratings have plummeted since August 2021's rushed and bloody events in Afghanistan, with more than half of Americans thinking the Democratic POTUS should resign over his handling of the chaotic evacuation.

One of the central elements of Joe Biden’s policy agenda for his inaugural year that encountered deadlock was failure to pass voting rights legislation, which their Republican counterparts successfully opposed.

This follows the introduction of new voting restrictions in Republican-led states in the aftermath of the 2020 election, and former President Donald Trump's claims of voter fraud. In order to successfully pass voting rights legislation, the Biden administration would also have to reform the Senate filibuster, which Democratic West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin has repeatedly opposed.

The Democratic Party-sponsored voting rights bill was blocked in the upper chamber on January 19, with a separate vote to change the filibuster rules in order to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act also failed. The GOP repeatedly blocked the Dem-sponsored voting rights bills, denouncing the voting legislation as a "federal takeover." Republican senators argued that the initiatives presupposing loosened ID rules, enhanced voting by mail, and automatic and same-day registration would pave the way to massive election fraud.

President Joe Biden's keystone social and climate spending agenda – the Build Back Better Act – was subjected to numerous trimmings from the initial $3 trillion designated for social spending so that it could sit well with every Democratic lawmaker. It eventually shrank to some $1.7 trillion, largely due to internal Democratic Party resistance from Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. After protracted back-and-forth negotiations to trim the size, scope, and cost of the legislation, the end result was the watered-down Inflation Reduction Act, adopted in early August 2022, which incorporated some of the BBB's climate change, healthcare, and tax reform proposals, ditching its social safety net offers.

Joe Biden’s $500 billion federal paid family- and medical-leave benefit plan, which was incorporated into the president’s original sweeping domestic spending plan – the Build Back Better legislation, was ditched in late 2021 amid failure to achieve compromise with lawmakers intensely critical of its price tag. The US is one of the only developed countries that fails to offer any federal paid family or sick leave benefits to new parents. While the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 allows workers to take 12 weeks off without losing their jobs – either to recuperate after illness or to care of newborns or ailing family members – it does not guarantee pay.

In his proposed Build Back Better plan, Biden also pushed Congress to approve sweeping investments in child care, including funding for free, universal preschool for all three- and four-year-olds nationwide, with an estimated cost of about $200 billion over the six-year plan. A later iteration of Biden’s domestic spending plan that Congress eventually passed dropped these investment proposals.

From the outset, Joe Biden was determined to undo many of his predecessor Donald Trump's immigration policies, ostensibly to offer increased protection and care for asylum seekers and migrants. In effect, however, the US-Mexico border crisis turned into a huge headache for the POTUS. Over 1.7 million migrant encounters were registered in Fiscal Year 2021, and more than two million in FY 2022, figures released in September showed. Reports citing the country’s Border Patrol say the US-Mexico border witnessed three times the number of migrant encounters under Biden than it experienced under Trump.

Republicans have blamed Joe Biden’s determination to “undo everything former President Donald Trump had done” for the border chaos, and denounced the current administration’s “open border policies,” along with the scrapping of a number of the restrictive measures against illegal migrants that were in place before.

Biden has, however, reinstated the Trump-era Remain In Mexico program and upheld a policy known as Title 42. The latter was used during the pandemic to preemptively remove migrants found at the border.

Exasperation was the word used regarding Joe Biden’s “lack of will" in fixing the “gun law crisis,” after he finally enacted a gun safety bill in the wake of deadly mass shootings in Buffalo, NY, and Uvalde, TX. In his debut White House "sales pitch" on Gun Violence Prevention, Biden denounced gun violence as “epidemic” and “an international embarrassment,” pledging the most significant executive action to date on the issue. However, the modest gun bill that expanded background checks and made it easier to prosecute illegal gun trafficking was seen as far wide of the mark.

President Joe Biden signed into law the first significant national gun control legislation in the past 30 years on June 25, 2022, after the bill passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 234-193. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act enhances background checks on young gun buyers aged 18-21, encourages states to create “red flag” laws and systems, and closed the so-called “boyfriend loophole” by extending the list of convicted domestic abusers unable to purchase firearms to include dating partners and not just couples who are married, live together, or have children. The bill, however, neglects to address several provisions gun control advocates asked for, including assault rifles and high-capacity magazines. Universal background checks were also not a part of the legislation.

Meanwhile, data cited by Republicans showed that violent crime and murders were on the rise, as Democrat-run cities slashed funding for their police departments and implemented anti-law enforcement policies. In 2021, there were 346 officers shot in the line of duty, the Fraternal Order of Police reported, with the GOP slamming Democrats' policies as jeopardizing the safety of law enforcement officers.

Throughout the first half of his term in office, Joe Biden's out-of-control spending has seen inflation soar to its highest level in decades. As measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), inflation stood at 8.2 percent for the year to September, after notching up to a 40-year peak of 9.1 percent during the 12 months to June.

However, despite continued reports of higher-than-expected inflation raging in the US, President Joe Biden urged Americans not to worry and argued that things are “going to be fine," with Republicans accusing the POTUS of being out of touch with reality.

Consumer have prices soared 12.7 percent since January 2021, outpacing wages, which rose just 8% over the same period, leaving the average American facing a loss of about $3,000 in annual purchasing power, according to Heritage Foundation think tank. Hiked interest rates by the US Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, in tandem with growing borrowing costs, have also reduced the average US resident’s purchasing power by another $1,200, according to the report, released on September 22. Millions of Americans are now struggling to pay for daily necessities such as food, gas, and rent.

After the beginning of Russia's military operation in Ukraine in February 2022 and the adoption of several packages of US-spearheaded sanctions against Moscow by the West, energy prices skyrocketed. Prices at the pump have become a major issue for Biden, which he attempted to fix ahead of the midterm elections. Diesel prices had reached a national average of $5.309 per gallon as of October 31, compared to $3.634 a year ago, according to data from the American Automobile Association (AAA). In June, diesel reached a record-high average price of $5.703 a gallon.

Floundering to keep fuel costs down to appease voters, Biden, who has constantly been blaming “Putin’s price hike” for Americans’ pain at the pump, resorted to unprecedented crude releases from the US strategic reserves, pressuring oil companies to boost production and threatening them with a windfall tax.

However, as the increase in the cost of everyday goods and services inflicts pain on households, Joe Biden's public approval rating slumped to lows of 39 percent in a recent Ipsos poll. Nevertheless, Joe Biden recently told reporters, in a nod to the 2024 elections, “I think everybody wants me to run, but we’re going to have discussions about it.