The Budget Message of the President

To The Congress of The United States:

Where we choose to invest speaks to what we value as a Nation.

This year's Budget, the first of my Presidency, is a statement of values that define our Nation at its best. It is a Budget for what our economy can be, who our economy can serve, and how we can build it back better by putting the needs, goals, ingenuity, and strength of the American people front and center.

The Budget is built around a fundamental understanding of how our economy works and why, for too long and for too many, it has not. It is a Budget that reflects the fact that trickle-down economics has never worked, and that the best way to grow our economy is not from the top down, but from the bottom up and the middle out. Our prosperity comes from the people who get up every day, work hard, raise their family, pay their taxes, serve their Nation, and volunteer in their communities. If we make that understanding our foundation, everything we build upon it will be strong.

And we have already seen how that economic vision is working. When I took office, America was a Nation in crisis. A once-in-a-century pandemic was raging, claiming thousands of American lives each day. A punishing economic crisis had erased 22 million jobs in just 2 months in the spring of 2020 and upended the lives of millions more. The pain these crises caused was visible not just in the data, but in the lives of millions of Americans: Americans who faced an empty chair at the dinner table where a loved one once sat; who had to shut down the family business; who lined up for miles in their cars waiting for a box of food to be put in the trunk; who went to bed staring at the ceiling wondering how they would get through tomorrow.

Through the American Rescue Plan, we answered the emergency and provided desperately needed relief to hundreds of millions of Americans. Immediately, the law began delivering shots in arms and checks in pockets.

The American Rescue Plan is also helping schools reopen safely, helping child care centers stay in business, and helping families pay for child care. In fact, it is providing the largest investment in American child care since World War II. It is delivering food and nutrition assistance to millions of Americans facing hunger. It is providing rental assistance to keep people from being evicted from their homes. It is helping small businesses and restaurants stay open or re-open. It is making healthcare more affordable. It is supporting the recovery of State and local governments. And it is putting us on track to cut child poverty in half this year.

With the resources provided by the American Rescue Plan, we are turning the corner on the pandemic, and powering an equitable economic recovery. In my first 100 days in office, our economy created more than 1.5 million jobs, the most in the first 100 days of any President on record. But more work remains—not simply to emerge from the immediate crises we inherited, but to build back better.

The Budget lays out the essential investments that my Administration has proposed through the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan.

The American Jobs Plan puts millions of Americans to work to build our Nation back not just to the way it was before the pandemic, but back better. Americans will rebuild America's transportation infrastructure, water infrastructure, and broadband connectivity infrastructure. Americans will build a clean energy future while investing in communities at risk of being left behind during our energy transition. American workers and American farmers will make unprecedented progress in our effort to tackle climate change. And, thanks to the biggest increase in non-defense research and development spending on record, Americans will boost America's innovative edge in markets where global leadership is up for grabs—markets like battery technology, biotechnology, computer chips, and clean energy. Finally, the American Jobs Plan will create new and better jobs for caregiving workers who have been underpaid and undervalued for far too long.

The American Families Plan addresses four of the biggest challenges facing American families today, and lays the groundwork for individual, family, community, and national success tomorrow. It guarantees four additional years of education for every American, beginning with 2 years of universal high-quality pre-school for every 3- and 4-year old in America, and adding 2 years of free community college. It would make college more affordable and tackle equity gaps with increased Pell grants and investments in institutions serving low-income, first generation students, and students of color. And it provides access to quality, affordable child care to low- and middle-income families, expanded access to healthy meals because no child in America should be hungry or under-nourished, comprehensive paid family and medical leave, and expanded game-changing tax credits for families and workers.

The Budget complements these historic plans with additional proposals to reinvest in the foundations of our Nation's strength—expanding economic opportunity, improving education, tackling the climate crisis, and ensuring a strong national defense while restoring America's place in the world. In the 1950s, our Department of Defense created a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to enhance our national security, and DARPA's work helped lead to the creation of the internet, Global Positioning System, and more. The Budget would create an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health tasked with developing a new generation of medical breakthroughs—marshalling our Nation's incredible scientific capacity to help prevent, detect, and treat diseases like cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer's. And it calls on the Congress to make progress on healthcare by cutting prescription drug costs and expanding and improving the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, and Medicare coverage.

The Budget invests directly in the American people and will strengthen our Nation's economy and improve our long-run fiscal health. It reforms our broken tax code to reward work instead of wealth, while also fully paying for the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan over 15 years. It will help us build a recovery that is broad-based, inclusive, sustained, and strong. And it will demonstrate to the American people that we value them and that we recognize that they are the key to our shared prosperity; that their Government sees them, hears them, and is able to deliver for them again.

It will send to the world the message that I shared with a Joint Session of the Congress in April: that America is on the move again, and that our democracy is proving it can deliver for our people and is poised to win the competition for the 21st Century.

There are many challenges ahead. But every time America has faced moments of testing, we have emerged stronger. And I believe this Budget will help us become stronger than ever.

I look forward to working with the Congress to deliver on this agenda this year.

JOSEPH R. BIDEN, JR.

The White House.