White House works to Trump-proof Biden’s legacy ahead of tight election

(CNN) — On the day President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection, he convened his senior team at the White House, asking for a plan to “run through the tape” in his final six months in office, implementing key laws and cementing foreign policy, chief of staff Jeff Zients told political appointees on a call this summer.

Whatever Biden’s team accomplishes in its last months in office, should Donald Trump win back the White House, there is little that can’t be undone. Just as Biden spent his first hours in office reversing some of Trump’s biggest moves, rejoining international pacts and signing executive orders, so too can Trump cancel much of Biden’s agenda.

“The power of the presidency is such that it is quite difficult to Trump-proof agencies and programs from someone who is determined to break the guardrails and shift the direction of the country if the courts and Congress fail to play their proper role of constraining that overreach,” said Sen. Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat and close Biden ally.

Here’s how the Biden White House is working to protect some of his key accomplishments from a potential second Trump administration:

Legislative wins

The cornerstone of Biden’s legacy – and its most durable feature – is a series of sweeping legislative wins designed to pour funding into rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, expanding clean technology capacity and bolstering domestic manufacturing in critical areas like chip production. Taken together, the laws are designed to reshape key pillars of the US economy over the next decade.

Taken in isolation, each law is designed to deploy significant federal resources:  The American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion Covid-19 economic relief package signed in March 2021; the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law; the CHIPS and Science Act, a $200 billion law to boost American chip manufacturing; and the Inflation Reduction Act, a $750 billion health care, tax, and climate bill.

Together, that’s more than $4 trillion of investment, spending and tax credits.

Most of the American Rescue Plan money has been spent, with a small amount clawed back by Congress.

Funding for the CHIPS law and the bulk of the infrastructure bill was designed to be deployed through the 2024 fiscal year. A portion of the infrastructure funds was allocated to be spent after that period, primarily through awards to states for bridge, road and water projects. Funding distribution for the Inflation Reduction Act covers a 10-year period, but the bulk of the funds available must be deployed by the end of this fiscal year.

The vast majority of the funding made available through this fiscal year has already been announced, making any efforts to claw back those funds legally tenuous, if not outright impossible.

From the day each bill was signed, Biden implored his team to implement them and get funding out the door as quickly as possible, especially as Republicans have campaigned on dismantling or defunding key pieces of Biden’s signature accomplishments.

“We are moving as fast as we can, knocking down obstacles to progress when we see them – and I don’t think that has changed with the president stepping out of the race, that hasn’t changed with the election coming, and it won’t change,” a senior administration official said.

But there’s still about $288 billion in infrastructure funding that won’t be available until Fiscal Year 2025 or later, and $14.8 billion for the Inflation Reduction Act after Fiscal Year 2025. And about $10 billion of the funding already announced for CHIPS projects includes funding from Fiscal Years 2025 and 2026.

There are legal guardrails to ensure that remaining money continues to be spent in the next administration through the Impoundment Control Act that limits the White House from withholding funds already appropriated by Congress.

If Republicans control both the House and Senate, Trump could have the votes to override any Congressional check, though current and former officials point to the bipartisan support – and need – for much of funding that would carry over, particularly in the case of the infrastructure law. Still, there are other legal tactics a Trump administration could take to delay future funding through the act – and a recognition in the final months of the administration that the best strategy is to leave as little to chance as bureaucratically possible.

“There’s a lot of ways that an administration that really doesn’t want to implement a program can make it difficult – if nothing else, can require folks to sue to get money out the door,” a former Biden official said. “You’re just better off doing as much of that as you can ahead of time.”

Officials have repeatedly pointed to the bills’ increasing popularity as a signal of durability in future administrations, and House Speaker Mike Johnson recently indicated that he plans to use a “scalpel and not a sledgehammer” on the clean energy provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act.

But some provisions are seen as low-hanging fruit for conservatives looking to cut spending, namely the cap on insulin prices and some $80 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act to beef up tax enforcement. But for projects where shovels are already in the ground – or factories are already being built, especially in some deep-red regions – Biden administration officials expect Republicans will want to take credit for the investment, not reverse it.

Even so, they acknowledge their limited abilities to underwrite everything outlined in the law before January.

“The only thing that will help you is getting your people elected,” one senior administration official said.

Supporting Ukraine

The US has given more than $50 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in February 2022.

