Over the past four years, President Biden and Vice President Harris have taken action to ensure the promise of America reaches every community-including Black communities. These actions have delivered historic results, enabling more Black Americans to access a quality education, obtain a good-paying job, start a business, and buy a home-driving significant gains in wealth. From growing economic and educational opportunities to improving health outcomes, from enhancing public trust and public safety to advancing equity, civil rights, and racial justice, the Biden-Harris Administration has demonstrated its deep commitment to ensuring equal opportunity for all and investing in the future of Black Americans.
Securing Economic Mobility, Educational Opportunity, and the American Dream for Black Communities
President Biden and Vice President Harris believe that the promise of America-the American Dream-is that everyone should have a fair shot at getting ahead. Under the Biden-Harris Administration, we have made progress:
- Achieved the lowest Black unemployment rate on record and created 2.4 million jobs for Black workers as of August 2024
- Lifted 400,000 Black children out of poverty by increased SNAP benefits through updating the Thrifty Food Plan, and continuing to call on Congress to restore the full expanded Child Tax Credit-which, during the COVID-19 pandemic, cut Black child poverty in half benefitting 600,000 and brought racial poverty disparities to a record low
- Grew Black American business ownership at the fastest rate in over three decades
- Tripled the number of SBA-backed loans to Black-owned businesses
- Awarded a record $10 billion in federal contracts to Black-owned small businesses in Fiscal Year 2023
- Invested a record of more than $16 billion in Historically Black Colleges and Universities
- Secured a $900 increase to the maximum Pell Grant award-the largest increase in the past 10 years-and $23 million in first-ever funding to the Augustus F. Hawkins Centers of Excellence Program to increase the number of teachers of color and multilingual educators across the country
- Approved the cancellation of almost $170 billion in student loan debt for nearly 5 million borrowers, including a significant number of Black borrowers who are disproportionately burdened by student debt
- Took on racial bias in home appraisals and closed the Black-white home misevaluation gap by 40%
- Reduced mortgage insurance premiums for FHA loans, saving 76,000 Black households an average of $900/year
- Cut costs for high-speed internet to 5.5 million Black households with the Affordable Connectivity Program
- Distributed $2.2 billion in financial assistance to over 43,000 farmers who experienced discrimination
- Led a historically equitable economic recovery-Black wealth, even after adjusting for inflation, is up 60% relative to pre-pandemic levels-the largest increase on record
Ending Health Disparities
President Biden and Vice President Harris are committed to keeping health care costs down for individuals and families and improving access to health care to address disparities in Black communities. To improve health outcomes for the Black community, the Biden-Harris Administration has:
- Ensured more Black Americans have health care than ever before by lowering premium costs by an average of $800 for millions of Americans, increasing Black enrollment in Affordable Care Act coverage by 95%, or over 1.7 million people since 2020
- Lowered monthly premiums for health insurance, capped the cost of insulin at $35 and all out-of-pocket drug costs at $2,000 for people on Medicare, and announced new negotiated prices for the first ten prescription drugs for Medicare price negotiation-expected to save $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket costs in the first year of the program alone
- Made sickle cell disease the first focus of the new Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services models, aimed to lower the high cost of drugs, promote accessibility to drug therapies, and improve patient care
- Expanded Medicaid postpartum coverage from 60 days to 12 months in 46 states and Washington, D.C., covering 700,000 more women in the year after childbirth
- Secured an additional $1.5 billion for Head Start
- Delivered $1 billion to help meet the mental health needs of young people by preparing and hiring a projected 14,000 additional mental health professionals to serve America's schools
Making Communities Safer and Strengthening America's Commitment to Justice
The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to using every available federal lever to advance effective, accountable policing, build trust, and improve public safety so that the promise of equal justice under the law is a reality for all. To enhance equal justice and public safety for all communities, including the Black community, the President has:
- Signed an Executive Order on police reform when Congressional Republicans would not pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; restricted the use of force, banned chokeholds, restricted the use of no-knock warrants and created the first-ever national database of federal law enforcement misconduct
- Created the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention
- U.S. Surgeon General named gun violence a public health crisis and issued a public health advisory on how to reduce violence.
- Signed into the law the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA), the most significant gun violence reduction legislation enacted in nearly 30 years, and taken more meaningful executive action than any other president to make our schools, churches, grocery stores, and communities safer
- Secured $400 million in funding dedicated specifically for community violence interventions that invests in evidence-informed strategies to prevent violence
- Cracked down on the source of illegal firearms by making it illegal to manufacture "ghost gun" kits, enacting the first-ever federal gun trafficking law, taking a "zero tolerance" approach to rogue gun dealers, and regulating the number one source of guns involved in gun trafficking investigations - unlicensed sellers.
- Pardoned thousands of Americans under federal and D.C. law for simple possession of marijuana
- Helped bring violent crime to its lowest level in 50 years-lower than during any year of the previous administration
Restoring the Soul of Our Nation
President Biden believes that advancing equity, civil rights, racial justice, and equal opportunity is the responsibility of the whole of our government and requires sustained leadership and partnership with all communities. To make the promise of America real for Black communities, the President has:
- Signed two Executive Orders directing the federal government to address inequality
- Protected Black history as American history
- Signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, the first new federal holiday since MLK Day
- Designated Springfield 1908 Race Riot and Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monuments
- Signed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act to classify lynching for the first time as a federal hate crime
- Worked to protect the sacred right to vote through executive actions and continued calls for legislation
- Appointed the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, more Black women to federal circuit courts than all previous presidents combined, and more Black judges in a single term than any other president
