Evan Vucci/AP Photo
President Joe Biden speaks during a Cabinet meeting at the White House, September 6, 2022, in Washington.
Tomorrow, the 118th Congress begins; who knows, by the end of the day it might even have a Speaker of the House. Whoever is chosen, Democrats will have lost their majority in the House, and with it their ability to unilaterally dictate the legislative process in Washington.
There will be important congressional fights in the next two years. Clearly, Congress is going to want to “do something” about crypto, even as laws already exist to prevent the worst of the industry’s scams. (SEC chair Gary Gensler has been alone in expressing this; this year, I would expect numerous enforcement actions to force registration of securities products.) Because Democrats failed to handle it in the lame-duck session, the debt limit will be a flashpoint in 2023, with Republicans openly vowing to force cuts to Social Security and Medicare as a condition for raising the borrowing cap. And it’s fully expected that the still-Democratic Senate will become a judicial confirmation factory, building on the 97 lifetime appointments it made in 2021-2022 to rebalance the federal bench.
But by and large, the business of governing will move inside the conference rooms and offices in executive branch agencies, where the business of interpreting and executing laws will be priorities. This is not really something that our political media is accustomed to covering. There often aren’t any votes to report on when an agency declines to enforce the law, or delays writing a rule. But we know its importance. The Dodd-Frank law was whittled down to a nub by bank lobbyists who swarmed the Securities and Exchange Commission and other financial regulatory agencies, which was perhaps the most high-profile example of this dynamic. With most other laws, we don’t even get that level of transparency.
In the case of the Biden administration, the task of rule-setting and enforcing is even more challenging. In some areas, they are swimming against a bipartisan current of comfort with corporate power, economic concentration, outsourcing of manufacturing, and environmental degradation. They also have three mammoth bills—the bipartisan infrastructure law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act—that represent the signature legislative output of the first term. All of them are in various stages of implementation, where decisions made by regulators and rule-writers will go a long way to proving their effectiveness.
The ultimate goal of these actions is, as the late Paul Wellstone so succinctly put it, “the improvement of people’s lives.” Recently, news observers got excited that the Biden administration timed the release and repurchase of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to win the government a $4 billion profit. But governmental day trading was most decidedly not the purpose of that program; it was to try to boost oil production and bring down gas prices (a dubious goal in the age of climate crisis, but a goal nonetheless).
Gas prices have most certainly plummeted below the rates of a year earlier; it’s unlikely that the SPR maneuvers setting a floor for oil production is responsible, as production has only nudged slightly higher. More likely, the price reduction comes from the usual lower demand in the winter and higher utilization rates for refineries, which was always the hidden driver of the price hikes. The fact that Biden demanded higher refinery capacity for six months had a lot more to do with the decreased prices than the fun oil trade.
In 2023, nothing will be more critical than getting the execution of policy right.
More decisions to improve lives will be made on a daily basis by the executive branch in 2023. Unheralded people like Gabe Klein, who runs the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation that will manage $7.5 billion in electric-vehicle charging station funds, or Jigar Shah, who runs the Loan Programs Office at the Department of Energy and has up to $100 billion in lending capacity for green-energy projects, will simply matter more in the overall scheme this year than Marjorie Taylor Greene or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Whether these and other bureaucrats honor the requests of the army of lobbyists being deployed to get their way on infrastructure development and the energy transition will make a big difference.
Yet the public can play a role too. Initially, the U.S. Postal Service’s plan for its next-generation postal trucks, the single largest segment of the federal fleet, included just a token few electric vehicles. But public outcry and administration nudging led to the December announcement that 75 percent of the first order of trucks will be EVs, and 100 percent after 2026. As Kate Aronoff notes, this isn’t a full victory, and more could be done if the administration could actually install enough Board of Governors officials to finally ditch Louis DeJoy.
The bigger problem is that the trucks will still be made at Oshkosh Defense’s non-union plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina, rather than the unionized OD facility in Wisconsin. That’s also a choice of the government: whether or not to require the purchases they make to be carried out with union labor.
Plenty of decisions like these will have to be made. We’ve already seen a number of good ones: Proposed rules would more closely scrutinize television advertising and other aggressive marketing for private Medicare Advantage plans, which have been accused of denying patients care and overcharging the government. The Environmental Protection Agency finalized a Clean Trucks rule that could significantly reduce pollution in vulnerable areas with heavy traffic. Federal drinking water standards seek to eliminate the dangerous “forever chemicals” known as PFAS from the water supply. The drinking water standards are already bearing fruit, as 3M has announced it would discontinue use of PFAS.
But not every step has been positive. The Department of Energy recently reversed a previous position by allowing $3.7 billion in funding support for carbon capture programs to go toward injecting CO2 into oil fields to produce “enhanced oil recovery.” In other words, this program from the Inflation Reduction Act, which is supposed to reduce carbon emissions, will be put to use funding the production of more crude oil.
These developments too often get relegated to the back pages (if they’re even reported on at all), which takes them out of the realm of the political conversation. That amounts to journalistic malpractice, and at least in 2023, nothing will be more critical than getting the execution of policy right. Whether antitrust authorities manage to block mergers in high tech and weapons manufacturing matters. Whether health care, finance, and competition authorities police the increasing role of private equity in our health system matters. Whether the hundreds of billions of dollars meant to protect the climate and transition our energy infrastructure actually reach their goals matters. And whether the Biden administration is ambitious enough in using its authority to bring positive change and tackle America’s challenges matters.
The Prospect has been keeping track of executive actions since even before the Biden administration took power. But with legislative action mostly exhausted, this is the year where those actions take center stage. Implementing policies new and old is the yardstick by which this administration will be measured in 2023. Biden seems determined to run for re-election, and his record can only be enhanced in the next two years, and the case for his continuation in the Oval Office strengthened, by getting the job done in his executive agencies. Many won’t pay attention to this fundamental aspect of governing. We will.
