Despite launching his presidential library foundation a year ago, former President Joe Biden has struggled to raise substantial funds for the project, casting serious doubt on its future as a standalone institution.
According to a New York Times report, public filings and donor interviews reveal that the Joseph R. Biden Jr. Presidential Library Foundation expects to raise just $11.3 million by the end of 2027—a fraction of what is typically needed to construct a modern presidential library. No new donations were received in 2024, and the foundation’s seed money came from $4 million in leftover funds from Biden’s 2021 inauguration.
As of late 2025, Biden has yet to hold any major fundraising events for the library, with the first donor reception scheduled for this coming Monday in Washington DC’s Georgetown neighborhood. The foundation has not disclosed what it raised in 2025, only stating that Biden is now beginning to fundraise more actively.
The New York Times notes that Biden’s projected total of $11.3 million lags far behind the efforts of other recent presidents. The Obama Foundation, in comparison, has raised over $1.5 billion for its sprawling Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. The center, despite cost overruns and criticism from Chicago residents, is slated to open in 2026 with more than $850 million already committed to construction. However, filings and financial disclosures have prompted concerns about the foundation’s limited endowment funding and the potential for taxpayer liability, along with rising operating costs.
President Donald Trump, who plans to build his library in Miami, is aiming to raise nearly $1 billion and has already secured land and funding from legal settlements and private donations. Trump’s project was formally approved in September 2025 by the Florida Cabinet and is being promoted as a major civic attraction in Miami.
The Biden library foundation’s difficulties appear compounded by donor fatigue and intra-party discontent. Several top Democrat donors, including longtime bundler John Morgan, have expressed disinterest or outright refusal to contribute, citing poor treatment by Biden’s staff. “He’ll be lucky to have a bookmobile,” Morgan told the New York Times. Some donors have said they are more focused on defeating Donald Trump or are reluctant to contribute due to frustrations with Biden’s presidency. Separately, Axios revealed that Biden’s decision to pardon his son Hunter further alienated some Democrats, with a number of donors threatening to withhold support for the library effort.
The Biden library foundation is currently chaired by Rufus Gifford, a Democrat fundraiser and former U.S. chief of protocol. Its executive directors include two of Biden’s closest aides, Annie Tomasini and Anthony Bernal. Over the summer, the group hired a consulting firm, CCS Fundraising, to assess financial prospects. In September, the Bidens sent letters inviting prospective supporters to participate in 45-minute interviews to gauge donation potential.
Given the fundraising shortfall, some of President Biden’s donors have suggested merging the future library with existing Biden institutions at the University of Delaware. The university has raised at least $22 million—including $20 million from the Delaware state government—to construct “Biden Hall.” While such a merger might allow the library project to share resources and reduce costs, both the university and the Biden foundation declined to comment on whether consolidation is being considered.
At present, the Biden library exists only on the National Archives website and as a corporate entity incorporated in December 2024. It has not selected a specific site in Delaware, though locations in Wilmington have been discussed. The library’s stated $200 million fundraising goal remains far out of reach.
Trump’s answer for everything: Blame Biden
It feels like a lifetime since Joe Biden was in the Oval Office, such is the turmoil and transformation unleashed since he went home to Delaware.
But one person in Washington never stops obsessing about the 46th president — his predecessor and successor.
Donald Trump rarely appears in public without complaining about Biden’s policies or flinging an insult at his mental or physical capacity.
His obsession betrays deep personal and political antipathy and spite towards a predecessor who has left the political stage. It’s also built on a foundation of Biden’s failures, especially over a surge of migrants across the southern border and a legacy of elevated consumer prices.
Yet Trump’s own deteriorating political position raises questions about the long-term viability of his all Biden, all the time strategy. After all, the former president has run his political race. Trump is now in power. And voters still aren’t happy.
“We inherited a total mess from the Biden administration,” Trump said Monday, opening a forum on his $12 billion bailout for farmers. His own tariff war with China made the rescue necessary — but Trump blamed Biden for agriculture’s woes.
It’s not just farms. Everything’s Biden’s fault, according to Trump.
Trouble in the auto industry? Blame Biden, as Trump did last week, saying he was officially terminating his predecessor’s “ridiculously burdensome” fuel efficiency standards introduced to battle climate change — a crisis the current president ignores.
What about the war in Ukraine that Trump promised to end in 24 hours? That’s Biden’s fault too, Trump says, as Russia would never have invaded in 2022 had he still been in office. “It was Joe Biden’s war, not my war,” Trump told “60 Minutes” in November.
