ITIF analysis of Trump and Biden's tech policies shows Biden offers a concrete agenda while Trump has focused on tax cuts, deregulation, and alleged bias
Context & Ripple Effects
ITIF has run this exercise before: its 2016 review of Clinton's and Trump's tech positions reached the same structural finding — the Democratic candidate supplied specifics while Trump offered no articulated policy. The 2020 update sharpens that contrast into tax cuts, deregulation, and alleged anti-conservative bias on one side versus a written agenda on the other.
First-order effects
- Campaigns, donors, and trade groups get a scorecard that frames Biden's platform as implementable detail rather than sentiment, consistent with Democrats' August prediction of an initially unaggressive but less Obama-cozy posture (per Axios).
Second-order effects
- If the agenda governs as written, Biden enters office with a mandate to overturn Trump's immigration orders and restore net neutrality, while his appointments signal toughness on tech beyond any predecessor — forcing platforms to plan for enforcement, not friendliness.
Third-order effects
- The asymmetry ITIF flags becomes the throughline of the decade: Trump's later AI Action Plan explicitly rolls back Biden-era AI bias and cybersecurity measures, and by late 2025 Big Tech gets almost everything it wants from Trump — making each election a binary switch between a written tech agenda and deregulatory default.
The trend: US tech policy is consolidating into alternating four-year regimes — Democratic specificity versus Republican deregulation — with think-tank scorecards like ITIF's marking each handoff.