Gridlock in Washington and chaos on the campaign trail may dominate the headlines, but a look back at the big policy stories of the past year reveals a different story: The Obama administration got most of what it wanted, from overtime regulations to food rules to international trade, affecting virtually every aspect of American life.

A decidedly Obama-friendly agenda broke through with executive actions, regulations, court rulings and even an occasional legislative accomplishment in the Republican Congress. Whether it was re-establishing ties with Cuba, negotiating a 12-nation trade pact spanning the Pacific Rim or winning court cases on gay marriage and Obamacare, there were more policy victories for President Barack Obama than losses.


To be sure, there were setbacks: Obama underestimated the threat of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which will be the dominant threat to American security for the foreseeable future. A federal appeals court blocked the president’s efforts to make it easier for many immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally to live and work here. And he failed to move the ball on gun control.

Some of the accomplishments don’t fit neatly within either party’s ideology: Congressional Republicans worked with Democrats to overhaul the much-criticized No Child Left Behind Act, returning more control over public schools to the states. And lawmakers from both parties signed off on a long-sought deal for a five-year highway bill, and legislation that made permanent several business and family tax breaks.

Here’s a look at the most consequential stories of the year as judged by POLITICO’s policy reporters:

Obamacare is upheld … and then sustains fresh wounds: The Affordable Care Act survived another major legal challenge in June when the Supreme Court sided with the Obama administration and upheld government subsidies to residents in the 34 states that rely on HealthCare.gov as a marketplace. The King v. Burwell case could have resulted in more than 6 million Americans losing financial assistance to purchase health coverage, but Chief Justice John Roberts once again sided with the court’s four liberals in backing the administration’s position — and this time Justice Anthony Kennedy joined them. Only six months later, though, the law sustained serious damage after Congress voted to delay or kill several elements of its financing as part of a massive spending bill.

War rages against ISIL: Even before a San Bernardino, California, couple inspired by ISIL went on a deadly rampage, the U.S. campaign against the Islamist group had steadily escalated, with more than 3,500 U.S. troops now in Iraq and special forces operating in and out of Syria. The deployments signal the lengthy fight still ahead. But while Obama isn’t recommitting a large ground force, the ramped-up deployments — along with the 10,000 U.S. troops still in Afghanistan — underscore the reality that the U.S. fight in the Middle East will be far from done when the president leaves office in January 2017.

Clean power plan: In August, the Environmental Protection Agency issued sweeping climate change regulations for power plants, the biggest source of temperature-raising pollution. The regulations aim to ratchet down carbon dioxide emissions. They also push electricity producers away from coal toward clean-burning natural gas, while accelerating the growth of solar, wind and other renewable power sources. Internationally, Obama used the rules to help cajole China and India to join an international climate agreement in Paris earlier this month.

FCC OKs ‘free’ Internet: Obama won his top technology priority in February, when the Federal Communications Commission voted along party lines to approve regulations that treat broadband like a utility and ensure all Web traffic is treated equally. The move gave the FCC clearer authority to act as an Internet traffic cop and introduced new protections for consumers and content companies such as Netflix. Internet providers like AT&T and Verizon said the rules would dampen innovation. Cable, telecom and wireless trade groups brought suit in March to throw out the rules. A three-judge panel heard arguments this month and is expected to rule in the first half of next year.

12-nation trade deal clinched: After more than five years of talks, the Obama administration concluded the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal in October, which would tear down trade barriers with 11 countries in the fast-growing Asia-Pacific region, including Canada, Mexico and Japan. Obama hopes to win congressional approval of the deal before he leaves office, but Republicans raise concerns about pharmaceutical, tobacco and financial services provisions, while groups on the left question its labor and environmental commitments. Add in the difficulty of trade votes during a presidential election year, and the outlook for the agreement remains uncertain.

Worker wins: The Labor Department unveiled a rule to make millions of American workers newly eligible for overtime. The regulation, to be finalized next July, covers virtually all workers who earn below $50,440 per year. (The prior threshold of $23,660 had been updated only once since 1975.) The National Labor Relations Board also gave a gift to unions trying to organize the fast food industry with an August ruling that Browning Ferris Industries, a waste management company, qualifies as a “joint employer” alongside one of its subcontractors. The ruling means that franchisers like McDonald’s may now be forced to sit at the bargaining table with workers employed by a franchisee managing one of its restaurants.

Immigration actions blocked: The Obama administration’s executive actions to allow more than 4 million undocumented immigrants to live and work legally in the U.S. were blocked by a federal judge in response to a lawsuit from Texas and 25 other states. After two appellate court losses, the administration has asked the Supreme Court to hear the case.

U.S.-Cuba relations restored: Obama continued chipping away at the 53-year-old Cuba embargo this year, following through on an initiative he launched in December 2014. The administration announced rules in September to further ease trade, travel and investment restrictions on the communist island nation. The two countries also restored diplomatic ties and reopened embassies, although Cuba has made it clear that full normalization will require complete lifting of the Cold War-era embargo, a step the Republican-controlled Congress is unlikely to take.