The president has been taking heat because of the affordability crisis. But he insists Biden caused it. “I inherited the worst inflation in history,” he said, falsely, last week at a Cabinet meeting. “There was no affordability. Nobody could afford anything.” Biden’s name came up more than 30 times, showing that Trump’s subordinates know there’s one sure way to please the boss: blame his predecessor.
After two National Guard members were shot in Washington, DC, last month, allegedly by an Afghan man who worked with the CIA during America’s longest war, Trump pinned the blame on the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan orchestrated by “a disastrous president, the worst in the history of our country.” While the alleged assailant came to the US under Biden, he was granted asylum in Trump’s second term. And Trump ignored criticisms that he exposed National Guard troops by sending them into US cities.
When Trump was hammered for pardoning a former Honduran president serving a 45-year-federal sentence for drugs trafficking, he claimed the conviction was a “Biden set-up.”
The president took his Biden fixation into the realm of self-mockery before Thanksgiving. “He used an autopen last year for the turkeys’ pardon,” Trump said.
A personal obsession — and comparison
Why can’t Trump let Biden go?
One reason is that he always needs a foil. His quest for dominance depends on constantly beating up on adversaries. And he can’t let grudges lie.
Trump’s antipathy for his former foe also appears genuinely personal. Not surprising perhaps since he blames the Democrat for orchestrating the criminal indictments he faced after his own first term. (Biden always insisted that the Justice Department and local prosecutors acted without consulting the White House).
Trump is also cruelly preoccupied with the 83-year-old former president’s physical and mental acuity in and out of office.
On Saturday, Trump recalled playing golf with nine-time major champion Gary Player. “He’s 90-years-old … he shot a 70 with me the other day. We’re playing pretty far back too. He’s incredible. You think Biden could do that? I don’t think so, he can’t lift a club” Trump said at a reception for Kennedy Center honorees.
At 79, Trump is proud and vain about his belief he’s in better shape than Biden. But since he’s again the oldest man to take the inaugural oath and watched Biden age visibly in office, does a frisson of fear also creep into the president’s thoughts? Occasionally, Trump hints at wistfulness over his mortality, even while insisting he’s in almost superhuman shape. “I’ll let you know when there’s something wrong. There will be someday. That’s going to happen to all of us. But right now, I think I’m sharper than I was 25 years ago. But who the hell knows?” he said at the Cabinet meeting last week — during which he appeared to doze off.
One thing Trump can’t blame Biden for
There’s another possible root of Trump’s Biden obsession. Life is tough as an incumbent president. Biden’s record is fair game. But Trump’s policies are now causing their own damage.
Despite the president’s adamant refusal to believe it, tariffs increase costs for consumers. And the president’s unwillingness to match Biden’s vast packages of arms and ammunition to Ukraine partly explain why Russia feels it has the luxury of continuing to wage war.
Voters are now looking for answers from Trump, not Biden. After all, he’s the one who conjured a dystopian picture of an America stalked by destitution and violence and vowed “I alone can fix it” in 2016.
Still, Trump’s wildest rhetoric contains a grain of truth. Had Biden’s presidency been a stunning success, Trump wouldn’t be in office now. The former president’s state of denial on an immigration crisis and an inflation spike played a huge role in the decision of many voters to give Trump a second chance in the White House.
And the former president’s decision to seek a second term despite his advanced age culminated in a disastrous debate performance that led him to abandon his campaign and a sequence of events that culminated in Trump’s reelection.
Trump is far from the first president heap blame on a predecessor. Biden’s entire presidency — especially during its first dark months during a pandemic — was an implicit rebuke of Trump. He blamed the Afghan withdrawal debacle on his predecessor’s timetable. And he based his ill-fated reelection bid on a warning that Trump’s return would buckle America’s soul.
President Barack Obama made an art form of blaming his predecessor, President George W. Bush, for the financial crisis that he took on in 2009. He was still at it during his reelection campaign. “We’ve made sure to do everything we can to dig ourselves out of this incredible hole I inherited,” Obama said in 2012.
The blame game never ends.
Vice President JD Vance previewed a possible campaign theme for the administration as it tries to defy political gravity ahead of the midterm elections next year when he tried to offload blame for the affordability crisis. “The hoax is the idea that it’s our fault and not the Democrats’ fault. And I do think that’s a totally bullsh*t narrative,” he told NBC in an interview last week.
But the problem for the administration is that voters — who unlike Trump live in the present — aren’t buying it.
In a Fox News poll last month, 62% of Americans said they blamed Trump for current economic conditions while 32% blamed Biden. Trump’s approval rating sits at 39% in CNN’s poll average.
Polls are one thing the president has yet to blame his predecessor for. Although he probably would if he could.
Trump is immune from accountability for boat strikes. What about everyone under him?
There is one person who can never face any accountability for the killing of people clinging to an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean in September.
