Biden Seeks Shift in How the Nation Serves Its People

President Biden laid out an ambitious agenda on Wednesday to rewrite the American social compact by vastly expanding health care, family leave, child care, preschool and college education for millions of people to be financed with increased taxes on the wealthiest earners.

The $1.8 trillion plan he unveiled in advance of his first address to a joint session of Congress along with previous proposals to build roads and bridges, expand other social programs and combat climate change represent a fundamental reorientation of the role of government not seen since the days of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

“We have to prove democracy still works, that our government still works and can deliver for the people,” Mr. Biden planned to say in his nationally televised speech, according to excerpts released by the White House earlier in the day.

Taken together, the collection of initiatives that Mr. Biden has introduced in his first 100 days in office suggest a breathtaking scope of change sought by a 78-year-old president who spent a lifetime as a more conventional lawmaker. After presenting himself during last year’s campaign as a “transition candidate” to follow the volatile tenure of Donald J. Trump, Mr. Biden has since his inauguration positioned himself as a transformational president.

But the succession of costly proposals amounts to a risky gamble that a country deeply polarized along ideological and cultural lines is ready for a more activist government and the sort of redistribution of wealth long sought by progressives. Mr. Biden’s Democrats have only the barest of majorities in the House and Senate to push through the most sweeping of legislation and, successful or not, he may have framed the terms of the debate for the next election.

“Our best future won’t come from Washington schemes or socialist dreams,” Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, planned to say in his party’s televised official response, according to advance excerpts. “It will come from you — the American people.”

The president’s own prime-time speech to Congress was to be the functional equivalent of a State of the Union address. But coming in the latter days of the coronavirus pandemic and less than four months after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in a vain effort to overturn his election defeat, the event was set to be unlike any other presidential speech.

On the advice of the Capitol physician, only 200 members of Congress and other officials were invited instead of the usual 1,600, and none of the traditional guests were to be in the first lady’s box. The president and his limited audience were to gather amid tighter security than usual, with streets around the building closed and patrolled by swarms of police officers and National Guard troops.

The cabinet was to be represented by just two members, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, while Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was to stand in for the entire Supreme Court and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for the rest of the military hierarchy.

But in a notable first, Mr. Biden was to become the first president to deliver an address to Congress with two women sitting behind him representing the next in the line of succession to his office, Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The gathering came at a moment of racial turmoil after last week’s conviction of a former Minneapolis police officer in the murder of George Floyd and after a spate of subsequent shootings involving law enforcement agents around the country. And it came at a time of multiple mass shootings that have once again put the United States’ gun laws into question.

Mr. Biden planned to address both matters in his speech, calling for legislation to improve policing around the country and to restrict access to high-powered firearms. Negotiations over a new law to rein in police abuses have produced a glimmer of hope for bipartisan agreement, while no consensus across the aisle appears likely for meaningful gun legislation.

But Mr. Biden also hoped to strike an optimistic note with the fading of the pandemic that has killed more than 573,000 people in this country, hailing the progress in vaccinating most American adults and the easing of public health restrictions that have so warped everyday life for more than a year.

“Now, after just 100 days, I can report to the nation: America is on the move again,” Mr. Biden said in the excerpts. “Turning peril into possibility. Crisis into opportunity. Setback into strength.”

He added: “We’re vaccinating the nation. We’re creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. We’re delivering real results people can see and feel in their own lives. Opening the doors of opportunity. Guaranteeing fairness and justice.”

The president, who has struggled to respond to a surge of migrants at the southwestern border since taking office, planned to promote his proposed overhaul of the immigration system, which would provide a pathway to citizens for millions of people living in the country illegally. In addition, he intended to talk about his goals to stem climate change by cutting carbon emissions in half over the next decade.

While foreign policy has not dominated his early months in office, Mr. Biden was expected to explain his decision to pull all troops out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11 after nearly 20 years of war there. And many were watching to see how he would address challenges from increasingly antagonistic adversaries like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.

