On Sunday, nearly a month after a disastrous debate performance that left the Democratic Party in shambles, President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection. The decision puts to rest weeks of speculation and mudslinging, and leaves us with the far less incendiary task of assessing his legacy—something that peddles in nuts-and-bolts policy more than the sloganeering of campaigning.
And when it comes to tech policy, history may look back kindly on America’s 46th president.
One of Biden’s biggest tech initiatives, the CHIPS Act, aims to reshore production of semiconductors. The CHIPS Act has been effective at bringing tech to the heartland, with $272 billion of investments supporting 36,300 jobs—and has proven to be quite popular. According to a Morning Consult/Politico poll, two-thirds of the American public support the law.
“When Biden has looked at tech, he has been interested in ‘How do we bring the tech economy to more people, beyond Silicon Valley and beyond the coasts?’” Adam Kovacevich, founder and CEO of the Chamber of Progress, a tech industry coalition. (Kovacevich is a declared Democrat.)
The CHIPS Act seeks to ensure that the United States remains a leader when it comes to the global tech race against China. It also comes at a time when jobs are being lost to that country. The CHIPS Act, signed in 2022 and subsidizing U.S. manufacturers to the tune of $39 billion, may prove to be one of the smartest strategic moves as the world begins to worry about overexposure to Nvidia’s AI chips, which are made in Taiwan, a country whose future is always in peril as China stalks. (Last week, share prices in those companies collapsed after Donald Trump suggested he’d not do much to protect Taiwanese interests if elected.)
That interest in supporting the public, American business interests, and then tech companies’ profits, in that order, is evident throughout Biden’s tech agenda. More recently, his administration imposed protectionist tax rates on imported Chinese vehicles in order to protect the homegrown industry. And while the Affordable Connectivity Program ran out in late May after Congress couldn’t agree on its continuation, it managed to help level out inequalities when it comes to internet access in the United States. On the antitrust front, Biden has also tried to rein in the likes of Meta, Google, and Apple. Indeed, many felt his 2021 appointment of Lina Khan as chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was an inspired decision. “He hired the right people to pursue vigorous antitrust policy in connection with tech,” says Mark MacCarthy, senior policy fellow at Georgetown University.
“President Biden has done more than any American president to ensure that big tech works in the public interest,” says Emerson T. Brooking, director of strategy and a senior resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, a D.C.-based think tank. “While Biden has been strong, the courts and the Congress have not often played along.”
In some areas, he has gotten around that problem by issuing executive orders, such as on AI in October 2023, when he demanded the development of it be “safe, secure, and trustworthy.” (In May, he unveiled a set of follow-up principles aimed at protecting employees from AI’s advancement. His administration managed to get Microsoft, among others, to sign on to that voluntary code.) Yet, some would argue that the Biden approach to regulating AI has been led by industry voices and has resulted in rules that work in their favor—a concern that those with the most to gain have managed to capture the initiative of how rules are written.
Many of Biden’s policies have caused more headaches for Silicon Valley and Big Tech executives than Trump’s unabashedly pro-business attitude may do. It’s for that reason that people such as Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk have publicly supported Trump. But Biden’s still seen as preferable to the tech industry, according to a recent survey of key decision makers by The Information.
“President Biden had to thread a very thin needle,” says Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics at George Washington University. “With Europe advancing relatively aggressive tech regulation, Biden needed to simultaneously promote American tech innovation while trying to limit the harms of Big Tech in particular to Americans and to wider competition.” The gridlock in Congress made it all nearly impossible, Tromble says, adding, “The fact that he was able to advance his tech agenda at all under these conditions is truly noteworthy.”