That person is Donald Trump, who as US president was granted broad immunity for official acts by the Supreme Court last year while he is in office.
From there, things get tangled in a complicated bramble of military, civilian and international law.
Does Trump’s immunity for extrajudicial killings transfer down to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who gave the order to ensure the strike killed everyone on board, but said he did not order the second strike that killed survivors clinging to the boat’s side?
How about Adm. Frank Bradley, who did order the second strike, apparently, after consulting with a lawyer? Or the service members who pushed the button?
Some legal experts view the second strike as murder, but that may not matter, at least not in the short term. While a future Department of Justice or Defense could pursue charges against people involved with the strikes, it defies logic that Trump’s Department of Justice will seek accountability under US law, or that his Department of Defense will seek accountability under military law.
Trump could also always pardon anyone involved with the strikes, conveying his immunity on anyone he likes.
Life imitating a Supreme Court argument
It should be lost on no one that the hypothetical that animated the Supreme Court arguments about Trump’s immunity involved a president ordering SEAL Team Six to take out a political rival.
The Washington Post reports it was SEAL Team Six that carried out the boat strike that many experts say is illegal.
What was not discussed during those Supreme Court arguments is whether SEAL Team Six should carry out an illegal order.
The laws of war do not apply when the US is not at war
One former military lawyer who has been critical of Trump’s alleged drug-boat campaign says the second strike on the boat in September should refocus the debate on the larger issue that the Trump administration is using the military without direct approval from Congress.
“All of this discussion about the laws of war is really misplaced because they don’t apply,” Maj. Gen. Steven Lepper, a retired Air Force lawyer told me.
In his view, the entire use of the military is unlawful since the administration has tried to draw an equivalence that does not exist in US law between drugs entering the US and bullets threatening Americans.
Accountability outside of the justice system
“We have to give a wider view what accountability means,” said Brian Finucane, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group and a former legal adviser at the State Department.
In the short term, Finucane argued that accountability should come from Congress, which is investigating the strike and he hopes will turn to “forcing the administration to stop this killing spree at sea.”
Another attack was carried out Thursday, according to a social media post by US Southern Command, even as controversy built over the September strike in Washington.
Finucane said in the longer term “the subsequent administration may have the political will to pursue accountability.”
What about military law?
The military justice system has been built around the chain of command, where commanders are an essential part of the process to bring charges when military law is broken.
Any sort of court martial against a top officer like Bradley would be decided by a jury of fellow top officers.
That assumes a case would ever be initiated. Military justice cases are started by what’s known as a “convening authority,” which is usually a commander. But recent changes to the system – enacted to make it possible to take sexual abuse claims out of the chain of command – now also allow military lawyers, special trial counsel, to bring charges.
All of that is an extremely remote possibility at the moment.
What about international law?
A Colombian family has lodged a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which could ultimately lead to reparations for the death of Colombian fisherman Alejandro Carranza.
The US has a history of shutting down any international accountability for it or its allies. But no war has been declared, which means members of the US military could even conceivably be subject to the laws of other countries.
The specifics of who ordered a second strike on the first targeted boat in September have dominated the news this week.
The US military killed the people while carrying out orders Hegseth to destroy the alleged drug boat. The overall strategy had the blessing of blessing of Trump, although both he and Hegseth said they did not immediately know about the second strike.
What about international court?
There is an International Criminal Court in the Hague, for instance, to prosecute war crimes. The international court is modeled on International Criminal Tribunals set up for genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. But the US is notably not a party to the organization.
Bill Clinton did sign the Rome Statue, the agreement that set up the International Criminal Court, as a lame duck president in December of 2000. But the treaty was never ratified by the Senate. And in fact, there is a US law, signed in 2002 by President George W. Bush, that seeks to shield American service members from detention or prosecution by the court. The US actually abstains from certain UN peacekeeping operations as a result of this law.
Other major powers, including China and Russia, are also not parties to the court or, as with Russia, have withdrawn.
That does not mean the court won’t bring charges against people from those countries. The ICC issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin, and another Russian in 2023, over Russia’s scheme to indoctrinate Ukrainian children.
The Trump administration has taken an even more adversarial position toward the ICC. Trump in August authorized sanctions and visa restrictions against members of the court after the ICC launched a probe of alleged war crimes committed by US and Afghan forces and the CIA in Afghanistan. Trump and his administration oppose ICC arrest warrants issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
What about the laws of other countries?
Italy in 2009 convicted nearly two dozen suspected CIA operatives for the alleged 2003 abduction, or rendition, of a terror suspect from the streets of Milan. The Americans did not serve time and effectively became fugitives in Italy, but it did not affect relations between the two countries.
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