As Joe Biden prepares to speak at the DNC, what has he accomplished as president?

CHICAGO — Since President Joe Biden decided not to seek a second term, Democratic chatter about the incumbent president turned from despair at his stumbling campaign to praise for his accomplishments.

Biden enters the Democratic National Convention at the United Center, where he will deliver a prime-time address Aug. 19, with a swell of admiration from Kamala Harris, his vice president and successor as the Democratic presidential nominee.

Biden and Harris appeared together Aug. 15 to mark the first 10 prescription drugs the federal government negotiated for lower prices for Medicare recipients starting in 2026 — a signature achievement for Biden. At the announcement, their first joint appearance since Biden exited the race July 21, Harris noted "a lot of love in this room for our president." 

"And I think it’s for many, many reasons," Harris told the Largo, Maryland, audience, "including few leaders in our nation have done more, on so many issues, including to expand access to affordable health care, than Joe Biden."

Historians said Biden has notched important policy victories.

PolitiFact has watched the progress of 99 promises Biden made during the 2020 campaign. Our Biden Promise Tracker uses the same system we applied to our promise-tracking of former presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama.

Our rating system assesses campaign promises based on outcomes, not intentions. Only full enactment of a promise qualifies for a Promise Kept; partial enactment merits a Compromise rating. We’ll continue updating promises until Biden leaves the Oval Office; we typically don’t rate a promise broken until later in the term, when a president has had more time to act on the promise.

So far, Biden earned a Promise Kept rating for about 29 of his promises, and 10 more received a Compromise rating. Three so far have received a Promise Broken, but with five months to go in his presidency, another 32 rated Stalled could move there by the time he leaves office. The remaining 24 are rated In the Works.

Here’s a closer look at what Biden delivered so far and where he has fallen short.

As he entered office in January 2021, Biden’s first task was addressing the novel coronavirus pandemic. He signed the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill that passed with only Democratic support. The virus remains but is no longer an overwhelming threat. We rated his pledge to get COVID-19 under control a Promise Kept.

Also, as we noted, Biden successfully repealed a law barring Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices. 

On a key environmental issue, Biden moved the U.S. toward achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. (This would mean a balance between greenhouse gas emissions from human activities and removals of these gases.) He also secured bipartisan cooperation on the economy with an infrastructure law that passed with the backing of 13 Republicans in the House and 19 in the Senate, and a separate bipartisan bill to promote semiconductor manufacturing, known as the CHIPS and Science Act.  

Arizona State University political scientist Steven Smith said Biden "encouraged compromise, which involved radical reductions in his plans, and patience that most Democrats seemed to lack. The result was major new policy initiatives and significant tax policy changes."

The Inflation Reduction Act, a wide-ranging package with estimated costs of $800 billion over 10 years, enacted climate change policies but earned no Republican support. It passed only when two centrists in the Democratic caucus, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, were satisfied with its scope.

A promise to decriminalize marijuana, launched using executive authority, is moving toward finalization. Biden has so far limited direct tax increases to people earning more than $400,000.

Biden also nominated the first Black woman to U.S. Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson. Beyond the Supreme Court, the Senate approved a combined 201 district and circuit court judges nominated by Biden through mid-July, a number higher than the first-four-years total of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Not everything Biden accomplished was high-profile. The spending bills he signed kept a pledge to invest $300 million for the community policing program known as COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services). His administration enacted technical changes that made consumer-friendly changes to Obamacare. And although a pro-labor union bill stalled in the Senate after passing in the House, Biden leveraged appointments to the National Labor Relations Board to make union organizing easier for workers.

Biden the presidential candidate couldn’t have predicted Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but his administration responded with several rounds of funding to bolster Ukraine’s defenses. 

He also couldn’t have predicted the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol. But he later signed legislation to clarify the procedures for counting electoral votes, which experts say should prevent the types of legal arguments that fed the Capitol violence.

On a more personal note, Biden cited the death of his veteran son Beau from brain cancer in pushing to pass the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics, or PACT, Act, which expands services for veterans who, during their service, were exposed to burn pits or other dangerous chemicals.

Sometimes Biden settled for half a loaf.

A gun bill he signed included incentives for states to pass "red flag" laws that can remove weapons for people deemed threats to themselves or others. The bill, the first significant new gun law in three decades, also stiffened gun restrictions for certain domestic partners convicted of abuse and expanded background checks for potential purchasers between the ages of 18 and 21.

However, the law does not include other changes anti-gun violence advocates had sought, including requiring background checks for all gun sales and banning the manufacture and sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

A sweeping Biden plan to forgive student loan debt lost at the Supreme Court, but he has used executive authority to move toward the same goal in a more piecemeal way.

On foreign affairs, Biden extricated the United States from Afghanistan, but chaotically and with American and Afghani bloodshed. His pledge to end U.S. military involvement in the Middle East has not succeeded, however, particularly after Hamas attacked Israel last Oct. 7.

On multiple occasions, Biden was stymied — by Republican opposition, by recalcitrant Democrats, or by his own choice.

After the Supreme Court overturned the abortion decision Roe v. Wade, efforts to codify Roe v. Wade have come to naught, failing to secure the 60 votes needed in the Senate. (He did, however, sign legislation to codify same-sex marriage.

A bipartisan immigration bill seemed to gather momentum earlier this year, but then Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, leaned on House Republicans to reject it. So, although  Biden reversed family separation policies and rescinded the "Muslim bans" Trump had instituted, more far-reaching policies remained out of reach, including creating a pathway to citizenship for nearly 11 million people.

When Biden tried to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, seven Senate Democrats stood in the way. And Biden was forced to curb his ambitions on social policies — such as universal preschool to 3- and 4-year-olds and two years of community college tuition-free — when crucial centrists declined to support them. 

Biden reversed himself on a promise to block new hydraulic fracturing on federal lands. And although Biden had pledged in 2020 to put Social Security on a path to long-run solvency, his position was not to cut Social Security benefits or raise the retirement age — which economists said are the two most obvious ways to improve the program’s solvency.

John Pitney, a politics professor at Claremont McKenna College, said political reality has hemmed in every president, including Biden.

"Statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke wrote that ‘those who will lead must also, in a considerable degree, follow,’" Pitney said. "Biden has had to deal with the constraints of public opinion."

Biden also oversaw some notable failures. In addition to the chaotic troop withdrawal, critics have pointed to high levels of migrant crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border (though they are now dropping) as well as inflation that peaked at a four-decade high, sapping consumer confidence. 

Economists said some inflation would have been inevitable given pandemic-era supply chain problems, but they added that the American Rescue Plan probably exacerbated inflation by putting money in Americans’ hands when their chances to spend it were limited.

Smith said Biden’s low-profile role in legislative negotiations and difficulty in broadcasting his successes "reduced the credit that flowed to him for his efforts." This, combined with long-lasting consumer frustration with high prices, left Biden with an average approval rating that was almost 18 points underwater when he announced he would give up the nomination.

RELATED: PolitiFact’s Biden Promise Tracker