The White House is working to get as much money and weaponry into Kyiv’s hands by January, a US official told CNN, acknowledging that whatever is unspent from the $61 billion in funding passed by Congress earlier this year is liable to be clawed back.

Biden has directed the Department of Defense to allocate all remaining funding “by the end of my term in office.” Democrats in Congress have shared the administration’s concerns that any of the billions in aid to Ukraine that have already passed could be slow walked or blocked if it isn’t entirely transferred to Ukraine by the time Trump is sworn in.

There is approximately $7.5 billion left under Presidential Drawdown Authority, which pulls equipment from US stocks, and roughly $2.12 billion for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which allows the US to purchase equipment and systems from US defense contractors.

Presidents have a lot of power when it comes to transferring weapons and aid to foreign countries, one Democratic senator warned.

“Until it is in the possession of our allies, the president could probably stop the transfer,” the senator said.

Recently, the White House has been working to spread support for Ukraine more broadly across allied countries. Last week, the Biden administration joined the G7 in moving forward with a $50 billion loan package for Ukraine, including $20 billion from the US, which was backed by frozen Russian assets.

Senior administration officials say that financing is structured to be immune to political winds in any of the participating countries.

There have also been efforts to give the NATO alliance more control over Ukraine assistance, with alliance defense ministers finalizing an agreement in June to give NATO a more centralized role.

European nations have also taken the lead on training and provision of a variety weapons systems to Kyiv, even US-made weapons like F-16 fighter jets.

While the future of aid is in question, the Biden administration believes US membership in the newly-expanded North Atlantic Treaty Organization should not be in question. Most members are on track to meet the bloc’s target of spending 2% of their economy on defense, neutralizing a frequent criticism by Trump.

The most recent National Defense Authorization Agreement, which provides funding for the US military, also prohibits any president from unilaterally withdrawing from NATO without approval from Congress.

Environmental rules and regulations

Biden’s climate and environmental regulations will likely be a major target of a Trump administration. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan told CNN in a recent interview his agency has worked hard to make its rules limiting pollution legally durable.

The EPA also got all its biggest climate rules done by April to avoid the Congressional Review Act, which makes it easier to reverse last-minute regulations made at the end of an administration and previously enabled Trump and Congressional Republicans to overturn some of Obama’s climate regulations.

In August, White House senior advisor for international climate policy John Podesta told CNN he expected around 90% of IRA grant funds for fiscal year 2024 to be out the door. About $103 billion in IRA funding – 92% of the law’s total – has been announced as of late October. That money will fund everything from clean energy rebates to helping coastal communities prepare for rising seas and slashing pollution from oil and gas operations.

The EPA alone is on track to obligate nearly $38.3 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act by the end of the year, making it harder to claw back.

However, the tens of billions in grant money is a small part of the IRA’s spending power. The bulk of the IRA’s climate provisions are uncapped, decade-long clean energy tax rebates. Those were initially priced at $391 billion by the Congressional Budget Office, but they have proved so popular with businesses and individual consumers that they have been revised by public and private groups to having a price tag anywhere from $500 billion to $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years.

House Republicans have voted to repeal some of the climate law’s biggest programs dozens of times. But administration officials and outside clean energy experts feel more confident that Republicans will leave some of the biggest tax credits in Biden’s climate law alone – because Republican districts are benefitting from them.

The vast majority of private investments companies have made to build new EV factories or build massive wind and solar farms – nearly 78% – has gone to Republican congressional districts, according to a CNN analysis of data from the nonpartisan Rhodium Group and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this summer.

That flow of money to GOP districts could make it much harder for Republicans to repeal the IRA, Podesta told CNN this summer.

“I think there’s a growing understanding that that’s bad politics, not just bad policy,” Podesta said in August.

Judicial nominations

Biden has had a significant impact on the federal bench, nominating 259 federal judges, 213 of whom have been confirmed by the Senate. Of those, 136 are women and 129 are people of color.

Biden has appointed more than two times more women and four times as many people of color than Trump. That includes appointing Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court.

“The confirmation of judges has been a priority since day one of this administration and is unrelated to the election,” a senior administration official said. “It is about President Biden making a real and lasting impact on the federal courts.”

Trump named 234 judicial nominees during his term, as well as three Supreme Court justices, reshaping the ideological makeup of federal appeals courts and driving a generational shift to the highest court.

CNN’s Phil Mattingly, Haley Britzky and Jennifer Hansler contributed to this report.

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