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The White House’s Adventures in Wonderland

By issuing misleading claims about its policies and their likely effects, US President Joe Biden's administration is squandering one of its most important resources: credibility. Today's fraught geopolitical environment requires more transparency, and less spin, about the hard choices that governments face.

STANFORD – President Joe Biden’s administration is not serving US economic, energy, or national security when it issues unrealistic statements and assessments of what each requires. While every administration exaggerates to some extent, misleading claims have become more problematic in today’s changing policymaking environment.

I am not talking about embarrassing misjudgments, like the administration’s costly belief that rising inflation was “transitory.” Political misinformation falls along a spectrum, from the Biden administration repeatedly defending ridiculous statements (the Afghan withdrawal was a success) and shifting blame (expensive gas is due to “Putin’s price hike”) to his predecessors Donald Trump cherry-picking pandemic data and Bill Clinton relying on semantic obfuscation.

Most recently, Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have repeatedly asserted that America’s southern border is secure, even though they know perfectly well that it is not. The administration’s own delayed data release late last month reveals a record-shattering 2.4 million border-patrol encounters for the fiscal year, plus an estimated half-million illegal migrants who evaded an encounter.

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