Economist Milton Friedman once noted that there is nothing more permanent than a “temporary” government program. A corollary could be that there are few things more permanent than an “emergency” government program.

A new report from the conservative American Enterprise Institute says that various “emergency” measures relating to America’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — colloquially known as food stamps — that were enacted during the Covid pandemic are continuing unabated despite the passing of the crisis and will cause the program to cost upward of $100 billion a year for the next decade.

The new price tag means the program has ballooned nearly five-fold since the year 2000, and by $40 billion since 2019 alone. The program is now second only to Medicaid in terms of cost to American taxpayers, and the AEI analysis suggests that increased economic need does not explain the growth — that the actions of policymakers are largely to blame.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program “has increased this dramatically without policymakers addressing its fundamental problems, mainly its negative employment effects and its contribution to diet-related disease,” the report’s author, Angela Rachidi, a senior fellow at AEI, tells the Sun. “As the program expands its reach, it means more people are subject to its negative effects.”

America’s first food stamp program dates to 1939. It reached some 4 million people at a total cost of $262 million before it was phased out in 1943. President Johnson, as part of his War on Poverty, revived it in 1964 by signing the Food Stamp Act, making the program permanent. In 2021, some 41 million Americans, or 13 percent of the population, relied on food stamps to put food on their tables — a number that has more than doubled since 2000.

The explosion of people receiving food stamps cannot be explained by macroeconomic factors, Ms. Rachidi said. Unemployment rates in the years immediately preceding the pandemic were at some of the lowest levels in history — something President Trump trumpeted at nearly every opportunity — yet the number of people receiving benefits reached 37.5 million in 2019. A more likely explanation for the growth is relaxed eligibility rules in many states and a rebranding in 2008 that reduced the stigma associated with the program.

“The caseload growth has disproportionately come from older recipients, people over 50, and prime-age recipients without dependents — not parents and their minor children,” Ms. Rachidi said. “In my view, work disincentives coupled with policies that reduced program stigma have been the biggest contributors to this growth.”

During the pandemic, spending on the program skyrocketed following several “emergency” measures such as eliminating the requirement that applicants go to an office to report income changes or other factors affecting eligibility. Everyone in the program was simply handed the maximum benefit allowed in their state. Consequently, the cost of the program jumped to $113.7 billion in 2021 from $79.1 billion in 2020, even though the number of people enrolled only increased to 41.5 million from 39.8 million — a 44 percent increase in cost to serve a 4.3 percent increase in the number of participants.

Congress passed other “emergency” measures as part of subsequent plans, bumping up benefits levels by 15 percent across the board. President Biden’s American Rescue Plan extended that emergency increase in April 2021 until it expired in September 2021.

Instead of letting the increase sunset, however, Ms. Rachidi says the Biden administration — in a move not unlike the one he made to forgive student loans without congressional authorization — used a routine administrative action to increase benefits by 23 percent in October 2021. The Government Accounting Office concluded that Mr. Biden’s Agriculture Department acted improperly in doing so, but the horse was out of the barn.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program “was already on an increasing trajectory stemming from years of policy changes that relaxed eligibility and increased program take-up,” Ms. Rachidi writes in her report. “However, actions since the pandemic have increased SNAP expenditures well beyond caseload increases, with considerable effect.”

The omnibus spending bill passed by Congress last month sets aside $140 billion for SNAP in fiscal 2023. The Congressional Budget Office projects that, despite steadily declining participation in the program over the next decade, the cost of SNAP will continue to exceed $100 billion a year during the same period.

All those “emergency” measures are looking pretty permanent now.