Before and After - The Cabinets
Segment #1039
Yes. A more useful head-to-head is to separate what each secretary actually accomplished from what went wrong under that secretary's watch. For Biden, that means giving substantial weight to Afghanistan, the border surge, inflation, FAFSA, pandemic-program fraud, infrastructure execution and administrative performance—not merely listing legislation passed.
One caution: a Cabinet secretary does not personally control every outcome associated with a department. I therefore distinguish between documented departmental performance and broader presidential policy.
Biden Cabinet vs. Trump Cabinet: accomplishments and shortcomings
tSTATE
Antony Blinken. Accomplishments: helped assemble the multinational response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine; Finland and Sweden entered NATO; strengthened Indo-Pacific alliances. Major shortcomings: Afghanistan is the central blemish. Biden changed the May 2021 withdrawal deadline established by the 2020 U.S.-Taliban agreement but still proceeded with complete withdrawal. The Taliban then captured Kabul and virtually every provincial capital. State's own inspector general later found deficiencies serious enough to conduct a classified review of evacuation planning; another OIG investigation could not even independently verify the government's evacuation total because State relied entirely on DOD's accounting. (Office of Inspector General)
Marco Rubio. Has pursued Trump's substantially different foreign policy: greater emphasis on the Western Hemisphere, pressure on NATO members over defense spending, Iran, trade and immigration diplomacy. His record is still incomplete because the administration is only about 20 months old
.DEFENSE
Lloyd Austin. Accomplishments: coordinated enormous military assistance to Ukraine; strengthened NATO's eastern flank; expanded Indo-Pacific defense cooperation and AUKUS. Major shortcomings: Afghanistan again dominates the negative side. Afghan forces collapsed far faster than Washington anticipated; Kabul fell August 15, 2021, and 13 American service members were killed in the Abbey Gate bombing during the evacuation. The administration successfully evacuated a huge population afterward, but the evacuation became necessary under extraordinarily chaotic conditions. The government's own Lead IG described the Taliban victory as a "decisive military and political defeat" of the Afghan government. (Office of Inspector General)
Pete Hegseth. Has emphasized recruiting, combat readiness, force standards, eliminating DEI programs and changing Pentagon personnel policies. The appropriate long-term test will be readiness, recruitment/retention, procurement reform, military outcomes and whether defense costs are actually controlled.
TREASURY
Janet Yellen. Accomplishments: helped manage recovery from the COVID recession; unemployment fell sharply; helped construct financial sanctions against Russia; implemented IRA tax provisions. Major shortcomings: inflation is impossible to minimize. CPI inflation reached 9.1% in June 2022, the highest 12-month increase since 1981. Food was +10.4%, food at home +12.2%, energy +41.6% and gasoline +59.9%. External shocks mattered greatly—COVID supply problems and Russia's invasion among them—but economists also debated how much the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan added to demand and inflation. Even the Chicago Fed was examining that risk immediately after ARP passed. (Bureau of Labor Statistics)
Scott Bessent. Implementing Trump's tax, tariff, sanctions and financial policies. The ultimate comparison needs to examine inflation, real wages, interest rates, deficits, debt, investment and tariff effects over the entire term rather than taking either administration's claims at face value.
HOMELAND SECURITY
Alejandro Mayorkas. Accomplishments: DHS eventually tightened asylum processing and enforcement, and crossings dropped substantially during 2024. Major shortcomings: this was preceded by an enormous border surge. CBP records show FY2023 alone involved 821,537 family-unit apprehensions and 137,275 unaccompanied children between ports of entry at the Southwest border; CBP detained more than 3.2 million people nationwide that fiscal year. Whatever one's view of immigration policy, the scale placed extraordinary pressure on Border Patrol, asylum courts, cities and federal resources. (Customs and Border Protection
Markwayne Mullin, following Kristi Noem. The administration has pursued much more restrictive border, asylum and removal policies. Border enforcement is one of the areas where a quantitative comparison—encounters, releases, removals, gotaways and fentanyl seizures—will ultimately be particularly informative.
