United States | America’s 46th president

Tracking Joe Biden’s first 100 days

The Economist is keeping tabs on his cabinet, progress and the latest polling

This page tracks Joe Biden's first 100 days in office. Our interactive poll tracker is monitoring what America thinks about the rest of his term. For more coverage of the Biden administration visit our hub, listen to our American politics podcast and sign up to our weekly newsletter.

MOST CANDIDATES enter office with a positive approval rating: the American people like to give their new leaders a chance. Donald Trump was an exception: throughout his presidency, his rating was anomalously steady—and low. So far, Joe Biden’s calls for unity haven't helped him lessen the partisan rancour. The gap between each party’s approval ratings for Mr Biden was the largest ever recorded for an incoming president.

There is no shortage of problems for the Biden administration to tackle. In the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency, the country grappled with the largest civil-rights protests in American history, wildfires devastated western states, and a global pandemic killed 400,000 people and caused the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression. This chart tracks which issues Americans view as most important. With many hospitals still overwhelmed by covid-19 patients and restrictions threatening local economies, it is unsurprising that health care and jobs take top billing. Mr Biden says he wants to take a more energetic federal approach to curbing the virus. He has already used executive orders to do so.


Covid-19

Before entering office, Joe Biden vowed to deliver 100m vaccine shots by his 100th day in office. That was a worthy target, but not a terribly ambitious one: as of April 12th, almost 190m shots have gone into American arms. Mr Biden has since upped the ante, pledging to deliver 200m shots by the end of April. That goal, too, looks achievable. He has also directed states to make all Americans aged 18 and over eligible for the vaccine by April 19th, raising hopes with the prospect of a relatively normal summer.

Success will depend on many things, including the supply of approved vaccines, the effectiveness of local governments in distributing them and, crucially, the willingness of people to get the shot.

America was already contending with widespread vaccine scepticism before the coronavirus pandemic. Persuading people that the vaccine is safe, and fighting misinformation and conspiracy theories, will require a massive outreach campaign. The importance of mask-wearing and social distancing won’t diminish, however, even as vaccinations speed up and the country works its way towards herd immunity. Safe and effective vaccines provide a path toward the end of the tunnel, but the light—the end of the pandemic—is still a long way off.

Cabinet

As a candidate, Joe Biden cast himself as a steady, experienced hand. His cabinet reflects those virtues. Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, is a former deputy secretary of state; Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, previously chaired the Federal Reserve. It is also a cabinet of firsts. Deb Haaland is the first Native American cabinet secretary, Ms Yellen the first female Treasury secretary, Lloyd Austin the first African-American to run the Pentagon, Alejandro Mayorkas the first immigrant to take the helm at the Department of Homeland Security.

Mr Biden’s cabinet-rank choices evince the same emphasis on diversity and experience. The most unusual addition is John Kerry, a former senator and secretary of state, as presidential envoy for climate—a new position, and one that signals the importance which the incoming administration places on global warming, environmental policy and multilateralism.

Donald Trump’s cabinet was mainly old, pale, male and inexperienced. Nearly half of Mr Biden’s nominees are women; half are non-white. Almost all his choices have previous government experience; all have worked in the public sector. Putting diversity ahead of ideology has had interesting consequences for the centrist septuagenarian. The left wing of the Democratic Party may have objected to Mr Austin’s ties to Raytheon Technologies, a large defence contractor, but the historic nature of his nomination quelled any serious criticism. That the Democrats very narrowly control the Senate should also help Mr Biden confirm his more progressive choices. Ms Haaland, for example, might have faced a tougher road with a Republican majority.

Beyond the cabinet

America’s federal government has far more positions filled by political appointees than any other advanced democracy: more than 1,250 executive-branch jobs require Senate confirmation. Even so, presidents invariably struggle to get their nominees through the lengthy confirmation process. Joe Biden is no exception. There are three main reasons why the hiring process is so agonising: Senate confirmation tends to slow things down, hiring can seem less urgent than policy work, and interested parties jockeying for their preferred candidate can delay the confirmation process.


Executive orders

Executive orders are directives from the president to executive-branch agencies. They are not laws, but they can still accomplish much: the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, freeing enslaved people in the South, was an executive order, as was Franklin Roosevelt’s command to send Japanese-Americans to internment camps in 1942. Every president except one has used them, some more than others. James Madison and James Monroe issued one each; FDR issued 3,721—a record. Joe Biden has begun his presidency at a Rooseveltian pace. His executive orders have among other things reversed Donald Trump’s ban on trans people serving in the military, required masks and social distancing on all federal property, created a task force to reunite families separated at the southern border and expanded the federal government’s pandemic-response role.


Correction (January 22 2021): An earlier version of this article mis-stated the number of executive orders Joe Biden signed during his first two days in office.

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