Biden’s Team Wishes They’d Moved So Much Faster

I’ve been thinking about something that Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, said in a post-election interview: “The president has been operating on a time horizon measured in decades, while the political cycle is measured in four years.” What we’re seeing now is that this was a false choice. There is no way to cleave the policy of the next decade from the outcome of the next election. If you lose power, your carefully constructed set of bills and international alliances can be turned to cinder by your successor. If it is true that President Biden believed he was choosing the politics of posterity over the policies Americans would feel before the election, then he chose wrong. But I don’t think it was a choice. Delay has become the default setting of American government. The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was supposed to pump hundreds of billions into roads, bridges, rural broadband, electric vehicle chargers. By 2024, few of its projects were finished or installed. That wasn’t because the Biden team wanted to run for re-election on the backs of news releases rather than ribbon cuttings. But the administration didn’t make the changes necessary to deliver on a time frame the public could feel. Many members of Biden’s staff now bitterly regret it. 

[Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.”]