In his address to Congress, which ran for more than an hour and a half, President Donald Trump made a series of claims about the state of the US under his predecessor Joe Biden and the achievements of his first weeks in office.

He returned to key campaign themes including illegal immigration, rising prices and what he called “appalling waste” in government spending.

BBC Verify has looked into the facts behind some of his key claims.

Trump said he inherited an “economic catastrophe” from Biden.

This is misleading. The US economy was growing at an annual rate of 2.3% in the final quarter of 2024 under the previous administration. It expanded by 2.8% over 2024 as a whole according to official US statistics.

The International Monetary Fund estimates that the US growth rate in 2024 was faster than any other nation in the G7.

On rising prices, Trump added “we suffered the worst inflation in 48 years, but perhaps even in the history of our country”.

Inflation under Biden peaked at 9.1% in June 2022 – the highest level since 1981 – so not quite as far back as Trump claimed.

The 2022 peak was in the context of high inflation in the rest of the world in the wake of the Covid pandemic and a global energy shock. The inflation rate had dropped to 3% by the time Trump took office.

Inflation has also been much higher than 9% at several other points in US history, including the 1940s and 1920s.

Trump went on to blame Biden for egg prices, claiming he “let the price of eggs get out of control”.

Prices are high, but this has been linked to a bird flu outbreak in the US.

Egg prices rose under Biden in 2023, and in January a dozen eggs averaged over $5, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). That is 53% above the average for the whole of 2024.

The USDA has said a bird flu outbreak has led to US farmers having to kill millions of chickens, creating egg shortages, and has announced a $1bn (£780m) plan to help combat the issue.

The outbreak started in February 2022 and last year the Biden administration allocated more than $800m to tackle it.

The Trump administration recently fired a number of USDA officials who worked on the government’s response to bird flu as part of cost-cutting measures by the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge). They are now reportedly attempting to rehire some of them.

Trump praised Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) and claimed the advisory body had found “hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud” in federal government spending.

No evidence has been provided for this figure.

On its official website, Doge states that it has saved an estimated $105bn, from fraud detection, contract and grant cancellations, real estate lease terminations, asset sales, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings.

However, that figure cannot be independently verified as, so far, Doge has only published “receipts” for contract, grant and real estate lease cancellations on the website. These add up to about $18.6bn. We have asked the White House for evidence of the remaining $86bn of savings.

US media outlets have also highlighted some accounting errors. For example, Doge initially listed its largest saving of $8bn from scrapping an immigration agency contract – it later corrected this to $8m.

Speaking about his actions to tackle illegal immigration, Trump said that “as a result, illegal border crossings last month were by far the lowest ever recorded”.

This is true.

In February 2025, 8,326 encounters of migrants at the south-west border with Mexico were recorded by US Border Patrol.

This is the lowest level since monthly records began in 2000.

By comparison, there were 140,641 encounters by US Border Patrol at this border in February last year under Biden.

Numbers fell to 47,316 in December 2024.

Continuing with illegal migration, Trump claimed: “Over the past four years, 21 million people poured into the United States”.

There is no evidence for a figure this high.

Encounters with migrants at the borders – a measure of illegal migration – reached 10 million under Biden but this does not mean this many people stayed in the US.

It is impossible to know exactly how many illegal immigrants have come to the US, as many will have evaded law enforcement agencies, but several estimates put the number at around half what Trump stated.

A report published by the Office of Homeland Security last year estimated the number of illegal immigrants living in the US, as of January 2022, at 11 million.

It says about a fifth of them arrived in 2010 or later but the majority arrived before this time, some as early as the 1980s.

On US aid to Ukraine, Trump claimed: “We’ve spent perhaps $350bn… and they [Europe] have spent $100bn. What a difference that is.”

BBC Verify is unable to find any evidence for Trump’s $350bn claim and some figures suggest Europe has spent more as whole when all aid to Ukraine is included.

The US is, by some margin, the largest single donor to Ukraine. But Europe combined has spent more money than the US, according to the Kiel Institute think tank.

It calculates that between 24 January 2022 and the end of 2024, Europe as a whole spent $138.7bn on Ukraine, while the US spent $119.7bn.

The US Department of Defense has a higher figure of $182.8bn – taking into account a broader range of US military activity in Europe – but this is still considerably less than Trump’s figure.

We have asked the White House where it comes from.

Correction: an earlier version of this article stated that migrant encounters at the south-west border fell to 96,000 at the end of 2024. While this is correct for overall encounters here, the number recorded by Border Patrol was 47,316.

Additional reporting by Shayan Sardarizadeh & Anthony Reuben.