Illustration of President Joe Biden and events from 2021.

(Chris Burnett / for NBC News)

(Chris Burnett / for NBC News)

‘Help is here’:
100 days of the Biden doctrine

How a man guided by a deep belief in an active federal government has navigated his early days at the helm of a nation in crisis.

By Jonathan Allen
April 26, 2021

WASHINGTON — By traditional measures — number of laws enacted and programs created or abolished — President Joe Biden's first 100 days in office look relatively sleepy. He has made no discernible difference in the organizational charts of the federal government and has signed only seven bills into law, tying him with George W. Bush for the fewest since Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a record 76 laws in his first 100 days in office.

But Biden's $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief measure is the most expensive law ever enacted during the first phase of a presidency. His flurry of executive actions, many aimed at undoing his predecessor's legacy, include re-entry into the Paris climate accords, expansion of access to Obamacare and new support for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, President Barack Obama's program for undocumented people who were brought to the U.S. as children. 

And he is prodding Congress to move forward on his "American Jobs Plan" and "American Families Plan," which could push trillions more dollars into the economy.

In that sense, it has been an especially ambitious 100 days, building on the dozens of promises he made during the campaign. And it shows how he has embraced Roosevelt's "first 100 days" benchmark, using the time frame to clearly measure progress on the coronavirus pandemic.

"The first hundred days have always been important to every White House, especially those of a first-term president," said James A. Baker, who was President Ronald Reagan's first chief of staff and treasury secretary before becoming President George H.W. Bush's secretary of state. "A president traditionally has the power to get things done immediately after the election, when his favorability ratings are usually high."

Biden is riding high; polling consistently suggests that majorities approve of his performance and many of his policies. But in many ways, his political challenge is even more daunting than Roosevelt's. FDR's Democrats controlled more than 70 percent of the House seats and more than 60 percent of the Senate seats. 

Biden and his party have a much more tenuous grip on power. They control the Senate only by virtue of Vice President Kamala Harris' tiebreaking vote, and they occupy just 51 percent of the House seats. Biden is a 36-year veteran of the Senate, and no one has had to explain to him that the narrow margins mean he has little room for dissent within his own party or that his agenda would be doomed if Republicans take the majority in either chamber in next year's midterm elections.

President Franklin Roosevelt signs New Deal emergency banking legislation on March 9, 1933.

President Franklin Roosevelt signs New Deal emergency banking legislation on March 9, 1933. (Bettmann Archive via Getty Images)

President Franklin Roosevelt signs New Deal emergency banking legislation on March 9, 1933. (Bettmann Archive via Getty Images)

Roosevelt could also be more certain about his mandate for change: He won a whopping 472 electoral votes, compared to Biden's 306. The polarization Biden faces is exceptionally bitter, as millions of Republicans still believe he stole the election and cling to Donald Trump's divisive ideas about race, immigration and the pandemic.

Biden "knows that he has an enormous amount to do and limited votes in Congress, so he is going to maximize the window," said a Biden ally who worked in the Obama administration.

If he is successful, he will usher in a new era of muscular government.

 'Help is here': Biden's doctrine

One of Biden's most consistent principles through his half-century in politics is that the federal government can be a powerful tool in Americans' lives. The belief has defined how he has navigated his first days in office, as he has necessarily been focused on curing the ills of a complex plague on the nation — a virus that killed more than 565,000 people and claimed millions of jobs while highlighting and aggravating inequalities in health outcomes and wealth. 

He has promised that his administration will use every lever of the federal government to address what he calls four "converging crises": the pandemic, economic instability, racial injustice and climate change.

"'The four crises' seems like a talking point, but it's really a road map," said a senior White House official who worked on Biden's campaign. 

As Biden nears the 100-day milestone, his plans for American restoration and improvement — of health, economic opportunity and democracy itself — rely on injecting the steroid of cash through the veins of the bureaucracy and to the public. Rather than adding appendages, the way many of his Democratic predecessors did, Biden is jacking up the existing arms of government as he tries to demonstrate that Washington, and the republic it represents, can still lead  at home and abroad. 

He has surrounded himself with a coterie of top advisers who have extensive experience in the legislative and executive branches and are intimately familiar with the body of federal programs.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the Oval Office.

