After two years under the Biden Administration, Americans were called to the ballot box this November to renew the makeup of Congress. The Midterms are crucial for the incumbent President, as their outcome determines the President’s ability to carry out his agenda for the remainder of his term. These elections were all the more important to Joe Biden, given the continuing trend in American politics for the President's party to lose control of Congress to the opposition in midterm elections. Yet so far, the Democrats have disproved this premise by retaining control of the Senate, even though they have lost their majority in the House of Representatives. To understand how the midterm results are likely to influence Joe Biden’s policy agenda during the second half of his term, it is worth taking a look at what a Democratic-majority Congress enabled him to achieve thus far.

When Joe Biden was elected to the presidency in 2020, he came into office in less than ideal circumstances. Political tension was high after the Capitol invasion, and Biden faced a severely divided nation, with many Americans believing Donald Trump's allegations of voter fraud.  Economically, the country needed to recover from the severe downturn caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Biden's first objective in the White House was to pass the American Rescue Plan (ARP), a whopping $1.9 trillion stimulus package to address Covid’s negative impact on the U.S. economy. However, as Ken Kollman explains in The American Political System, the US Constitution does not vest the President with authority to decide on the allocation of federal funds (149). To do so, Biden had to rely on the support of Congress, which was then controlled by the Democrats in both chambers.

This majority in Congress was decisive in many ways for Biden. Indeed, this recovery plan was one of the most expensive in US history and induced substantial increases in federal government spending. This imperative highlighted a lasting partisan division among Democrats and Republicans on the federal government's role. While the former support government interventionism in the economy, the latter advocate for a minimal role (Kollman, 316). This clear dividing line expressed itself in the House during the vote on the final version of the aid package. With universal support from Democratic representatives and universal opposition from Republican ones, this bill passed on a party-line vote.

More broadly, this relief package was the first stone of Biden’s legislative agenda: the Build Back Better Framework. This plan reflects Biden’s ambitious domestic policy agenda thanks to considerable investments in social, infrastructure, and environmental programs. Through this plan, the Biden administration sought to fund the largest national public investment since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” thus marking the return of the "Big Government," which refers to a dominant federal government seeking to strengthen its authority over local and state governments. Yet the revival of the "Big Government" highlights one of the main dividing lines between Republicans and Democrats: the level of federal government power. 

The American system operates under a mix of dual and cooperative federalism. This means that some prerogatives depend exclusively on the federal government, like national defense, while others typically fall under the states' jurisdiction, like education. However, cooperative federalism also means that some prerogatives are shared, like social welfare and business regulation, and that authority over them heavily depends on the political color of Congress and the Presidency. Essentially, Republicans advocate for greater state freedom over these shared prerogatives, while Democrats favor a significant federal role in such domains, which Biden sought to achieve with the Build Back Better plan (Kollman, 77).

Still, even among the Democrats, the desire to revive the "Big Government" did not enjoy consensus. Indeed, the Build Back Better plan included two other parts, the American Jobs Plan (AJP) and the American Family Plan (AFP). While the ARP, the stimulus package, was passed without much trouble, the AJP and the AFP raised more concerns among moderate Democrats precisely because they entailed a significant expansion of the federal government’s action funded by an increase in the debt.

Specifically, Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator of West Virginia, was the main reason the AFP did not pass, considering the plan too expensive and too broad. He negotiated a $1.75 trillion cap on the $3.5 trillion initially requested by Biden, but even with that, the Democrats could not win his decisive vote. Indeed, the plan was to be financed partly by an increase in the corporate tax rate, which he opposed. Like the Republicans, he was against increasing federal social benefits funded by tax or debt increases.

As such, the AFP, the most ambitious plan on social and environmental issues, is still at a standstill because it has failed to gain the support of Manchin and the Republicans. The Democrats managed to pass the AJP but at the cost of profoundly reshaping it into a $1.2 trillion bipartisan bill, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, that included many features wanted by the Republicans to make consensus.

Therefore, the lessons of these first two years are numerous for Biden and the Democrats. The return of the "Big Government" desired by the president, the antithesis of the Republican project, was far from unanimous in his own camp. Only one of the three acts of the Build Back Better Act passed without a hitch, the others having to be thoroughly renegotiated or simply failing to win majority support in Congress, even though the Democrats then controlled it.

Although his party has retained control of the Senate, the loss of the Democratic majority in Congress will force Biden to rethink numerous policies he intended to pass, which are far from consensual. His ambitious legislative agenda is thus likely to come to a standstill because convincing Republicans to support further federal government interventionism is unlikely.

As such, Biden is likely to focus more on foreign policy, with managing the competition with China and the war in Ukraine currently being his two top priorities. Still, even on those matters, the President is likely to face hardships in Congress, as several Republican representatives have already expressed their intent to revise downwards the large sums of money allocated to the Ukrainian government.