With the Capitol building and grounds restored after the catastrophic attack on them by Trump supporters just two weeks earlier, President Joe Biden took the presidential oath on January 20, 2021, with spectators on the stage distanced and masked as the Covid pandemic raged. The new 46th president’s top priorities included controlling the virus, which had killed more than 400,000 Americans, and restoring the U.S. economy, battered by a national shutdown to maintain public health.

The Cabinet

Before taking office, Biden had sent a clear signal that after four years of inexperienced and unpredictable leadership under Trump, it was time to build a mature team ready to take on the massive challenges facing the country. His cabinet and staffing choices also reflected Biden’s pledge to assemble the most diverse cabinet in history. Biden encountered criticism for recycling some officials who served under Barack Obama and for creating a team whose primary policy ambitions appeared aimed at tackling the twin pandemic and economic crises confronting America, at the expense of pursuing broad change that progressives desired.

Among Biden’s picks, Janet Yellen, who at 74 was the most senior cabinet official, became the first female secretary of Treasury Department. She had served as Federal Reserve chair from 2014 to 2018. Unlike leading the Fed, which is intended to be more insulated from politics, at Treasury she had to collaborate closely with Congress to promote bills to stimulate the economy and ease economic hardship from the pandemic.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra also immediately faced the Covid emergency. Biden and Becerra, the first Latino to head HHS, took a more aggressive approach than the Trump administration in combating the virus, especially by promoting testing, masking, and vaccination. HHS encompasses a wide range of agencies to ensure public health, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and Food and Drug Administration, that were crucial to saving lives and ending the pandemic. Becerra also proved a valuable adviser to Biden in strengthening the Affordable Care Act after Trump and congressional Republicans repeatedly tried to repeal it. As attorney general of California, Becerra had led a multi-state effort to preserve the ACA, which became an effective and popular policy for Americans to acquire affordable health insurance.

Biden fulfilled his promise to build an administration that “is going to look like the country.” In addition to Yellen and Becerra, the president broadened diversity of his domestic policy team by naming New Mexico congresswoman Deb Haaland secretary of interior, the first indigenous American to serve as a cabinet secretary. A member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, Haaland represented a victory for progressives who had long lobbied for a Native American to head the Interior Department. Her appointment and service signaled a change in the government’s long and often tragic relationship with the country’s indigenous population.

Haaland created the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative to investigate abuse of Native American children in residential schools founded under the 1819 Civilization Fund Act. Children were forcibly removed from their families and subjected to all means of denying their indigenous heritage, stripping them of their native dress, names, hairstyles, and language. Many suffered physical and sexual abuse, fell ill and died, and were buried in unmarked graves. Secretary Haaland’s own grandparents had endured these schools’ indignities and cultural abolition. She made it a point to attend Road to Healing events around the country where she listened to survivors’ stories of the hellish circumstances they faced in Indian Boarding Schools.

Biden chose Michael S. Regan, who led the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, to head the Environmental Protection Agency, and Brenda Mallory, a veteran of environmental law and regulation, to lead the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality. As African Americans, they both had personal and professional understanding of the adverse impact environmental practices and policies have on low-income and minority communities, whose locales often expose their residents to toxic chemicals through air and water pollution.

The Obama era resurfaced in several of Biden’s selections. Tom Vilsack, named secretary of agriculture, had served two terms in the same position under President Obama. Denis McDonough, whom Biden chose for secretary of veteran affairs, had served as Obama’s chief of staff for four years, as well as deputy national security adviser.

Biden recruited another name from the Obama administration—Merrick Garland—although he did not actually serve in it. In 2016, President Obama had nominated Court of Appeals Judge Garland to a Supreme Court seat vacated by Justice Antonin Scalia’s sudden death, but Republican Mitch McConnell, Senate majority leader, refused to consider his nomination. Biden named Garland to be attorney general and lead the Department of Justice, but his admirable judicial temperament seemed ill suited for the avalanche of Trump litigation that faced him, including eventual federal indictments for the 45th president’s role in the January 6th insurrection and his violation of the Presidential Records Act by taking numerous boxes of White House files with him to his Florida home and failing to keep national security documents safe.

Critics claimed that these cases politicized the judicial process, and Democrats criticized Garland for taking too long to appoint Special Counsel Jack Smith to investigate the former president’s actions. In June 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that neither incumbent nor former presidents could be criminally indicted for acts exercised under their core constitutional powers, thus ending any chance of holding Trump accountable for thwarting the federal rule of law.

Garland also upset Democrats by naming a special counsel, Robert Hur, to investigate some vice-presidential papers discovered in Biden’s home and office. After his October 2023 interview with Biden, Hur decided in 2024 not to proceed with a case against him, describing the president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Release of the recorded interview in 2025 proved the point.

In another nod to diversity, Biden selected Pete Buttigieg, former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and a presidential candidate in 2020, as secretary of transportation. A young, brilliant, charismatic Navy veteran, with Harvard and Oxford degrees, the latter as a Rhodes Scholar, he became the first openly gay cabinet member in U.S. history. He and his husband adopted two newborn fraternal twins during Buttigieg’s cabinet tenure, and activists praised them for representing same-gender fatherhood.

The Covid Pandemic and the U.S. Economy

On the domestic scene, President Biden had to address immediately the ravages of the deadly coronavirus, which ultimately claimed more than 1.1 million American lives. Not since the flu pandemic of 1918-1919 had one disease inflicted such death and social upheaval on the United States and around the globe.