President Joe Biden signs executive orders on health care alongside Vice President Kamala Harris in the Oval Office of the White House on Jan. 28, 2021. (Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images file)

President Joe Biden signs executive orders on health care alongside Vice President Kamala Harris in the Oval Office of the White House on Jan. 28, 2021. (Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images file)

"Help is here, and we will not stop working for you," Biden said last month as he launched a tour to bring attention to the streams of federal aid in his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Covid-19 relief and economic stimulus law. In addition to bolstering the federal-state vaccination effort that has put 200 million shots in American arms, the law pumped out assistance in the form of stimulus checks, expanded unemployment insurance, a labor-pensions bailout, funds for schools and a boost for the child tax credit.

"He knows the infrastructure is there," a Biden adviser said. "Unlike Trump — hell, unlike Obama — Biden and his people have lived and breathed government for half a century."


His big proposals so far have been light on innovation and heavy on investment in the ability of federal agencies to deliver relief and, optimally, a springboard to lower- and middle-class Americans.

The pattern is also evident in his $2 trillion-plus American Jobs Plan, his $1.5 trillion discretionary spending proposal for the next fiscal year and the outlines of his trillion-dollar American Families Plan. He plans to pay for transportation, infrastructure, elder care and child care, and other items with higher taxes on corporations and on families that earn more than $400,000 a year. But the core of his agenda is on the spending side.

"President Biden has not expanded the agencies and the breadth of government," said Mack McLarty, who was President Bill Clinton's first chief of staff, taking stock of the trillions the new president wants to spend. "We've now got a different letter of the alphabet in front of the federal expenditures: It's a 'T,' not a 'B.' These are just unprecedented times that call for these actions, and I don't think anyone can say we don't need to do some big things here to help the American people."

Many of Biden's initiatives center on expanding eligibility for, access to and public awareness of federal aid. That ties into his vow to concentrate on equity in his policymaking, a directive that is infused into the administration's proposals and talking points.

"That's exactly the kind of emphasis that needed to be made," said House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., who delivered a crucial endorsement to Biden just before South Carolina's Democratic primary and who has talked with Biden about guiding assistance to chronically impoverished parts of the country. "This is not any kind of special program. This is just directing resources where they can do the most good for the most people."

People wait in line at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center for Covid-19 vaccinations in New York on April 6, 2021

People wait in line at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center for Covid-19 vaccinations in New York on April 6, 2021. (Timothy A. Clary / AFP via Getty Images file)

People wait in line at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center for Covid-19 vaccinations in New York on April 6, 2021. (Timothy A. Clary / AFP via Getty Images file)

 A partisan push

The administration's early approach has met Biden's benchmarks for the national vaccination effort, getting the relief law out the door and escaping major missteps. But it hasn't matched what confidants say is a deep belief that policy should be made in a bipartisan fashion. 

White House officials say Biden has been disappointed that Republicans haven't supported his rescue plan, gun-safety proposals and other measures that have broad public support in polls.

"It's not that he's surprised," White House press secretary Jen Psaki said. "It's still frustrating, though."

As a former lawmaker who served in the majority and the minority under presidents of both parties, Biden is attuned to the need to "leave space for the other party" to work through its internal politics in dealing with him, Psaki said.

Biden's aides and his allies on Capitol Hill say he wants to work across the aisle as his presidency evolves, even if that won't be made any easier by his decision to move forward on the emergency aid package without any Republican votes. 

GOP lawmakers should not “leave their fingerprints on the murder weapon,” said Grover Norquist, an influential advocate of smaller government who runs the group Americans for Tax Reform.

Norquist said that voters will punish Biden and his fellow Democrats at the polls next year if they raise taxes and expand government — so long as the GOP doesn’t give him any meaningful support. 

Republican leaders have said their rank-and-file will stand unified against Biden’s latest proposals, but some of the lawmakers sound more optimistic about the prospects of bipartisan Senate working groups coming together on compromises.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said she sees authenticity in Biden’s outreach: "I always assume that it's sincere,” she said.  “We’ll have  to see what happens.”

Some Republican lawmakers and aides have complained that Biden blew them off during the Covid-19 relief package, and they hope he won't do that again on his infrastructure package.

"He is doing a partisan 100 days — meaning he understands that the Republicans won't compromise and he isn't waiting for them," Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian and Princeton University professor, said in early April. "His focus is on keeping his caucus together and working through that."

 The historical mark

On Reagan's 99th day in office, less than a month after would-be assassin John Hinckley shot him outside the Washington Hilton hotel, he pitched a sweeping economic plan to slash taxes and federal programs to a joint session of Congress.

Before he laid out his proposal, Reagan was interrupted repeatedly by thunderous applause as he read out the names of people who had been wounded during Hinckley's attempt on his life. So by the time he turned to his policy vision, Reagan held the sentiment of the public  and of many lawmakers in his hand.

