Neither of those excuse having a budget in the negative.

While literally true, this is not very insightful/useful information because Obama entered office at peak deficit spend to counter the mortgage crisis, and Biden entered at peak deficit spend to counter COVID lockdowns. Because both the mortgage crisis and COVID eventually ended, deficit spend came down from those peaks without either president meaningfully reforming the budget.

Structurally, the budget has gotten worse every year since the 1990s. In large part for reasons not attributable to presidents. For example the number of old people (as a % of the population) in the US has doubled since the '90s, thus ballooning medicare and social security spend. Without cutting eligibility to those programs, increased spend was always going to be an inevitability due to seismic underlying demographic trends. Second, the persistent deficit has led to now $2T in annual interest expense. Again, not something an administration can simply "reform" or back out of; that is now structural inherited spend.