EDUCATION
Miguel Cardona. Accomplishments: expanded Pell eligibility and implemented substantial student-loan relief through several existing programs. FAFSA simplification ultimately increased Pell eligibility: GAO found 570,000 additional students eligible and 1.9 million more eligible for the maximum grant. Major shortcomings: implementation was extremely poor. GAO found the new FAFSA was three months late, technical failures prevented applications, and about 74% of calls for help went unanswered. First-time applications dropped 9%, or roughly 432,000 by August 2024. GAO also found agency leadership had not exercised significant oversight of the replacement system. (Government Accountability Office)
Linda McMahon. Has emphasized reducing the federal Education Department's role, state control and school choice. The 2026–27 FAFSA subsequently launched on time and earlier than previous cycles. Whether broader restructuring improves educational outcomes requires considerably more time to establish. (U.S. Department of Education)
LABOR
Marty Walsh / Julie Su. Accomplishments: strong employment recovery and expansion of apprenticeships; promoted Biden's pro-union policies. Major shortcomings: unemployment-insurance integrity was an enormous federal-state problem spanning both administrations. GAO estimates $100–135 billion in UI fraud from April 2020 through May 2023. Much of the vulnerable system and pandemic programs originated before Biden, so assigning all of that loss to Biden would be misleading. But DOL under Biden still had not fully implemented 16 of 26 relevant GAO recommendations as of the 2023 report. (Government Accountability Office)
Keith Sonderling, acting. Greater emphasis on deregulation, employer flexibility and workforce development. The fair comparison will eventually be labor-force participation, real wages, job creation, strikes, workplace enforcement and apprenticeship growth.
HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES
Xavier Becerra. Accomplishments: implemented Medicare drug-price provisions, the $35 Medicare insulin cap and expanded ACA enrollment. Major shortcomings: GAO put HHS's leadership of public-health emergencies on its High-Risk List in 2022 because of persistent systemic deficiencies. By April 2024 HHS still had 417 open GAO recommendations and only about a 68% implementation rate. GAO also identified duplicated pandemic IT systems and missing privacy assessments. (Government Accountability Office)
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Has redirected HHS toward chronic disease, nutrition and food policy while substantially changing federal vaccine and public-health policy. The appropriate comparison will require health outcomes as well as administrative changes; those outcomes take time to emerge.
TRANSPORTATION
Pete Buttigieg. Accomplishments: managed implementation of the huge IIJA transportation investment; significant bridge, airport, road, rail and transit projects; strengthened airline refund requirements. Major shortcomings: authorization and announcements ran far ahead of completed projects in some programs. The $5 billion NEVI charging program became a particularly visible example: as of February 6, 2025, DOT had obligated only about $527 million of $3.27 billion then available for obligation. More broadly, subsequent GAO accounting found the four large agencies it examined had obligated 76% of their IIJA money through FY2025 but disbursed only about 54% of those obligated funds. The latter statistic spans several agencies and includes activity after Biden left office, so it is not solely a Buttigieg metric. (Government Accountability Office)
Sean Duffy. Has emphasized aviation modernization, conventional infrastructure, safety and reversal of some Biden EV policies. His performance should eventually be judged by completed projects and transportation outcomes rather than dollars announced.
COMMERCE
Gina Raimondo. Accomplishments: CHIPS is one of the stronger cases for a substantive Biden industrial-policy accomplishment. Billions were awarded to rebuild domestic semiconductor capacity and private companies announced very large U.S. investments. Qualification: announced investment isn't identical to completed factories. By April 2026—after Raimondo left—CHIPS awardees had received $13.1B, about 42% of $31.5B in direct funding, although GAO said awardees had completed required milestones by their deadlines, with some anticipated schedules slipping. That suggests a program producing tangible results but whose full payoff remained years away. (Government Accountability Office)
Howard Lutnick. Has shifted Commerce toward tariffs, trade negotiations, reshoring and a more transactional industrial policy. Some Biden-era CHIPS manufacturing commitments have continued, while other R&D initiatives have been changed or canceled.
ENERGY
Jennifer Granholm. Accomplishments: implemented enormous IRA/IIJA investments in batteries, nuclear energy, grid modernization, hydrogen and clean-energy manufacturing. Major criticism: again, appropriated dollars aren't completed infrastructure. GAO later identified implementation and oversight challenges in major DOE/EPA programs. Biden also restricted some federal fossil-energy activities while U.S. oil production nevertheless reached record levels—illustrating why presidential rhetoric and actual energy production should be separated. (Government Accountability Office)
Chris Wright. Has emphasized oil, gas, LNG, nuclear and coal while reversing much of Biden's climate-centered energy policy. A serious comparison should ultimately use actual production, electricity prices, reliability, permitting times and taxpayer costs.