But as striking as anything else in the speech was Mr. Biden’s vision of a profound pivot in America’s eternal debate about the role of government in society. Four decades after a newly inaugurated President Ronald Reagan declared that government was the problem, not the solution, Mr. Biden aimed to turn that thesis on its head, seeking to empower the federal state as a catalyst to remake the country and revamp the balance between the richest and the rest.

The “American Families Plan,” as he called his latest, $1.8 trillion proposal, would follow the “American Rescue Plan,” a $1.9 trillion package of spending on pandemic relief and economic stimulus that he has already signed into law, and the “American Jobs Plan,” a $2.3 trillion program for infrastructure, home health care and other priorities that remains pending.

The families plan introduced by Mr. Biden on Wednesday includes $1 trillion in new spending and $800 billion in tax credits. Among other things, it would finance universal prekindergarten for all 3- and 4-year-olds, a federal paid family and medical leave program, efforts to make child care more affordable, free community college for all, aid for students at colleges that historically serve nonwhite communities and expanded subsidies under the Affordable Care Act.

The plan would also extend key tax cuts included as temporary measures in the original coronavirus relief package that benefit lower- and middle-income workers and families, including the child tax credit, the earned-income tax credit, and the child and dependent care tax credit.

To pay for that, the president proposed increasing the marginal income tax rate for the top 1 percent of American income earners, to 39.6 percent from 37 percent. He also would increase capital gains and dividend tax rates for those earning more than $1 million a year. And he would eliminate a provision in the tax code that reduces capital gains on some inherited assets, like vacation homes, that largely benefits the wealthy.

Republicans on Wednesday did not wait for the speech to be delivered to focus on the sticker shock of Mr. Biden’s various plans, eager to unify in their opposition to a Democratic president’s liberal blueprint rather than continue to engage in their own fractious civil war over the role of Mr. Trump in their party.

“Behind President Biden’s familiar face, it’s like the most radical Washington Democrats have been handed the keys, and they’re trying to speed as far left as they can possibly go before American voters ask for their car back,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said on the Senate floor.

Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, one of the more moderate Republicans that Mr. Biden would need if he has any realistic hope of forging bipartisan support, used another metaphor. “Maybe if he were younger, I’d say his dad needs to take away the credit card,” Mr. Romney told reporters.

Nor did Republicans give the president much credit for the progress in curbing the pandemic, pointing out that the vaccines that have made such a difference were developed under Mr. Trump and that the economy was already on the rebound by the time Mr. Biden took office.

“This administration inherited a tide that had already turned,” Mr. Scott said. “The coronavirus is on the run.”

For their part, Democrats welcomed Mr. Biden’s go-big approach, which stood in contrast to the more incremental or centrist efforts ultimately advanced since the conservative backlash to the Johnson era by all of his party’s subsequent presidents, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.

“We want to invest in our work force, so, as we build back better, we have a trained work force, many more people able to participate from every aspect of our society, that what we’re doing in terms of children and seniors and care for them, that many more women can participate in the fullest way,” Ms. Pelosi told Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC.

But as aggressive as Mr. Biden’s programs were, he faced pressure from the left within his own party to go further. Some liberals, for instance, were disappointed that he pulled out a plan to negotiate prescription drug prices amid industry opposition.

“In general, I think we are going to say we agree with everything that is in the president’s plan,” Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington State and the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said on MSNBC. “But we need more, and there’s a couple of areas where we really think they’ve been excluded, and they need to be included.”

Mr. Biden arrives at his 100-day mark on Thursday with solid if not spectacular approval ratings, with about 52 percent of the public favoring his performance — higher than Mr. Trump received at any point in his presidency in the main opinion polls but below nearly all modern presidents at this stage of their tenure.

That underlined the political challenges for Mr. Biden in building a broader consensus behind his agenda at a time when political divisions remain as acute as they have been in years. Sensitive to that, Mr. Biden made a special point to reassure working-class Americans, many of whom supported Mr. Trump, that his plans would benefit them by creating new jobs.

“These are good-paying jobs that can’t be outsourced,” he planned to say in the speech. “Nearly 90 percent of the infrastructure jobs created in the American Jobs Plan don’t require a college degree. Seventy-five percent don’t require an associate’s degree. The Americans Jobs Plan is a blue-collar blueprint to build America.”