The 2020 presidential election set a lot of records. Joe Biden became the oldest person to assume the office of president; Kamala Harris became the first woman, Black person and Asian person to become vice president, the list goes on. Many were relieved that Trump had been voted out of office, while others were skeptical of the new administration given some of the controversial decisions made while Biden was VP under the Obama administration.

Joe Biden took office in an unprecedented time in American history; the COVID-19 pandemic had just peaked; just a few weeks earlier a group of domestic terrorists had attempted to break into the capitol building and more were protesting the government’s response to police brutality than ever before. Many of Biden’s voters hoped that he would address these issues and return America to some semblance of normal, and while at times it seems he’s getting that done, the first year of the Biden administration is much less productive than many had hoped.

One of Biden’s biggest platforms during his campaign was the “Build Back Better” bill, a social and economic bill that intends to tackle climate change; COVID-19 and increase funding toward social programs. The bill passed in November and was a very split issue in the House; it passed by only seven votes.

One of the major features of the bill is providing tax breaks for companies that pledge to use clean energy, which is estimated to lower the cost of installing solar panels for companies by around 30%. While a lot of the blame for the climate crisis tends to fall on individual people for their energy consumption habits, 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from just 100 companies, and providing these companies a monetary incentive to reduce their impact on the environment can help curb the issue.

Not all of the money in the bill is going to wealthy business owners; however, 400 billion of the 1.2 trillion dollars in the bill are going to funding universal pre-K. If the bill is passed, no family that makes less than 300,000 a year will have to spend more than 7% of their income on their child’s pre-school education. This aims to tackle economic inequality, as many families that can’t afford childcare have to sacrifice having a job to supervise their children. Single-parent households struggle with this issue paramountly, as the parent often has no source of income at all when taking care of the child.

To further aid new parents, 200 million of the bill will go to four weeks of national, paid maternity leave. The United States is one of only a few United Nations countries that doesn’t provide paid maternity leave, and this is a long-overdue change. The Build Back Better bill, if passed, will take several steps in the right direction when it comes to putting American social programs on par with those in other developed countries. 

Unfortunately, the Build Back Better Bill is where most of my positive opinion of the Biden administration ends. Biden’s presidency has been littered with failed campaign promises, missed opportunities and the same policies Americans were hoping to avoid when Trump was voted out. In Biden’s campaign, he promised to eliminate student loan debts, which have been a hot-button issue in Congress for years. However, since taking office, Biden has only cleared roughly 11 billion dollars of student loan debt. This may sound like a lot without context, but this is less than 1 percent of the 1.7 trillion dollars of total student loan debt.

Before taking office, Biden had planned to pause all deportations from the US-Mexico border, but arrests at the border reached an all-time high this year. Over half of the budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement that Biden has proposed would go to detention and deportation of immigrants.

The indiscriminate bombings in the Middle East that became commonplace during the Obama administration have continued through the Biden administration, and they show no signs of slowing. Biden claims to support efforts to end police brutality and predatory policing practices as a whole, yet he plans to invest almost 300 million dollars in community policing. Police reform does nothing to mitigate the issues with violence in the police force at its core; it simply changes the way it manifests. For instance, when Eric Garner was choked to death in 2014, the NYPD moved to ban chokeholds. When George Floyd was killed last year, the Minneapolis Police Department moved to ban kneeling on necks. Neither of these measures sees extrajudicial police killings as the issue, but rather the way that these killings are being carried out. Biden’s presidency has been filled with the same conservative policies that Trump was rightfully bashed for. However, Democrats and the liberal media have largely overlooked Biden’s shortcomings in the name of partisan politics.

My criticism of the Biden administration can be most aptly summarized by this MLK quote: “the Negro has been betrayed by both the Republican and the Democratic parties. The Democrats have betrayed him by capitulating to the whims and caprices of the Southern Dixiecrats. The Republicans have betrayed him by capitulating to the blatant hypocrisy of reactionary right-wing northern Republicans.” Conservative presidents like Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump are rightfully criticized for kneecapping Black people, poor people and for their socially conservative views, yet when a Democratic president is just as right-wing and elitist, it is largely ignored because they give good lip service to marginalized people. Deportations, extrajudicial police killings, the lack of LGBTQ protections and economic inequality are all still looming issues in this country, but Biden seemingly gets away with ignoring them. 

Voting Republican ensures backward steps in social progress, but Democratic presidents haven’t done much to remedy the damage done by right-wing figures either. Voting for a third party often feels like a wasted vote, so many leftist voters hoping for change are left between picking from one of two evils. Joe Biden happened to be that lesser evil, and he’s seemingly gone through the first year of his presidency coasting on his reputation for being better than Trump, which isn’t exactly a high watermark. Neither major political party has the people’s best interests in mind. Although, it becomes especially hurtful when the Democratic party gets away with calling themselves “progressive” simply because they aren’t virulently bigoted. Although blunt, Malcolm X put it best: “​​I only cite these things to show you that in America the history of the… liberal has been nothing but a series of trickery designed to make Negros think that the… liberal was going to solve our problems.”