Biden’s domestic policy failures are mounting, too

It’s not just the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Many of President Biden’s domestic policy efforts have become a mismanaged mess. And yet, having failed miserably in handling several foreign and domestic policy challenges, the president wants voters to trust him with managing the next $3.5 trillion he wants to take from taxpayers.

Here are a few reasons why voters should be skeptical.

The Emergency Rental Assistance Program. A recent New York Times headline reads, “About 89% of Rental Assistance Funds Have Not Been Distributed, Figures Show.” The story reveals how badly the Biden administration has mishandled rental assistance.

Both Presidents Trump and Biden signed bills to provide some $46.5 billion to help renters pay their rent during the pandemic. But the government has failed to put that money into the hands of struggling renters, which would have helped both them and landlords, whom the government prohibited from evicting non-paying tenants.

Once the news got out about the mismanagement – which Goldman Sachs now estimates could mean some 700,000 households evicted this year – Democrats scrambled to contrive a solution. 

Even though Biden said on many occasions that he did not have the authority to extend the eviction moratorium past July 31, Democrats pressured the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to come up with a transparently ludicrous justification to allow Biden to do just that.

And Biden went along with it, even as he conceded that its real purpose was to provide enough time for his administration to distribute the rental assistance funds it should have released months earlier. The U.S. Supreme Court quickly struck down that effort. 

So now perhaps thousands of families will be evicted from their homes and apartments with no place to go — thanks to Biden’s mismanagement.

Wasted COVID-19 vaccine doses. Here’s a Sept. 1 headline: “15 million Covid vaccine doses thrown away in the U.S. since March, new data shows.”

The World Health Organization and poor countries are begging for COVID-19 vaccines. And yet in six months we have thrown away 15 million doses.

Before the delta variant surge, Biden frequently boasted of his administration’s work in distributing COVID-19 vaccines around the country — though much of that success was the result of plans put in place during the closing weeks of the Trump administration.

In any grand scheme such as the nationwide COVID vaccine distribution, there’s likely going to be some waste.

But good supply management isn’t just getting adequate doses of the vaccine distributed. It’s also retrieving unused doses so they can be transferred to poorer countries before they expire.

Biden has promised he would help those countries, and doses have been sent out. But letting 15 million doses be thrown away because Biden didn’t have a recapture plan is a major management failure that will cost lives.

Losing track of illegal immigrant children. And one more recent news item, this time from Axios: “The U.S. government has lost contact with thousands of migrant children released from its custody.”

Getting the information about the missing children didn’t come easily. Axios obtained it through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

And who’s surprised? Early in his presidency Biden conveyed the impression that illegal immigrants would be welcome, and so they came in record numbers — much to the surprise of the White House.

Team Biden tried to stifle media coverage of the immigration “challenge” – because no one was allowed to call it a “crisis” – at the border. But it was clear then, and now, that the administration botched it.

Will these children show up for their court dates? How do we know if they are with their parents or relatives, as opposed to people who will abuse or traffic them? Don’t ask Biden, the administration has lost contact.

And it’s not just these immigrants. The Associated Press reports the Biden administration may be doing a poor job vetting some Afghanis arriving in the United States. To be sure, there wasn’t much time to vet tens of thousands of Afghanis, but that’s because of the administration’s mismanagement of the withdrawal.

Of course, Biden is trying to quickly change the narrative away from his multiple management failures — sort of like the president’s advice to the former Afghan president to “change the perception.” Biden wants voters focused on his $3.5 trillion spending spree.

But why would anyone hand that much money to a president who has proven, repeatedly, that he cannot effectively manage many of the tasks he already has?

Merrill Matthews is a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas, Texas. Follow him on Twitter @MerrillMatthews.