Yet there was also well over $1 trillion for retrofitting public schools and public housing care for elderly Americans and job training efforts.
There was $300 billion for expanding Internet access and upgrading electric power grids. His proposal included $621 billion for conventional physical infrastructure - bridges, roads, airports, seaports, public transit, and charging stations for electric vehicles. In late March, Biden unveiled a massive $2 trillion infrastructure program, with a pronounced social welfare orientation that, while controversial, was once again evocative of the New Deal. Public works spending has been a third dimension of Biden's "first 100 days" closely retracing FDR's initiatives nearly nine decades ago. President Joe Biden (C) greets Barney Graham (L), during a visit at the Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory at the National Institutes of Health on Feb. There Biden, himself devastated while Vice President by his son's untimely death, observed movingly that "though broken, each of us can be healed," and broadened his earlier "struggle against COVID virus" theme, to figuratively include healing America's broken infrastructure, as Roosevelt had also once done. Just before the 2020 Presidential election, Biden visited Roosevelt's "Little White House," in Warm Springs, Georgia, where FDR, crippled early in life by polio, often went for solace and rest. Just days after his inauguration, Biden proposed the Cares Act, a $1.9 trillion economic support program providing $1,400 per person to lower-income Americans that was enacted by Congress within weeks. Social welfare amidst economic chaos was also an early focal point for Biden. New COVID-19 cases in the United States fell by more than 50 percent during Biden's first three months in office, due partially to the rapid progress of vaccination.Įarly highlights of Roosevelt's "first 100 days," as noted above, included aid to the unemployed, and an augmented social security system, just emerging in his day. And he seems to be succeeding - arguably better than Europe, Latin America, and indeed most other nations, following the chaos and tragic inaction, apart from successful vaccine development, of Trump's pandemic response.
The struggle against COVID-19 is clearly one central hallmark of Biden's first 100 days. With vaccinations in the United States recently running 3-4 million daily, Biden's seemingly ambitious goal will likely be achieved. Early in the 2020 campaign, he set a national goal of assuring "100 million vaccinations" in his "first 100 days in office," doubling that goal recently to 200 million vaccinations against COVID-19, in the same 100 days. Kennedy and Barack Obama before him, has often evoked the "first 100 days" symbolism of FDR.