INTERIOR
Deb Haaland. Accomplishments: Tribal water settlements, conservation, co-management and renewable-energy development. Major criticism: the administration deliberately restricted some federal oil-and-gas development. Biden immediately ordered review of Arctic Coastal Plain leasing, and Haaland subsequently suspended the program pending new environmental analysis. Whether those restrictions were desirable is a policy question; the factual point is that reducing development on selected federal lands was intentional policy, not merely something critics imagined. (Government Accountability Office)
Doug Burgum. Has largely reversed that orientation, emphasizing federal-land leasing, mining, conventional energy and faster permitting.
VETERANS AFFAIRS
Denis McDonough. Accomplishments: PACT Act implementation substantially expanded benefits and health coverage for veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxins. This is one of the clearer Biden Cabinet accomplishments. Shortcomings: VA continued longstanding problems involving claims processing, IT modernization, staffing and access.
Doug Collins. Has emphasized community care, administrative restructuring and accountability. Longer-term comparisons should use claims backlogs, appointment wait times, disability decisions and veteran satisfaction rather than political messaging.
AGRICULTURE
Tom Vilsack. Accomplishments: rural infrastructure, broadband, conservation and agricultural support programs. Major criticism: consumers experienced extraordinary food inflation during the administration. At the June 2022 inflation peak, food-at-home prices were 12.2% higher than a year earlier. USDA obviously did not single-handedly cause food inflation—energy, fertilizer, labor, supply chains, monetary/fiscal conditions and Ukraine all mattered—but affordability was a significant negative outcome during Vilsack's tenure. (Bureau of Labor Statistics)
Brooke Rollins. Has emphasized agricultural production, deregulation, trade and reduction of climate/DEI initiatives. Farm income, food prices, exports and input costs will provide better measures of the eventual record.
What changes when the Biden record is examined critically
Several distinctions become important.
Afghanistan was not merely bad optics. The administration inherited Trump's agreement with the Taliban and a difficult strategic position, but Biden made the decision to alter the deadline and complete withdrawal. The Taliban then defeated the Afghan government with astonishing speed, Kabul fell, and the evacuation was conducted after that collapse. Those facts belong alongside the administration's successful evacuation of tens of thousands of people. (Office of Inspector General)
The border problem cannot reasonably be summarized by pointing only to the decline in crossings in late 2024. That improvement followed several years of historically high migration that overwhelmed portions of the immigration system. The fair question for Mayorkas is therefore both why encounters became so high and what eventually caused them to fall. (Customs and Border Protection)
Inflation was a genuine economic failure experienced by households, but assigning causation requires more care. Prices didn't rise 9.1% simply because Janet Yellen or Joe Biden caused them to. Pandemic disruptions, energy markets, Russia's invasion, monetary policy and fiscal stimulus all contributed in varying degrees. What is beyond dispute is the outcome: by June 2022 inflation was 9.1%, food at home 12.2%, energy 41.6% and gasoline 59.9% year-over-year. (Bureau of Labor Statistics)
Administrative execution was uneven. FAFSA provides perhaps the clearest example because the criticism comes from GAO rather than a partisan organization. A program intended to make obtaining college aid easier produced delays, technical failures, unanswered telephone calls and fewer applications during the rollout. Yet the underlying reform ultimately expanded Pell eligibility. Both facts belong in an accurate assessment. (Government Accountability Office)
And spending money isn't the same thing as accomplishing the intended result. Biden signed unusually large infrastructure, semiconductor and energy-investment laws. Some generated substantial tangible investment, particularly semiconductor manufacturing. Others moved slowly from appropriation → obligation → disbursement → construction → completion. GAO's subsequent IIJA/IRA work makes that distinction especially important. (Government Accountability Office)
That produces a considerably more critical picture of the Biden Cabinet without needing partisan labels: substantial legislative resources and several important accomplishments, alongside major failures or weaknesses in Afghanistan, border management, inflation-era economic management, FAFSA implementation, public-health administration and execution of some large spending programs. The Trump column should ultimately be subjected to the identical test—measurable outcomes, implementation failures, taxpayer cost and unintended consequences—once comparable time has elapsed.