Fact check: Did Joe Biden keep these 99 promises?

As Joe Biden campaigned for president in 2020, national and global discussion focused on one issue: the COVID-19 pandemic. As then-President Donald Trump downplayed the pandemic’s severity, Biden pledged to increase COVID-19 testing, vaccinate 50 million people in 100 days and get the virus under control.

But his campaign promises extended beyond the pandemic. Biden also said he would raise taxes only for the wealthiest Americans, pursue calls for racial justice and adopt policies to mitigate climate change. He said he would forgive all undergraduate student loan debt, lower prescription drug costs and end online sales of firearms and ammunition.

Over four years, PolitiFact monitored the progress of 99 campaign promises on the Biden Promise Tracker. PolitiFact reporters tracked each issue and measured outcomes – not intentions or efforts – with final ratings of promise kept, compromise and promise broken.

It’s the same system used with the Obameter, which tracked more than 500 of Barack Obama’s promises, and the 2017-2020 iteration of the Trump-O-Meter, which tracked 102 promises from the president-elect’s first term.

Our analysis of Biden’s performance on 99 promises found:

Biden kept 33 promises.

Biden compromised on 32.

Biden broke 34 promises.

Trump kept about 24 of his promises, compromised on 23 and broke 55. (Obama’s promise meter is not easily compared with Biden and Trump’s trackers because we tracked five times as many promises, and Obama had two terms to work on them.)

Our promise meters help voters gauge whether presidents kept their word to the American public. But a higher percentage of promises kept and a smaller percentage of promises broken does not automatically translate into a successful presidency, for several reasons.

One is that the issues that dominate in the year before presidents take office may not be the most salient years later. For instance, in 2020, addressing COVID-19 was unavoidable. But by 2024, voters were more interested in inflation and border security.

Another caveat is that our promise meters track single, verifiable promises, not the broad goals underlying them. This means a president can get credit on our promise meter for specific pledges but fail to achieve the larger goal underpinning those promises.

For instance, Biden pledged to expand affordable housing access, which earned a compromise rating. Although his administration pulled levers to increase access, congressional gridlock stymied Biden’s efforts to pass far-reaching housing assistance. The lack of affordable housing has worsened since Biden took office, largely because of longstanding challenges including low inventory and high demand.

Another example is Biden’s promise to end wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, which also earned a compromise rating. Biden pulled US troops from Afghanistan, but he has not ended wars in the Middle East, especially after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel and Israel’s military response. Biden’s removal of US troops from Afghanistan was also chaotic and deadly, killing 13 American service members, which significantly damaged his public support.

However, promise ratings do reflect a president’s ability to enact an agenda. Here’s a rundown of what Biden did and didn’t accomplish.

What Biden accomplished on his own

A president can enact some promises unilaterally with executive orders. Other promises require changing laws, meaning Congress must cooperate – making those promises harder to achieve in today’s highly polarised political environment.

Promises Biden kept by signing an executive order include rescinding Trump’s “Muslim bans”, reversing Trump’s family separation policies, rejoining the World Health Organization and reversing the transgender military ban.

Biden acted on his own to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court – the Senate confirmed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the court in 2022. He also created a bipartisan commission to consider reforms to the court.

Biden used executive branch agencies to issue regulations that kept his promises of restoring federal funding for Planned Parenthood and establishing new fuel economy standards.

One action that Biden was able to take on his own – the pardon of his son, Hunter Biden – ended up torpedoing one of his own promises. Because of the pardon, we rated his pledge to prevent the White House from interfering in federal investigations and prosecutions, as a promise broken.

Sometimes, even a presidential promise that doesn’t require Congress to act can be tricky to keep.

For instance, the Biden administration moved to allow the import of prescription drugs from other countries. But Florida, the first state to receive that right from the US Food and Drug Administration, hasn’t exercised it yet. So, that promise rating is a compromise.

Obstacles sometimes emerge in foreign policy, too. Biden earned compromises for his promise to join allies to negotiate with North Korea on denuclearisation (which didn’t accomplish much, given North Korean intransigence) and to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal (which foundered amid rising tensions between Iran and the US).

The tradeoff with setting policies by executive order is that a future administration can easily overturn them. Biden relied on executive orders when he earned some of his earliest promise-kept ratings, such as those overturning Trump’s controversial immigration policies. Trump has already said that when he returns to office he will reverse policies such as the military transgender ban and fuel economy standards.

What Biden accomplished, and didn’t, with Congress

Biden, a 36-year veteran of the US Senate, secured passage of major legislation during his first two years in office, when Democrats controlled both the House and Senate. But during his final two years, with a divided government, Biden got little done.

