National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett on Tuesday defended the Trump administration’s response to the economy, saying the U.S. is still grappling with the effects of COVID-19-related stimulus spending from former President Joe Biden’s first year in office.
“This is a big mistake, and we’re still trying to get out of it,” Hassett said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
The comments came in the final weeks of a midterm election cycle that centered on widespread concerns about affordability and inflation, with Democrats appearing poised to make gains in Congress.
President Donald Trump and his administration officials regularly defend his administration’s record by contrasting it favorably with the Biden era or blaming the former president’s policies for causing lingering problems.
Nearly two years after the 2024 presidential election, these claims appear to be losing some of their validity, with recent polls showing voters increasingly disapproving of the economy and of Trump in general.
After the CNBC host brought up the coronavirus, Hassett argued that the first Trump administration approved a reasonable amount of pandemic-related stimulus, but that large spending continued under the Biden administration.
“We wanted to fill the void, but we didn’t do much more than that,” Hassett said of Trump’s first term, which coincided with the coronavirus outbreak in March 2020. “What Biden did was take all of that spending and decide to use it for other things, even if we didn’t need it.”
“When President Trump last left office, he talked about affordability, and inflation was 1.5%,” he said.
“Then we blew up the problem by helicoptering out money by keeping coronavirus spending as a baseline. That was a really big mistake and we’re still working our way out of it,” Hassett argued.
Biden signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan in March 2021, which many economists say has worsened U.S. inflation, although the extent of that impact is debated.
Inflation under the Biden administration rose sharply during his first two years in office, peaking at about 9% in the summer of 2022. Inflation had fallen to 3% by the time Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, but it rose further this year as the U.S. war with Iran and Russia’s continued war in Ukraine strained global energy supplies.