President Ronald Reagan illustrates his attempts to compromise with Congress on the budget on April 19, 1982.

President Ronald Reagan illustrates his attempts to compromise with Congress on the budget on April 19, 1982. (Bettmann Archive via Getty Images)

President Ronald Reagan illustrates his attempts to compromise with Congress on the budget on April 19, 1982. (Bettmann Archive via Getty Images)

The rally-around-the-flag effect of the wounded but beaming president rising to the lectern at the front of the House chamber helped weaken Democratic opposition to his agenda, paving the way for bipartisan enactment of an economic proposal that was anathema to House Democrats when it was introduced.

The speech to Congress was a capstone to Reagan's first 100 days in office, and it was part of a broader public relations campaign that tied his popularity to a radical reimagining of the federal government as a smaller factor in American life. Democrats, who held the majority in the House, had the power to stop him — but they were cowed into cooperating by their fear that voters would punish them for standing in his way.

Biden, who will speak to Congress on the 99th day of his presidency and the 40th anniversary of Reagan's address, voted for Reagan's tax cuts that summer.

"It's all fairly artificial, but as humans we need these milestones and markers," Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, said of the 100-days window. "It's meaningful at the time. It could be meaningful in the long term. But it could also be overtaken by the swath of history."

People line up at the Boys and Girls Club of Anaheim to receive free food in Calif., on July 14, 2020.

People line up at the Boys and Girls Club to receive free food in Anaheim, Calif., on July 14, 2020. (Leonard Ortiz / Orange County Register via Getty Images file)

People line up at the Boys and Girls Club to receive free food in Anaheim, Calif., on July 14, 2020. (Leonard Ortiz / Orange County Register via Getty Images file)

Perry and other historians said Biden's parallel with Roosevelt is that they both came into office facing genuine threats to the general welfare of the nation and promising  to confront them swiftly. Like most Democratic presidents, Biden has looked to Roosevelt for inspiration, but he has also echoed Reagan's public communications effort with his American Relief Plan tour and the rollout of his American Jobs Plan.

White House officials say Biden frequently reminds them that he believes Obama failed to effectively market Obamacare and its benefits to the public. He plans a different approach.

 The Obama-Biden lessons

Inside the White House, Biden and his team have assiduously courted, and basked in, comparisons to Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. But the animating ghost driving Biden is the administration he previously served in, Obama's.  

Biden may never get over Obama's having repeatedly discouraged him from seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020. He is determined now to demonstrate that he can be a more effective president than Obama. 

"He gets to run an Obama-Biden 2.0 setup," said a Biden ally who has worked for both men. "He knows what they did wrong and what they did right. He has brought in a lot of those experts to run the plan differently, one level up than they did the last time."

It is a rivalry between friends but a rivalry all the same, and Biden's team has wasted few chances to capitalize on Democratic dissatisfaction with Obama's results. Many progressives say Obama blew an opportunity to harness public anger over the Great Recession and use it to justify a more ambitious agenda along the lines of Roosevelt's New Deal. 

Obama, this theory holds, naively waited for Republican support in Congress for his major initiatives and sacrificed Democratic priorities in a vain attempt to get it.

Biden, who, like Obama, promised to work across the aisle and unify the country, wrestled with the conflict between the need to pump money into the economy and his desire for bipartisanship, said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., one of his closest confidants on Capitol Hill.

Vice President Joe Biden and President Barack Obama attend an event to honor the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team in the East Room of the White House on Oct. 27, 2015.

Vice President Joe Biden and President Barack Obama attend an event to honor the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team in the East Room of the White House on Oct. 27, 2015. (Mark Wilson / Getty Images file)

Vice President Joe Biden and President Barack Obama attend an event to honor the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team in the East Room of the White House on Oct. 27, 2015. (Mark Wilson / Getty Images file)

"He had two competing urges or instincts as he came into the White House," Coons said. "To get as much relief out the door as possible, those instincts won out over bipartisanship."

The Covid-19 crisis gave Biden a big stick to carry as he spoke in soft tones about his "friends" on the other side of the partisan aisle. But there is also a sense that he can be more methodical — and seek bipartisanship — now that the rescue law is being implemented.

"You see it in the outreach and the effort to listen and be open to compromise," a White House aide said. "We have a little bit more time to do that."

Coons said that in an era in which presidents use their power to undo their predecessors' legacies as quickly as possible, Biden knows that many of his policies will last only if Republicans have skin in the game and put votes on the board.

"It's really in his belief that durable solutions are bipartisan solutions," Coons said. "The balance he struck between urgency and bipartisanship in the first 100 days doesn't predict how he will strike that balance going forward."