In 2022, he signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which helped fulfil his promise to reauthorise the Violence Against Women Act; it also earned him a compromise on requiring background checks for all gun sales.

Other times, passage required a special Senate procedure called reconciliation that allows a simple majority to pass legislation, rather than requiring 60 votes to move to a final vote. This meant Biden had to negotiate with two centrists in his own Senate caucus – then-Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona – to eke out a majority.

Biden signed two laws passed this way: the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

The American Rescue Plan Act was a sweeping package for pandemic relief – it was later criticised for exacerbating pandemic-induced inflation. It also enacted Biden’s promise to help state and local governments prevent budget shortfalls.

The Inflation Reduction Act, which passed after inflation had peaked, included provisions on climate change, corporate taxes and healthcare. One provision achieved his pledge to repeal the law barring Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices.

Parts of these two laws also enabled Biden to earn some compromise ratings. These include Biden’s promise to offer up to $8,000 tax credit for childcare (it lasted only a year), expand broadband to every American (networks are still being built out) and raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent. (Biden didn’t secure an across-the-board tax hike for corporations but enacted additional taxes on some of the biggest companies.)

Often, however, Biden simply couldn’t get Congress to support his agenda. On day one of Biden’s presidency, he proposed a bill to create a pathway to citizenship for nearly 11 million people. It went nowhere. Biden also failed to get lawmakers’ support for his promises to ban the manufacture and sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour and codify provisions of Roe v Wade, the now-overturned 1973 US Supreme Court case that protected abortion access nationwide.

Sometimes, Biden used executive orders to work around Congress, but the courts often stopped those efforts. He pursued forgiving student loan debt in an across-the-board way through executive order, but the US Supreme Court blocked it. Biden then turned to his executive authority to reduce student debt in a more piecemeal way for certain groups.

After the Senate failed to follow the House in passing the labour-backed 2021 PRO Act, Biden used his appointment power to name pro-labour members of the National Labor Relations Board, who have since voted to make union organising easier for workers in certain cases.

Sometimes, Biden simply backed off his promises. Late in his term, he signed bipartisan legislation to boost the social security benefits of certain state and local workers whose pension payments had been deducted from their monthly payouts. This meant Biden secured a compromise on his promise to expand and increase Social Security benefits, while breaking his pledge to put Social Security on a path to long-run solvency. The bill accelerated Social Security’s insolvency date by six months.

What do promise outcomes say about a presidency?

With any president, there is a disconnect between what the public thinks a president can do and what can be done.

This has been popularised as the “Green Lantern” theory, a term Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan coined. The term comes from a corps of characters in the DC Comics universe who possess rings that create “green energy projections” of enormous power, and if the ring isn’t working, it’s because the users don’t believe in themselves.

According to the theory, the public believes “the president can achieve any political or policy objective if only he tries hard enough or uses the right tactics”, either through public communication or legislative acumen. Nyhan considers this misguided.

Most voters don’t know about some of the major projects that will eventually benefit them, John J Pitney Jr, an American politics professor at Claremont McKenna College, told us. He pointed to infrastructure spending in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the CHIPS and Science Act, which allocated billions in federal funding for projects such as broadband access and roads and bridges.

“It takes years or decades to build a project,” Pitney said. “By the time people are actually benefitting from the projects, his presidency will be a difficult question on the (Advanced Placement) government exam.”

Biden earned a compromise rating for his pledge to require background checks for all gun sales, and his promise to decriminalise marijuana. But on both issues, he achieved policy results that hadn’t been seen in decades.

Frances Lee, a Princeton University political scientist, said Biden was not necessarily the primary factor in the gun bill victories. He harnessed the power of the national shock that followed mass shootings in a Buffalo, New York, supermarket and a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school, which left Republicans “on the wrong side of public opinion”, Lee said. Public opinion had also changed with marijuana, she said, with even Republican states voting to expand its use.

Candidates also have incentives to overshoot on promises.

“Presidential candidates almost always exaggerate what it’s possible for them to accomplish in office using the powers of the presidency, which are quite weak in formal terms,” Pitney said.

Regardless, candidates aim for lofty goals because voters wouldn’t pay much attention if they didn’t, said James M Curry, a University of Utah political scientist.

“You can’t excite voters by running on a campaign platform of not trying to accomplish anything big,” Curry said. “This leads to a cycle of over-promising and under-delivering, which absolutely leaves at least some voters perpetually disappointed in presidents, the parties and the Congress.”

Source