Brian Deese on the Legislative Legacy of President Biden's First Two Years

Joe Weisenthal (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:16)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:17)

Tracy, you know, one of the things that I think is most surprising or striking about the Biden administration or the first two years of the Biden administration is how slim the sort of congressional majority was, like just 50 seats in the Senate, extremely narrow, and yet legislatively, an incredibly consequential two years, I would say.

Tracy Alloway (0:41)

Yeah, I'm trying to think of all the big spending bills that happened past, but you had like the Inflation Reduction Act, you had a climate bill, you had the emergency sort of fiscal stuff that was announced right at the beginning of COVID. There was a lot that happened.

Joe Weisenthal (0:58)

Yeah, and of course there was the CHIPS Act as well.

Tracy Alloway (1:02)

Oh, CHIPS Act, yeah.

Joe Weisenthal (1:03)

So it was really consequential, also usage of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in kind of a novel way, just like a very big two years. And when we think about these bills, and Obama had a pretty big, his first two years were pretty big because Obamacare got passed during that time.

It seems to many, and I guess I would say, I would include myself in that category that not just are these sort of big pieces of legislation that got passed, but kind of a break from how past presidents have treated economic management specifically with things that seem to resemble like industrial policy.

Tracy Alloway (1:43)

Yes.

It's funny that you said industrial policy because I see people use the term industrial strategy a lot. It's almost like industrial policy has like negative connotations, but you're right. You're right. It feels much more, I also don't know if interventionist is the right word, but it feels much more active in identifying choke points in the economy, things that are important either from a strategic perspective or maybe they're important for overall quality of life for Americans and prices and things like that, and then doing something about it.

Joe Weisenthal (2:22)

Right, identifying say domestic battery consumption, identifying battery materials, identifying the need to have good chip fabrication. And domestically, this was not an approach that Trump took. It wasn't an approach that Obama took. I don't think it was an approach that Bush took. So it feels very new.

And so it is a good time to take stock of what was done the last two years and sort of like, how will we evaluate ultimately the success of these pieces of legislation?

Tracy Alloway (2:52)

Absolutely. And we really do have the perfect guests to do that.

Joe Weisenthal (2:55)

Sometimes that line is like, okay, is it the perfect guest? In this case, I believe that actually is the case because we are going to be speaking with Brian Deese. He is the head of the President's National Economic Council involved in all of these sort of major actions.

And he's leaving. We're recording this February 15th. This is his last week on the job. He's getting a very, I assume, much needed break. So Brian, thank you so much for coming back on Odd Lots.

Brian Deese (3:27)

Thank you both for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Joe Weisenthal (3:29)

Thank you. So let's start with that. I mean, like, so I alluded to this in the beginning, but, you know, I would like your take on it, which is A, you know, it has Bidenomics, so to speak, been characterized as industrial policy and setting aside terminology, how much do you perceive this approach to economic management as having been a sort of major break from the likes of which we saw under Trump, Obama and other previous presidents?

Brian Deese (4:00)

Well, I think that we have a long history in the United States, going back to even the early days of this country, in experimenting or utilizing industrial strategies. And you guys were talking about the industrial strategy, industrial policy, the different terms. I think it is the case that over the course of the last 40 years, there were forces that really pushed the concept of industrial policy into being viewed as a sort of dirty word or being viewed as somehow inconsistent with a capitalist market-based economic system and the things that you need.

I also think over that time, the world has changed in pretty important and fundamental ways and has brought back into clear relief the economic need for something approximating an industrial strategy. And I think it's totally fair and right to look at the Biden economic strategy and this through line between in particular, the three big bills that were passed, the infrastructure bill, the Chips and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.