 Biden's take on the stakes

During last year's campaign, the transition period and the first 100 days, Biden has been explicit about his concerns that the republic and global democracy are in fragile states. Trump's refusal to accept the results of the election and his encouragement of a riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6 reinforced that view.

Biden's response has been to try to buttress domestic institutions. In remarks at the State Department in February, he warned about the rise of authoritarianism and painted domestic policies protecting minority rights as crucial to restoring America's role as the world's beacon of democracy.

"With your help, the United States will again lead not just by the example of our power but the power of our example," he said as he encouraged debate and dissent in policymaking. "That's why my administration has already taken the important step to live our ... democratic values at home."

Biden, friends said, still sees cooperation between the parties as an essential component of a healthy democracy that respects the will of the majority and the voice of the minority.

"It's how we demonstrate, as the world's leading democracy, how well we can function as a pluralistic society," former Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., who served with Biden in the Senate for nearly three decades said. "The president has said what the stakes are. Democracy is being tested. That's not hyperbole. ... There's a polarization occurring not only here, but globally."

But at times, he has struggled mightily with implementing values he has publicly embraced. For example, Biden has kept many of Trump's refugee policies after having attacked them on the campaign trail. Biden tweaked Trump’s “Title 42” policy, which forces the expulsion of asylum-seekers while they await adjudication of their claims, by allowing unaccompanied minors to remain in the U.S. But he has not rescinded the policy for adults and families, which make up the vast majority of asylum-seekers. In mid-April, he reversed his decision to raise the cap on refugees admitted to the country this year from 15,000 to 62,500. Then, hours later and under heavy pressure from progressives, the White House said he would increase the number but probably not to 62,500.

Workers with the San Francisco Department of Public Works repave a section of 24th Avenue on April 08, 2021, in San Francisco.

Workers with the San Francisco Department of Public Works repave a section of 24th Avenue on April 8, 2021. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images file)

Workers with the San Francisco Department of Public Works repave a section of 24th Avenue on April 8, 2021. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images file)

The new president also faces enormous challenges on Capitol Hill, where only a handful of Republicans have publicly signaled any interest in working with him on the American Jobs Plan. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has called the proposal a "Trojan horse," because it is billed as a transportation and infrastructure measure but includes hundreds of billions of dollars for affordable housing subsidies, elder care and other programs that don't neatly fit into traditional definitions of infrastructure.

Republicans say that they have been put off by Biden's turning to the reconciliation process to circumvent them and that they are infuriated by his depiction of GOP-backed measures to restrict voting at the state level as racially motivated. They fear that he will use reconciliation again to pass a Democratic voting rights law that would undercut the  state efforts.

"It is entirely possible that they'll be able to get a number of those things through using reconciliation," Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said on Fox Business. "I struggle with that and him trying to proclaim himself a unifier even while he's sowing the seeds of racial discord."

So far, Republicans are banking on overreach by Biden and his Democratic allies. They provided no votes in either chamber for his American Rescue Plan, despite its delivery of cash to their constituents, their states and the national effort to inoculate Americans against Covid-19. If they win control of either chamber in next year's midterm elections, Biden's legislative agenda could collapse. 

Most Republicans see political peril, rather than reward, in helping Democrats pass Biden's agenda, wagering that they are more likely to infuriate their own voters than they are to win the favor of Democrats in their states and districts.

Vice President Kamala Harris, President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in the Rose Garden of the White House on March 12, 2021.

Vice President Kamala Harris, President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in the Rose Garden of the White House on March 12, 2021. (Alex Wong / Getty Images file)

Vice President Kamala Harris, President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in the Rose Garden of the White House on March 12, 2021. (Alex Wong / Getty Images file)

Biden said he would be able to overcome partisan polarization — but he didn't expect to undo decades of conflict in his first 100 days, according to people close to him. He is more likely to view his window for action through a different lens. 

"He's been focused on the timeline, but I think it's because of the nature of his inbox," the Biden adviser said, referring to top aides who have reminded him of the 100-days marker. "Privately, Biden understands the first year itself is the longer game."

For now, Biden is expected to highlight the rescue, jobs and families plans, along with the host of executive actions he has taken to change domestic and foreign policy, when he addresses a joint session of Congress on Wednesday. He will no doubt also refer to the most significant foreign policy move of his early presidency: the decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"It's just a marking moment to see if we've made progress in the areas we wanted to make progress in," Psaki, the White House press secretary, said of the snapshot of the early stage of the presidency. "There was a recognition from him and everyone that the first 100 days would set the tone."