2023 Year in Review: Biden-Harris Administration Wins
What has the Biden-Harris administration been doing in 2023? The administration had some significant 2023 achievements you may not have heard about. Here are some real wins at the federal level that we should celebrate as we move into 2024!
January: The Biden-Harris administration issues blueprints on decarbonizing the transit sector and on creating a Renter’s Bill of Rights, and works to strengthen gun controls.
February: The EPA begins roll-out of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. While most of the Inflation Reduction Act takes the form of unlimited tax breaks—which via “direct pay” can be awarded to non-taxpaying entities such as counties, school districts, water districts, religious institutions and community groups, etc.—this $27 billion is structured differently and is already awarding grants. Two-thirds of the money goes to the communities most vulnerable to climate change, including the $7 billion Solar for All fund.
March: Biden, working with Secretary Deb Haaland to transform our public lands, designates the new Avi Kwa Ame monument, which contains the world’s largest Joshua Tree forest. Throughout the year, the administration secures record protections for public lands as part of the global 30x30 initiative to preserve 30% of our planet by 2030, including the restoration of Obama’s Arctic National Wildlife Reserve protections (including cancellation of oil leases), cancellation of many oil and gas leases, and protection of the entire United States Arctic Ocean from all new oil and gas leasing. Conservation, memory, and history go hand-in-hand, with new monuments like the Castner Range, Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni (1 million acres of Grand Canyon landscape sacred to Tribal Nations) and sites related to Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley.
April: The Biden-Harris Administration fights a mifepristone (abortion pill) ban. The Office of Management and Budget updates government-wide cost-benefit analysis guidelines for the first time in two decades. The Biden administration’s guidelines accord with the current literature and place much more weight on future costs by decreasing the discount rate. (Here’s a podcast on what this means.)
May: In addition to funds to go after ultra-millionaire tax cheats, 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act provides resources to the Internal Revenue Service to deliver a higher quality public service. In May of this year, the IRS delivered a report to Congress setting the stage for a Direct File pilot, which will simplify the 2023 tax season for millions of Americans. For resident Americans with US-sourced income, the IRS already knows what people owe. For the vast majority of people, tax filing should be a simple matter of correcting mistakes and omissions. This is Direct File. But decades of lobbying and heavy political spending from tax-preparation giants have led to a process that is complicated by design, overseen by an IRS that is so short of resources that calls don’t get answered and the paperwork backlog piles up in cafeterias. Tax season is a pain by design just so these companies can wring some bucks from a good chunk of us by plugging in the gaps of an underfunded state. Building up state capacity from decades of neoliberalism and privatization is a difficult task, but we are consistently seeing big steps in the right direction.
June: The Biden administration distributes $42.45 billion in funds for broadband Internet access in rural and low-income areas where (often) private monopolies refuse to invest.
July: On the two-year anniversary of its whole-of-government competition policy which was a massive rebuke to Reaganomics, comes a flurry of new policies, including an expansion of the administration’s war on “junk fees” that have proliferated in recent decades in airlines, concert ticketing, and rental housing, as well as “a new corporate charter for American business” in the form of merger guidelines that prohibit companies from growing by buying up the competition rather than investing and innovating.
August: The National Labor Relations Board issues the Cemex decision, upending 55 years of union-busting. Now when a union organizing committee presents majority support to the company, employers have two weeks to voluntarily recognize the union or file a petition for an election (Representation-Management petition). If the employer is found to commit even one unfair labor practice in the runup to the election, the employer will be ordered to bargain with the union, even if the union loses the vote tally. This retroactive decision has already helped rectify injustices, where lawbreaking employers won “tin pot dictatorship” elections, and has intensified the union organizing wave, fueled by Biden’s tight labor market and the work of groups like EWOC, and now the UAW. In the 90 days before Cemex, employers filed just four election petitions (Representation-Management petitions); in the 90 days after, that number was 118. Voluntary recognition has skyrocketed too.
On day one of his administration, Joe Biden had taken the unprecedented action of removing the NLRB General Counsel, the Trump-appointed union buster Peter Robb, replacing him with labor champion Jennifer Abruzzo. Abruzzo, who has pledged to aggressively enforce Cemex, describes her long plan to secure this win here (video).
September: Biden becomes the first president ever to join a picket line and advocate for workers’ demands. The UAW won their fight for a record contract, and their gains are spreading throughout the auto industry. Crucially, the victory paves the way for a transition to electric vehicles that is economically just. Now the UAW is planning to organize the rest of the US auto industry. At the same time, Trump joined a union-busting organization for an anti-union rally that was widely misrepresented by the media. Also, Secretary Becerra works to ensure the nation’s LGBTQI+ foster kids are placed in supportive homes.
October: President Biden issues the third-ever presidential proclamation of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which celebrates the more than $50 billion that have been invested in infrastructure, pandemic assistance, and climate resilience in Indian Country. The administration is working on a whole-of-government approach to ensure Tribal Nations have more say in how they spend federal dollars with less administrative burden, so that indigenous people can access an equitable share of resources.
November: The Biden-Harris administration cracks down on methane pollution and unveils the government’s new social cost of carbon in cost-benefit analyses of $190/ton. According to the IPCC, a $100/ton price, if applied to all decision-making, is likely sufficient to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C. The administration also fights to enforce the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act in abortion-ban states.
December: The Biden-Harris administration has been fighting all year for student debt relief, by December canceling nearly $132 billion for 3.6 million Americans. It also stands firm against a $41 million lobbying blitz from the fossil fuel industry and releases strong Inflation Reduction Act hydrogen tax credit rules that stop clean energy money from going into fossil companies’ hands. This proposed rule creates a massive new market for 24/7 clean energy. And, just in time for Christmas, the administration releases the latest in a long series of labor policy changes for federal workers and contractors: a requirement that large construction projects, for which Biden’s 2021-2022 Invest in America Agenda secured unprecedented money, must have union protections.