With the economy in free-fall as Biden took office, his first priority was to pass a stimulus package through Congress. Democrats held both the Senate (via Vice President Harris’s tie-breaking vote) and the House of Representatives (under Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s leadership). These Democratic majorities helped pass the American Rescue Plan Act, through a process known as reconciliation, and Biden signed it into law on March 11, 2021. It provided payments to taxpayers with $75,000 or less in income, expanded unemployment benefits and the child tax credit, created a grant program to support the restaurant industry, and gave money to K-12 schools to help them reopen.

During a national address, the president announced more good news that day for Americans desperate for it: by May 1, Covid vaccines would be available. They did not prevent the disease but offered some protection against the virus and helped reduce hospitalizations and deaths.

Although Biden, through his long Senate experience, created bipartisan congressional support for the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which he signed in November 2021, Republicans would later blame its $1.2 trillion price tag for fueling inflation, which rose to 7 percent during Biden’s first year in office. Nevertheless, it improved federal highways, funded high-speed rail lines, rebuilt bridges, and bolstered transportation safety.

The president’s second summer in the White House produced welcome news for stimulating the U.S. economy, with Biden signing two major bills within a week of each other. On August 9, 2022, the president signed the CHIPS and Science Act, which appropriated $280 billion for semiconductor and chip research and manufacturing. On August 16, he signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which aimed to reduce the federal budget, lowered prescription drug prices, and invested in domestic energy production, especially clean energy.

Biden also issued an executive order cancelling up to $10,000 of student financial aid debt or $20,000 for holders of Pell Grants. Progressives cheered Biden’s efforts to reduce or eliminate burdensome student loan debts, but a conservative Supreme Court, shaped by Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), voided what would have been the president’s most impactful version of the policy. This failed attempt at student loan relief, combined with inflation that raised the costs of food, fuel, mortgage rates, and nearly all consumer goods, soured many Americans on the state of the economy, despite the Biden administration’s efforts to stress improving macroeconomic indicators and the gradual decline of inflation to below 3 percent by 2024.

By the time Biden left office in 2025, all major financial indicators showed the United States to be among the strongest economies in the world, having recovered faster and more broadly from the Covid crash than comparable nations around the globe. Yet many Americans did not feel these macro-economic advances in their household budgets.

Immigration

Immigration had grown as a pressing issue in the United States partly because President Trump’s emphasis on it, making it a key issue in his campaigns and during his administrations. President Biden assigned the conundrum of immigration policy to Vice President Harris who was to encourage Mexico and Central American countries, such as Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, to address their economies, drug trade, gang violence, and famine. These issues propelled the majority of immigrants and asylum seekers to seek entry at the southern U.S. border. Indeed, immigration encounters there nearly doubled during the Biden administration to more than 2 million per year.

In 2024, Congress considered a bipartisan border bill that would have given the president emergency expulsion authority and increased the threshold for screening asylum seekers, but it also created a new protection program for them. The proposal provided pathway to citizenship for Afghan allies, 50,000 more green cards annually, and protection for dependent children for H-1B visa holders. When 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump encouraged Republican members to oppose the legislation so that he could use immigration as a campaign issue against Democrats, he succeeded, and the bill failed.

With continuing low approval ratings, and the fact that presidents’ parties usually lose congressional seats in midterm elections, Democrats feared a shellacking in the November 2022 congressional races. Miraculously, they eked out a slim Senate majority (51-49) but lost the House of Representatives to a 222-213 Republican takeover.

Shortly after the 2022 congressional elections, Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act, which defined marriage as a legal union between two individuals that must be recognized at the federal and state levels. As vice president, Biden had expressed his support for marriage equality, even ahead of President Obama, and his administration supported more LGBTQI+ rights initiatives than any presidency in history, including changing “dishonorable discharges” to “honorable” for most military veterans forced to leave the service due to sexual orientation. Biden also allowed transgender service members to remain in the military.

The Courts

So much of a president’s agenda rises or falls according to the Supreme Court’s decisions if his policies are challenged in courts. Biden’s long support for reproductive rights suffered a major blow when the nation’s highest court overturned federal abortion rights in 2022’s case of Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization. The president labelled the Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade a “tragic error,” encouraged Congress (unsuccessfully) to restore federal abortion rights, and signed an executive order to direct federal agencies, especially HHS, to facilitate access to reproductive care, including abortion and contraception. The administration strove to protect access to pharmaceutical abortion and the right of interstate travel for those seeking the procedure.

The Court also struck down the use of affirmative action (that is, racial preferences) in higher education admissions. Biden, however, gave Black Americans reason to celebrate when he signed the law creating Juneteenth as a national holiday and approved the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which civil rights proponents had advocated for decades. Another win for racial equity occurred when Biden fulfilled his 2020 campaign promise to place the first Black woman on the Supreme Court. Federal Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson replaced Justice Stephen Breyer in 2022. She formed a three-person liberal bloc, along with Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, that often found itself outnumbered by five or six of the conservative justices in many key cases on social issues, including in the landmark abortion and affirmative action decisions.

Gun Safety

Another issue continued to disrupt societal peace and security during the Biden years—mass shootings, especially of school children. On May 24, 2022, a young man entered an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, opened fire with an automatic rifle, and murdered 19 children and 2 teachers. It was almost a decade since Vice President Biden had urged Congress to pass sensible gun-safety measures after the similar carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Under grotesquely identical circumstance, Biden delivered one of the most moving speeches of his presidency. From the White House’s Roosevelt Room, he began, “I had hoped, when I became president, I would not have to do this again. Another massacre. . . . To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away. . . . When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?”

Just one month later he signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. The first major gun safety law in three decades, it incentivized states to pass “red-flag” measures to alert authorities to persons deemed a threat to themselves or others, expanded a law to prevent domestic abusers from owning firearms, and applied background checks for gun purchasers to those ages 18 to 21. The legislation did not end gun violence, but it took a step forward in answering the president’s haunting query on when America would start to counter the gun lobby.