REPORT: Investing in America Report: Today's Investments, Tomorrow's Future

Today, the President released the Investing in America Report: Today's Investments, Tomorrow's Future, which highlights the transformative impact of his Investing in America agenda, showing how thousands of projects across the country are revitalizing communities and strengthening our nation now and for years to come.

Read the full report HERE.

Introduction

When President Biden and Vice President Harris came into office, America was in the midst of a deadly pandemic, and our economy was reeling. Millions of Americans remained out of work. COVID-19 continued to shutter businesses, keep children out of classrooms, and kill thousands of Americans every day. President Biden and Vice President Harris were determined not only to address the public health and economic emergencies that faced the country, but also to support a recovery that would reach all communities, setting the stage for a stronger and fairer economy.

The President had an economic vision to rebuild the economy from the middle out and the bottom up. After decades of "trickle-down" economics that never trickled down, his agenda aimed to tackle rising inequality by investing in left-behind communities, addressing mounting costs from climate change, and accelerating the pace of growth to sow the seeds for broad prosperity for all Americans. President Biden and Vice President Harris charted a new path and created a plan to make smart investments in America, empower workers, and promote competition to lower costs and help small businesses.

Over the course of four years, the Biden-Harris Administration delivered on this vision and laid a strong foundation for America's renewal.

Within his first two months in office, President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan (ARP) — the most significant economic recovery package in U.S. history — to end the pandemic and revive the economy. The bill contained funding for COVID-19 response, stimulus checks for Americans, and support for small businesses, childcare providers, and retirees. All these measures aimed to get America back on track while avoiding a painful, long-tailed recession like those that accompanied previous recoveries, and it worked. America had the fastest and most broad-based recovery of any nation in the world.

The pandemic also laid bare broader tears in our nation's economic fabric: critical supply chains were too reliant on foreign actors, threatening national security and spurring inflation; economic growth was uneven, clustered in a handful of cities on the coasts that reaped outsized benefits while America's heartland was hollowed out by successive waves of offshoring and plant closures; and we lacked the infrastructure and incentives to win the economic competition of the 21st century. To address these broader challenges, President Biden proposed and passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and the CHIPS and Science Act (CHIPS) — cementing his Investing in America agenda, which marked the most significant investment in America since the New Deal.

The United States of America is the wealthiest country in the world, yet when President Biden took office, public investment in domestic infrastructure as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) had fallen by more than 40 percent since the 1960s, and the World Economic Forum ranked the United States 13th in overall infrastructure quality. After decades of disinvestment, crumbling roads and bridges, aging water systems, an unreliable electric grid, and inadequate high-speed Internet imposed real costs on businesses and families. President Biden recognized that for America to compete and grow, it needed to reverse this trend and make meaningful investments in infrastructure. Throughout his first year in office, President Biden worked across the aisle to craft BIL, which has spurred an "Infrastructure Decade" and is delivering the largest investment in American infrastructure since President Eisenhower.

The work of building a better America extended beyond investments in public infrastructure. It included reinvigorating America's private sector to make critical investments in domestic energy and manufacturing. President Biden's IRA made the largest investment in combatting climate change of any law in history — while strengthening energy security, creating good-paying jobs, reducing energy and health care costs for families, and making the tax code fairer. Similarly, CHIPS built on this industrial strategy to further American technological and manufacturing leadership in semiconductors.

President Biden also fought for strong Made in America provisions in these laws, ensuring that federal funds supported the build-out of American industrial capacity and brought back manufacturing jobs after decades of offshoring. As a result, these strategic public investments mobilized an additional $1 trillion in private-sector investments in clean energy and manufacturing in the United States. This government-enabled, private-sector-led approach defied expectations and is attracting private capital to critical sectors. After decades of outsourcing jobs, factories began returning to America, investing and building domestically, and creating good-paying American jobs. These efforts transformed the country for the better — reaching communities in every corner of the United States, including those left behind for decades.

Since the passage of these laws, these investments have helped create over 16 million new jobs. This represents the most job creation in any single presidential term in U.S. history, achieving the lowest average unemployment rate of any administration in the last 50 years, spurring 21 million applications for new businesses, and seeing stock markets hit record highs. To date, agencies have announced $700 billion in federal grants for clean energy, infrastructure, and manufacturing—equivalent to 99 percent of funds available in fiscal year (FY) 2024 or earlier. They have moved quickly to obligate 90 percent of this available funding.

This report provides an overview of the challenges the Biden-Harris Administration set out to solve, the federal investments made, accomplishments to date, and previews what is still to come.

Under President Biden and Vice President Harris' leadership, the Administration achieved more in one term than most presidencies accomplished in two. While the full effects of the President's Investing in America agenda will not be realized for years to come – its impacts on the economy, communities, and American families are here to stay.