Obama’s First 100 Days

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4/27/2009

This week marks Barack Obama’s historic first 100 days as President. Highlights of his Presidential actions are listed below.

Impact on Spending, Debt, and Taxes

• President Obama’s $3.69 trillion budget will raise taxes on all Americans by $1.4 trillion over the next decade, and will permanently elevate federal spending to nearly 23 percent of the entire economy by 2019—a level reached only three times since the end of World War II.

• The President’s budget dumps a staggering $9.3 trillion in new debt—$68,000 per household—into the laps of America's children and grandchildren. This is more debt than has been accumulated by all previous Presidents in American history from George Washington to George W. Bush—combined.

• President Obama ordered his cabinet to identify and shave a collective $100 MILLION in administrative costs from their budgets after proposing 40,000 times that in his budget and spending bills.

• The President’s budget proposes a $646 billion cap-and-trade tax that energy companies would immediately pass on to all consumers, including those earning less than $250,000.

Impact on Foreign Policy

• The President approved a cut of 15 percent of the Pentagon’s budget for missile defense and abandoning deploying defenses in Western Europe.

• Both President Obama and the Secretary of Homeland Security have been reticent to discuss the threat of terrorism, and Administration officials have issued a plethora of ambivalent and contradictory statements on homeland security and counterterrorism policies.

• The President declared that “50 years” of US policy had not worked as justification for reversing long-standing U.S. policies to isolate the Cuban dictatorship.

• President Obama’s Justice Department released documents on terrorist interrogation tactics used by the CIA after 9/11, yet refused to declassify and release additional material that describes the full scope and context of the program, including the effectiveness of the CIA interrogations.

Impact on Domestic Policy

• The President took over General Motors by firing the CEO.

• President Obama put the brakes on cheaper energy by delaying the opportunity to expand domestic supply through offshore drilling.

• The Obama Administration took the first official step towards federal regulation of carbon dioxide (the gas we exhale) by having the Environmental Protection Agency declare carbon dioxide dangerous to human health and the environment.

Click here to read more about President Obama's first 100 days in the White House.

Question 1

Yesterday, President Obama delivered a major speech on education in an effort to garner support for his Race to the Top grant program and his push for national education standards and tests. The President’s remarks came on the heels of a speech delivered by Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Tuesday at the National Press Club, during which Duncan attempted to paint the Administration’s policies as part of a “quiet revolution.”

Question 2

Over the last four weeks, The Heritage Foundation sent multiple teams of respected energy, environment, homeland security and response experts to the Gulf to study the federal response to the oil spill. These three delegations, with more to come, have traversed the areas hit hardest by the crisis, talking to response workers, affected oil crews, fishermen, elected leaders and BP representatives. What we found is simple: President Obama’s administration has turned a crisis into a disaster, and someone needs to be held accountable.

Question 3

At the height of the debate over Obamacare, when the White House's leftist allies were in full panic mode, The Washington Post's Ezra Klein accused Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) of being "willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people." Lieberman's crime? He opposed including an expansion of Medicare in the health regulation bill. Now that the President's signature foreign policy achievement, the New START nuclear agreement with Russia, is on the ropes, the left is again back to their hyperbolic ways. Ploughshares Fund president Joseph Cirincione told The Associated Press last week: "A delayed ratification with a close vote would be a blow to U.S. leadership around the world. People would doubt the President's ability to negotiate other agreements."

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© 2009, The Heritage Foundation Conservative policy research since 1973

The Heritage Foundation
Leadership for America

© 2009, The Heritage Foundation
Conservative policy research since 1973