The Obama Administration achieved a large foreign policy goal in the restoration of relations with Cuba.

Genetically engineered fish OK’d: The Food and Drug Administration’s approval of a salmon genetically altered to reach market size twice as quickly as conventional fish represents the first time the agency has approved a genetically engineered animal for human consumption. The November decision is likely to open the door for other such approvals. Whether supermarkets will stock the fish when its Massachusetts developer makes it available in about two years remains to be seen. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, whose home state of Alaska counts wild-caught salmon as a significant revenue source, got a rider inserted into the recent spending bill that requires that the fish be labeled before it can be sold across state lines.

Fed hikes rates for first time in a decade: The Federal Reserve raised interest rates in December by a modest 0.25 percent, ending almost a decade without an increase in borrowing costs and signaling confidence the nation has finally recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. Rate hikes could be a short-term economic boost, pushing companies and consumers to make big purchases now before rates go higher.

Combat jobs opened to women: In a historic move, Defense Secretary Ash Carter ordered the military to admit women to all combat jobs, fulfilling the president’s promise to make the military more inclusive. Obama inherited a military that barred gays from serving openly, banned transgender troops and prohibited women in ground combat units. All three of those exclusions have been, or are being, overturned. In his final order, Carter rejected a Marine Corps request for some exemptions, saying the “force of the future must continue to benefit from the best people America has to offer.”

AP Photo

Take us to your (new) leader: Former Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan replaced John Boehner as speaker of the House in October, making the chamber’s undisputed chief tax and health care wonk its most powerful member. That had many observers recalibrating the odds of full-blown tax or entitlement reforms, particularly if a Republican wins the White House. It perhaps wasn’t a coincidence that lawmakers passed a huge tax cut less than two months after Ryan’s ascension.

Giant data hack and China truce: The largest known data breach in U.S. government history, at the Office of Personnel Management, made victims out of approximately 22 million current and former government employees, as well as others vetted for travel and other programs. That fueled congressional hearings and a governmentwide “cyber sprint” to improve federal network security and contributed to a U.S.-China pact renouncing cyber espionage for commercial purposes.

No more No Child Left Behind: It took eight years since its expiration, but Congress finally overhauled the nation’s overarching K-12 education law, shifting decision-making power back to the states. The new law preserves annual testing in reading and math for kids in the third through eighth grades, but the feds will have less ability to dictate what goes on in schools. States will still have to report how minority students and those from low-income families do on tests, as a way of holding schools accountable.

Green light for gay marriage: The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to make same-sex marriage legal nationwide, with Kennedy writing the majority opinion and providing the swing vote. The June decision on Obergefell v. Hodges came against the backdrop of polls showing Americans increasingly supportive of gay marriage. In his opinion, the Reagan-appointed justice wrote that “it would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. … The Constitution grants them that right.”

Keystone XL pipeline KO’d: After seven years of delay, the Obama administration rejected a permit for TransCanada to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline. The $8 billion, 1,179-mile Alberta-to-Texas pipeline had achieved an “overinflated role in our political discourse," Obama said, as he made a public show of killing the project in the Roosevelt Room, alongside Secretary of State John Kerry. Republicans, industry and labor unions had lauded the project’s potential to create jobs, lower gas prices and reduced dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Greens had painted the pipeline as a “game over” for the climate and led several rallies in Washington and elsewhere to press their opposition.

Deal on five-year highway bill: The agreement, the biggest transportation infrastructure bill in a decade, provides more than $300 billion for federal transportation programs and sets out the policies that will govern highway, transit and rail spending for the next five years. It was one of Congress’ biggest achievements of the year and will provide certainty, enabling state governments to undertake major new projects and infrastructure upgrades that often take far longer to complete than the one- to two-year extensions that have emerged from Washington since 2009, usually as last-minute patches. Aside from the bipartisan support it won inside the Capitol, the bill was welcomed by both the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and labor groups, and provided a boost to Ryan early in his new role as speaker of the House.

‘Doc fix’ done: In April, Congress finally overhauled the formula for paying doctors who treat Medicare beneficiaries, ending the perennial fight over the “doc fix.” The legislation, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, establishes a payment system designed to reward doctors who deliver good outcomes.

Permanent tax credits: The most important tax bill of the year came at the very end: a $680 billion tax cut Congress approved just before leaving for the year. The legislation delayed Obamacare’s unpopular "Cadillac" tax; made several big, but temporary business tax breaks permanent (a win for Republicans); and made stimulus-era expansions of the earned income and child tax credits part of the tax code (a move that appeased Democrats). It will likely be the last big tax deal until the next administration.

Drone rules: Fearing as many as a million new drones may have landed under Christmas trees, the administration announced just before the holidays that it will require consumers to register their craft — and pay a small fee derided as a “drone tax” by early next year. The Federal Aviation Administration announced the national drone registry to deal with an increasingly crowded airspace and a rash of incidents, from drones buzzing planes to crashing on the White House lawn. The agency built the rule from recommendations made by a task force of retailers, manufacturers and law enforcement officials, but also bucked some of their suggestions — such as keeping registration free for consumers.