President Trump vowed to dismantle President Biden’s legacy, but as prices remain stubbornly high, he has embraced his predecessor’s policies on Medicare drug pricing, semiconductor funding, anti-collusion probes and tapping the oil reserves.
Nearing the two-year mark of his term, Mr. Trump has kept in place the basic architecture of several Biden-era programs, while tweaking their branding, priorities or methods. In some cases, he has gone further than Mr. Biden, giving Washington a more direct stake in private industry, a move foes and allies have derided as “socialism.”
Former Biden administration officials see Mr. Trump’s decision to preserve and, in some cases, expand upon their economic policies as a vindication.
“There has been a realization, though I think [Mr. Trump] will never admit it, that these policies were good and many of them were bipartisan, right before they were kind of attacked as Biden-era policies,” said Alex Jacquez, a Biden White House adviser on economic development and industrial strategy. “Many of these policies have come out of the mainstream of bipartisan thinkers who are concerned about the industrialization and deindustrialization of the country.”
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The Trump White House bristled at the comparison.
“The Biden administration’s playbook of blindly handing over billions in taxpayer dollars to some of the biggest corporations in the world with zero accountability is unacceptable to President Trump, who is ensuring taxpayers get the best bargain possible and that tax dollars are not wasted on ideological pet projects,” said White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers.
“President Trump’s strategy is actually delivering results from lower prices of many household essentials to trillions in critical manufacturing investments to historic declines in prescription drug costs.”
It is not unusual for presidents to keep their predecessor’s economic policies even while campaigning against them.
President Clinton harshly criticized President George H. W. Bush’s championing of the NAFTA trade deal during the 1992 presidential election. Mr. Clinton then signed it into law upon taking office in 1993.
Mr. Clinton pushed to get China into the World Trade Organization, a move blasted by President George W. Bush, who later normalized trade relations with China during his administration.
Mr. Biden griped about the tariffs imposed during the first Trump administration, but left them largely unchanged during his four years in office.
This time, Mr. Trump entered office on a mission to erase Mr. Biden’s legacy. By the end of his first year back in the White House, Mr. Trump had reversed 62% of his predecessor’s executive orders.
Mr. Trump also undid Mr. Biden’s legacy by slamming shut the border and pursuing mass deportations. He also canceled many provisions of Mr. Biden’s signature legislative achievement, the Build Back Better Act.
Still, Mr. Trump reversed himself to embrace some Biden economic policies.
Nowhere is the reversal clearer than the CHIPS Act, a $52.7 billion semiconductor law that was among Mr. Biden’s major legislative victories. Mr. Trump once called the 2022 law a “horrible, horrible thing,” and told House Speaker Mike Johnson to scrap it and redirect leftover funds to pay down the debt.
Now, Mr. Trump’s Commerce Department is not only keeping the money flowing, but restructuring some of the largest awards to give the federal government direct equity stakes in recipient companies, including a roughly 10% stake in Intel. Commerce recently signed letters of intent to fund seven more companies under the CHIPS Law as part of an $874 million round focused on Artificial Intelligence chip production.
Doling out the subsidies in exchange for a stake in the companies, which was part of the $874 million allocation, is more aggressive than anything Mr. Biden attempted.
Mr. Trump has argued that acquiring equity stakes in companies is good for the economy because it reshores manufacturing, secures supply chains and yields strong profits on government portfolios that can be returned to the American taxpayers.
Critics, including GOP Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, have accused Mr. Trump of embracing socialism by giving the government control over the means of production.
Mr. Trump also pulled from Mr. Biden’s playbook in June by accusing Chevron, Shell, BP and other oil companies of price gouging consumers amid the Iran war, which sent gas prices soaring. He ordered the Justice Department to investigate the companies, just like the probe Mr. Biden launched against the same companies after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. At that time, Republicans accused Mr. Biden of scapegoating corporations for what they said was his failed policies.
Both presidents also tackled rising gas prices by draining the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The Trump administration announced in March that it would release 172 million barrels from the reserve to combat steep oil prices from the Iran war. In 2022, Mr. Biden released 180 million barrels, the largest ever release, in response to the energy shocks caused by the war in Ukraine.
During the 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump had heavily criticized Mr. Biden for tapping the reserves, saying the oil was meant for the military. He vowed to fill it up “immediately” if elected.
Robert Rowland, who teaches political rhetoric at the University of Kansas, said Mr. Trump turned to Biden policies out of desperation.
“Trump has been very successful in telling the world to accept his viewpoint about nearly everything except when it comes to the economy because people see gas and food prices. I think he’s [embracing Biden policies] because he’s grasping at straws and throwing every damn idea at the economy that he can,” he said.
Both presidents also sought to wield their anti-collusion power to lower the high cost of living.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden ordered the Justice Department to probe the meatpacking industry, accusing them of price manipulation and collusion. Republicans reacted similarly to Mr. Biden’s meat probe as they did with the oil investigation, accusing him of blaming others for his inability to tame inflation.
The pattern continued with prescription drugs. Congressional Republicans and Mr. Trump fought hard against the Inflation Reduction Act’s Medicare drug pricing negotiation program when Mr. Biden signed it into law in 2022. They said government price controls would stymie pharmaceutical innovation.
However, Mr. Trump’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services expanded the effort. In April 2025, Mr. Trump signed an executive order to build upon the Biden cuts, rather than unwind them.
CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz last year touted some of the price cuts as deeper than anything Mr. Biden’s team achieved. He also credited the previous administration, saying the Trump team was using “the same process with a bolder direction.”
