Biden’s Bully Pulpit Is Giving Him Wins Congress Couldn’t

Faced with a divided Congress that is unlikely to pass major legislation, President Joe Biden’s administration is now persuading or working with private companies to advance an otherwise stalemate policy agenda on everything from prescription drug costs to expanding child care options.

On Wednesday, Biden welcomed pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly’s announcement that it would reduce and cap the cost of insulin. Earlier in the week, the Commerce Department announced that it would require chipmakers to offer affordable child care plans to qualify for more than $50 billion in subsidies. And three major airlines responded to Biden’s call in the State of the Union to eliminate fees for parents and children to sit together by doing just that.

All three announcements advance the administration’s long-standing policy goals — lowering prescription drug costs, expanding affordable child care options and eliminating so-called “junk fees” — in ways Congress has so far been unable to. It shows how the administration is resorting to public pressure and regulations to enact its agenda.

“The president’s bully pulpit is a really important tool that he’s using to reduce costs for families in a number of ways,” Bharat Ramamurti, deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, told HuffPost in a phone interview. “He’s not trying to replace things being passed by Congress, or getting anything done in rulemaking.”

Key to the efforts is the underlying popularity of the ideas: Lowering prescription drug costs has long been one of the public’s top priorities, and public polls show Biden’s push against junk pricing is widely popular.

“We choose these issues where something fundamentally unfair and unreasonable is happening, and you put the presidential spotlight on it,” Ramamurti continued. “The president must have talked about lowering the price of insulin 100 times over the last year and a half while he’s been pushing it, and this week he saw a pharmaceutical company respond to his call to action.”

The tactic is not new to the White House. Shortly after Biden revealed his antitrust agenda with a sweeping executive order in 2021 that included a push to “right to repair”, Apple announced that it would sell repair kits to the public for the first time.

At the same time, the moves, all of which are gradual, also show how limited the White House’s toolkit is for dealing with the major problems that drive up costs for Americans.

The Inflation Reduction Act went a long way to control the high prices of pharmaceuticals, a major concern of the American public. It gave Medicare the ability to use its purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices for the first time, even as pharma-friendly Democrats made sure to limit those powers.

It also capped the out-of-pocket cost of insulin for people with Medicare to $35. (An attempt to apply the limit to those with private health insurance plans failed due to Senate rules despite getting 57 votes). Since its passage, Biden, other Democrats and even some Republicans have pushed for companies to voluntarily comply with the cap.

On Wednesday, Eli Lilly became the first of the three major insulin-making companies to agree, limit out-of-pocket costs at $35 a month. Market forces, including the development of biosimilars and efforts to make insulin cheaper, played a role. But at least some of the credit also goes to political pressure.

“It’s rare that we see a pharmaceutical company voluntarily lower their prices,” said Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of the Medicare policy program at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “The company was facing some pretty strong headwinds in terms of political pressure from lawmakers.”

Speaking to House Democrats at their annual conference in Baltimore, Biden predicted that the other major manufacturers, Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk and France-based Sanofi, would have no choice but to follow suit.

“Guess what that means?” Biden said. “Every other company that makes insulin will have to drop their prices to $35 because they can’t compete.”

The decision will make a big difference for the uninsured, since most consumers with insurance probably already pay less than $35 a month, Cubanski noted. He also noted that the newer insulin products that Eli Lilly makes will not be covered by the price cut.

“This is the kind of persistent concern with drug prices in the United States that the Inflation Reduction Act doesn’t address,” he said.

Biden’s push against so-called “junk fees” — the fees added to tickets, financial services and other products — has drawn widespread opposition in the industry. Since he launched it shortly before his State of the Union address last month, the US Chamber of Commerce and other groups have criticized it as akin to price fixing, and major players in the hotel and ticket industry have also regressed.

However, his specific call for airline industry fees has prompted three major US airlines, Frontier, United and American, to remove fees for children and parents to sit together. Administration officials are hopeful that the recent launch of a Department of Transportation dashboard that tracks fares it will encourage other airlines to follow suit.

“Baggage fees are bad enough, you can’t treat your child like a piece of luggage,” Biden said in the State of the Union.

It helps that the Department of Transportation is already working on a rule that requires the removal of those fees, even if the proposal could take years to take effect. For now, the White House is looking to work with Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.), who has sponsored standalone legislation banning fees for families to sit together, to make the requirement law.

The administration’s move to expand child care differs from its other recent successes. While Biden and other officials verbally confronted airlines and drug companies, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo emphasized the requirement that chipmakers offer child care as an example of the administration’s work with industry.

“Right now we lack affordable child care, which is the biggest factor keeping people, especially women, out of the workforce,” Raimondo said in a conference call last week. “So we need to see how these companies are going to meet their labor needs.”

Senate Republicans, who overwhelmingly backed the CHIPS Act, which provided the funding for semiconductors, are complain about the move. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) called the requirements “wake-up” and Sen. Thom Tillis (RN.C.) referred to them as “social engineering.”

Administration officials, however, argue that the requirements are necessary to build the workforce that semiconductor manufacturers will need. Two innovation scholars from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a centrist think tank, made a similar argument in a blog post last week.

“It is not, as some have wrongly argued, a question of social policy,” the academics wrote. “It is a pragmatic move, clearly aligned with the nation’s security interests, to grow the workforce needed to build the factories and produce the chips that run our country.”

However, childcare is still a national crisis Biden was unable to fully address, primarily due to opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin (DW. Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) to his original “Build Back Better” plan, which would have funneled billions toward both children. . care and pre-kindergarten programs.