Mandel Ngan/Pool via AP
President Joe Biden speaks from the Oval Office of the White House as he gives his farewell address, January 15, 2025, in Washington.
My colleague Luke Goldstein wrote last week about the handful of agencies working until the final hours to deliver victories for the American people, and, if anything, the announcements have intensified from there.
Over the past seven days, the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division sued private equity firm KKR for simply failing to inform the agency about mergers as per the law on 16 occasions, sued to block a merger between the two largest business travel agents, and issued joint guidelines on what business practices affecting workers violate antitrust laws; the Federal Trade Commission sued John Deere for preventing farmers from fixing their own equipment, released a staff report showing pharmacy benefit managers executing insane markups of 1,000 percent or more on prescription drugs, finalized updates to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule to prevent companies from monetizing kids’ personal data, clarified that independent contractors and gig workers could organize unions without violating antitrust laws, and took action against GoDaddy for failed data security policies; and finally, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined Cash App $175 million over enabling fraud; sued Capital One for changing its savings account policies to cheat customers out of $2 billion in interest, released research showing hundreds of thousands of mortgages that were underinsured for flood risk, and proposed a rule to end “debanking” that kicks customers off of financial services based on their personal views.
That’s enough activity in some agencies to last an entire year, done in three agencies the week before the end of the Biden presidency.
The Biden White House has been active, too, in these final days. And some of their announcements help unlock the key to why, despite a generally populist economic agenda, voters were so frustrated with the president, sending him out the door with the lowest approval ratings of his entire term. Too often the White House would operate at cross-purposes to its more populist agencies, sometimes contradicting the very arguments the president himself was making in public. This dichotomy between values and actions grates on people, alienates potential allies, and gives voters little sense of a coherent agenda.
More than anything, the tenuous cease-fire in Gaza (which Benjamin Netanyahu already seems to be undermining) represents this gulf between actions and words. For more than a year, the State Department allowed the Israeli government to ignore demands to let humanitarian aid trucks into the war-torn region. It neglected U.S. statutes barring military funding for countries guilty of human rights violations. And it let its cease-fire deal twist in the wind for several months without putting any pressure on Netanyahu, least of all using the threat of withdrawing funding or arms shipments. Only the change of administration led to the final acceptance of a deal Hamas had agreed to as far back as July. This was a major factor in the 2024 election (according to new polling) and damaged the Democratic Party’s pretensions to upholding human rights and collective security in the region. It was an unmitigated disaster.
Closer to home, in Biden’s farewell address to the nation on Wednesday, he warned of a tech-industrial complex and the rise of “an oligarchy … of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.” This may prove prescient in the history books, and many actions of Biden’s administration, like the successful Big Tech monopolization cases, appear designed to thwart this oligarchy.
Yet the same week that he issued this warning, Biden signed an executive order that gives that tech-industrial complex an enormous gift, by making the creation of data centers for artificial intelligence a national-security imperative. The order aims to accelerate the production of data centers (in ways not afforded to, say, the production of housing for human beings), and requires the leasing of federal land owned by the Pentagon and the Department of Energy to build data centers (see previous parenthetical). The clear beneficiaries of this are the companies striving to build these data centers—Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Meta—which now don’t have to engage in site location scouting or securing infrastructure needs.
While the companies are asked to bring their own clean-energy generation to match the energy needs for the data centers, which are enormous, as The Lever reports, in the past these guidelines for clean energy have often been reciprocal in nature—bringing online clean energy somewhere but not directly serving the data centers—with the more energy-intensive sites using more fossil fuel and other dirty sources. The incoming president, Donald Trump, could change or disregard this aspect of the order. Consumer costs could also rise as a result of pressuring the grid with new energy needs, especially in the short term. (The executive order claims to have guardrails against this.)
For these reasons, several Democratic senators cautioned against the executive order when it was first rumored. But Biden clearly sees more computing power to train AI models as a geopolitical tool. “We will not let America be out-built when it comes to the technology that will define the future,” the president said in his statement announcing the order. As Henry Farrell writes, a great game to control AI is predicated on numerous assumptions and hype about the utility of AI, how soon it will manifest, and whether you must have the most computing power to succeed. But regardless of all that, there’s no question that Biden is empowering a tech-industrial complex to “define the future,” even as he warns of its emergence.
Biden, including in this executive order on AI, has called for more aggressive countering of China for its mercantilist policies. One of the biggest that is strangling U.S. industries right now is the exploitation of the “de minimis” loophole, which allows low-end Chinese goods to avoid tariffs and inspections, undercutting domestic producers. At the last minute, the administration made two wimpy pilot programs to address this loophole permanent, to the consternation of advocates who were seeking a solution for U.S. workers and businesses.
The pilot programs allow foreign e-commerce companies to voluntarily submit data on their shipments; Shein, one of the major Chinese e-retailers, joined one of the programs just last month. Over 1.4 billion de minimis packages reached America in fiscal year 2024 according to Customs and Border Protection, a 40 percent increase over the previous year. Enforcement has been, well, de minimis; these shipments do not go through typical customs processes, bypassing relevant physical inspections or tariffs. Essentially, the inspection process is outsourced to the companies and the authorities in their home countries. This is woefully inconsistent with warnings about China’s rise in manufacturing and retail goods.
Another Biden initiative was to prevent Chinese enterprises close to the state from controlling communications infrastructure. Congress passed, and Biden signed, legislation that would ban TikTok in the U.S. unless its parent company sold it off to a U.S. buyer. Instead, TikTok futilely tried to work the court system to nullify the ban. So Biden has now completely reversed himself, with the administration working desperately to stave off a Sunday deadline.
If Biden didn’t want the political fallout of banning TikTok, he shouldn’t have signed the bill. Now he looks completely ineffectual by trying to reverse his own initiative. Trump is no better on this; he supported the TikTok ban until a wealthy investor in TikTok’s U.S. operations gave him money; now TikTok’s CEO will sit on the dais at the inauguration, along with the rest of the tech oligarchy.
Not everything Biden has done in the final moments has been quite so absurd; his offshore-drilling ban apparently was done under a statute that makes it exceedingly hard to repeal, frustrating Trump’s “Drill, baby, drill” approach. But even this doesn’t match the Biden imperative to blitzscale energy-hungry data centers.
What are we to take away from this slapdash bundle in the final days of the presidency? People will remember pardoning Hunter Biden and clemency for a few unsavory characters, a speech designed for people to watch 50 years into the future, and a cease-fire deal hanging by a thread. But what none of us get is any understanding of how Biden thinks about the world. His essay in the Prospect actually did provide that, but White Houses are big places, not everyone agrees, and a weak president doesn’t filter out the parts that don’t fit the narrative.
The president’s weaknesses coming into the White House were an inability to set priorities or make up his mind. He goes out making those same errors. Biden is a one-term president because of global inflation and questions about his age, full stop. But he also faltered in keeping control of his agenda, in keeping his administration on a singular course. That’s the depressing reality.
