Can Biden Make Up With His Frenemy to Save His New Deal?
Reviving pieces of the Build Back Better plan will require the president to learn from his earlier mishandling of Senator Joe Manchin.
Joe Biden in the Oval Office of the White House.
Photographer: Al Drago/The New York Times/Bloomberg
Every time President Joe Biden sits at his ornately carved 19th-century oak desk in the Oval Office, he’s confronted with a massive portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt reminding him of an unfulfilled promise to bring sweeping social change.
His Build Back Better plan rivaled the ambition of FDR’s Depression-era New Deal, with a price tag of $3.5 trillion. It aimed to plug holes in the social safety net ripped open by the pandemic. It would have transformed U.S. energy policy to slow the planet’s warming and paid for child care, community college, leave for parents and caregivers and in-home care for the elderly and the sick.