Does a victory-lap quote on Biden's achievements add up? White House chief of staff Ron Klain the other day offered a victory-lap quote on behalf of President Biden: "The president has delivered the largest economic recovery plan since Roosevelt, the largest infrastructure plan since Eisenhower, the most judges confirmed since Kennedy, the second largest health care bill since Johnson, and the largest climate change bill in history." Klain cleverly framed his quote. He name-checks some of the most effective or popular presidents — and then does not say that President Biden topped their achievements, only that it's the "largest" since then. Still, does the math work? The most problematic claim is the first — "the largest economic recovery plan since Roosevelt." FDR's programs accounted for 40 percent of the nation's 1927 output. By contrast, the 2009 Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed under President Barack Obama amounted to 6.1 percent of 2008′s output. The Biden bill amounts to 8.87 percent of one year's output. But Trump's covid relief actions totaled 15.4 percent of one year's output, easily beating Biden. So how does Klain make this claim? The White House says he is also adding a bunch of other bills under "economic recovery." Still, by our math, the total spending for all of the legislation under Klain's rubric still falls just short of Trump's $3.3 trillion. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. The GOP claim that the existing budget would cover IRS retirements We recently disputed the GOP claim that the bill designed to bolster the Internal Revenue Service would result in the hiring of "87,000 new agents." As part of that analysis, we quoted a Treasury Department official as saying that over half of the IRS staff — 50,000 — is eligible for retirement in the next five years and so many of the new hires would replace those workers. Since we wrote that article, several readers have urged a reassessment. They argued that any attrition due to retirement or other factors would be covered by annual appropriations passed by Congress. In other words, the theory goes, the 87,000 people who could be hired under the legislation would indeed be new workers — and the size of the agency's staff would more than double. The new law would provide the funding as "mandatory spending" — meaning Congress would need to pass a new law to block it. Ordinarily, a government agency would be funded through what is known as discretionary spending — annual appropriations bills that must be approved year after year. Congress has trouble even accomplishing that task, so agencies are often funded via continuing resolutions, which generally just provide spending at the previous level. We reviewed a decade of the budget justifications that the IRS has submitted to lawmakers explaining the rationale behind its budget request. For many years, the IRS simply could not replace the staff that had quit — and so the number of employees kept dropping. The Bottom Line: The IRS until recently has not been able to know whether the funding would exist from year to year for replacement hires. The mandatory spending in the bill would provide the assurance that people could be hired for the long term. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP and @AdriUsero) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | 
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