The Crisis Presidency

On January 20, Joe Biden will face perhaps the most challenging environment of any new president. Presidents Lincoln (the attempted secession of 7 states and imminent civil war) and Roosevelt (the Great Depression) both faced serious problems. But they each faced a single (very large) problem and they both had strong working majorities in Congress. 

Joe Biden will deal with at least eight serious crises, each created or made worse by the incompetence or malevolence of the Trump administration. And he faces a deeply divided Congress and an electorate that President Trump spent four years dividing more than it was when he took office. He has already identified four of them as top priorities. 

Economic and employment crisis: We already faced growing poverty and inequality long before the pandemic. But the pandemic has made it far worse. The economy has made a slow “K shaped” recovery, with upper segments of society expanding their wealth and the professional classes using telecommuting, Zoom, Netflix, and carryout to maintain a semblance of normal life, while many at the bottom suffer unemployment, food and housing insecurity, and heightened exposure to the pandemic. Unemployment rates remain high and have stopped improving. Thousands have dropped out of the labor force. State and local governments are laying off thousands of first responders and teachers and some industries and small businesses are in crisis. Millions face eviction. Hours-long lines are appearing at food pantries around the country. Stimulus and economic restructuring are needed. But no economic recovery will be possible until the pandemic is tamed.

Pandemic. The pandemic is setting records every day, with a daily death toll exceeding 3000. Even if production and distribution of the vaccine all go smoothly, it will be six months or more before a significant number of ordinary Americans are protected. Biden will be challenged to restore the government’s tattered credibility and develop an effective plan to protect all the citizens, over the opposition of millions of people who believe Covid is a hoax and that wearing masks is tyranny. 

Civil rights/racial justice. Whether the issue is policing, incarceration, schools, employment, housing, or voting rights, little progress has been made in decades to overcome pervasive institutional racism. Trump has deepened the divides, emasculated the government programs to police the problem, and fed the beliefs of white bigots that they are the real victims.

Climate change. Disappearing Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets and glaciers, record climate disasters such as wildfires and record numbers of hurricanes, and record temperatures all emphasize that the climate crisis no longer is in the future.

But the Biden administration will also have to deal with four other important crises.

Healthcare. The ACA has been badly damaged in the past four years. Social security, Medicare and Medicaid face imminent funding crises. The opioid crisis rages unchecked in many towns and rural areas. After a year of forced living in isolation, the nation’s collective mental health may be at the lowest level ever. Finally, our healthcare system is facing an existential crisis. Hospitals are under physical and financial strain and the healthcare workforce is at a breaking point and could completely collapse.

Foreign policy. Our diplomatic infrastructure has decayed, our leadership has eroded, and our position in most parts of the world is weaker than it was four years ago.He didn’t “easily come up with something better” to replace the Iran treaty or “easily get Kim to eliminate nuclear weapons.” He didn’t bring the troops home, nor did he reduce the trade deficit with China or declare China a currency manipulator. He did weaken our alliances; weaken our position in the world; and allowed Russia, China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran to increase their regional power. We are further from a peace between Israel and he Palestinians than we were in the wake of the  Yom Kippur war. Americans are weary with the world.

Generational crisis. Student debt and economic uncertainty have held back the millennial generation and the economy. Money spent to retire student debt isn’t being used to buy a house or start a family. More recently, the educational, psychological, and developmental impacts of social isolation and a second disrupted school year on school-age children could last a long time. The educational achievement gap is undoubtedly widening; if virtual or hybrid learning is prolonged, the impact on at risk students could be severe.

At the other end of the age spectrum, less than half the “baby boom” has hit the full retirement age and the oldest boomers are still a relatively youthful 74 years old. Retirement and medical expenses are going to continue increasing rapidly and the day of reckoning for our healthcare system and for the Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid programs is approaching. Funding these programs will require federal and state budgetary tradeoffs between old age payments and education, defense, and everything else government does and will make it far more difficult to fund the federal debt.

Democracy crisis. We have suffered five years of assault by Trump and his acolytes on our democratic processes. Unfounded assaults on the legitimacy of one of the two major political parties (“traitors and scum”) and our election system; the “above the law” defiance of the president; and the near obliteration of our system of checks and balances will require priority attention. We just saw one of the two parties watch in silence as the president demanded the political prosecution of the last three Democratic party candidates for president and, even worse, that the courts or state legislators ignore the results of an election and disenfranchise 80 million voters.

Our federal election system seems to have survived – just barely. Some state legislatures were deterred from intervening in their state’s vote count because laws didn’t give them any role

Even with cooperation from Congress, there is a limited amount any President can address. One important question is whether the Republican party will rejoin the governing process after more than a decade of nihilism and obstruction. Will they simply rediscover that “deficits are evil” after ignoring the grotesque Trump (and Bush) deficits? Will they continue to rail about “Blue state bailouts” and “people who would rather sit at home than go to work?” The obstruction in Obama’s first term lengthened the recovery and inflicted unnecessary economic pain on most Americans. If they do it again, it will be a very long road to recovery. Biden will have perhaps the most talented team ever and there’s a lot he can do. But fully solving these problems will require some congressional cooperation.

Leon Reed is  former US Senate aide, defense consultant, and US history teacher. He is the chair of Gettysburg DFA.

GovernmentLeon Reed