If you want to understand where Joe Biden’s presidency went wrong, when his administration stopped looking like Barack Obama’s and started looking like Jimmy Carter’s, you could start with the failure of Build Back Better.

Build Back Better was a sweeping agenda of economic reform on the scale of the New Deal, meant to solidify its author as the “FDR-sized” president he wanted to be.

Dusting the text off now, you can feel that ambition. Across two bills — the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan — it sought to spend over $4 trillion across a decade on transportation, manufacturing and science, home care, clean energy, an expanded child tax credit, tuition-free community college, child care, and much more. It would have been an epochal expansion of government spending and ambition, on par with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal or Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

Little of this became law, of course. The bipartisan infrastructure law enacted in 2021 included $250 billion in new transportation spending, less than half of the Jobs Plans’ number; even adding the $72 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act for electric vehicles doesn’t close the gap much. While the Jobs Plan included $1.6 trillion in climate spending, the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate measures are estimated to cost less than half that much. The CHIPS and Science Act passed in 2022 appropriated all of $79 billion to support manufacturing, a far cry from Biden’s $590 billion bid, and largely didn’t appropriate money for science at all. And then there’s the American Families Plan, almost all of which fell by the wayside, not passed by Congress in any form.