Two years in, it might be easy to forget the Joe Biden presidency was first sold as a bold experiment in refashioning Americans’ relationship to government.

Addressing Congress for the first time as president in 2021, Biden “embraced government as the solution” and even as “an organizing principle for the nation’s democracy,” the Associated Press said, while the New York Times argued his now-abandoned domestic agenda represented “a fundamental reorientation of the role of government not seen since” the New Deal era. He was even trying to “reshape [the] role of US capitalism,” the Hill said. It was a framing Biden himself embraced, telling Congress defending US democracy meant proving “our government still works” and laying out a plan for “restor[ing] people’s faith in our government to come through when it matters most.”

If Biden and his team ever genuinely meant any of this, then the ongoing disaster in East Palestine suggests they’ve either given up on this goal or utterly failed at meeting it. Twelve days after a train carrying dangerous chemicals derailed and ignited in the Ohio town, leaking toxic chemicals into its surroundings that have left locals with physical symptoms and a trail of dead or sick animals in the area, the White House has said very little publicly about the incident and Biden has said nothing. It took transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg ten days to weigh in, assuring Twitter users he “continue[s] to be concerned about the impacts” of the derailment.