Joe Biden declared in a 60 Minutes interview aired on September 18th that “the pandemic is over.” He should tell that to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra, who yesterday renewed for another three months the federal government’s “determination that a public health emergency exists” as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Former HHS Secretary Alex Azar first made that official determination on January 31, 2020, and it has been renewed 11 times since.

Some will parse the medical criteria behind the latest determination. Others will review the implications of President Biden’s staff rejecting his straightforward declaration that the pandemic is over, which began immediately after his comments first aired. For example, a September 19 Politico article (“Biden declared the pandemic ‘over.’ His Covid team says it’s more complicated”) states:

Administration officials involved with the Covid response stressed that Biden’s remarks would not impact their policy planning, nor that they represented a turning point in the response. The administration is still expected to renew its Covid public health declaration in October….

But another angle that shouldn’t be overlooked is how key federal lawmakers continue to use the pandemic—and often the public health emergency determination itself—to try to leverage massive increases in federal spending, regardless of whether those plans make the slightest sense given current conditions.

The most recent example was when the White House argued for the President’s $500-billion plus college debt cancellation plan, which an August 24 White House fact sheet said would “address the financial harms of the pandemic.” Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona summarized “this is targeted relief based off of [the] pandemic.” Those arguments not only ignored the massive amounts of assistance provided to Americans during the pandemic, but also the fact that every penny of further relief would be provided after the president declared the pandemic was over. Even the Washington Post editorial board called the plan a “regressive, expensive mistake” and “likely inflationary.”

Speaking of inflationary, then-Senator Kamala Harris in May 2020 introduced the Monthly Economic Crisis Support Act, which may have been the most expensive bill in American history. That legislation proposed specifically tying the ongoing payment of $2,000-per-month federal checks to the public health emergency determination. Checks would have been paid to most Americans starting in March 2020 and stopping only three months after the HHS Secretary determined “the public health emergency…has ended.” If enacted, those checks not only would still be flowing today, but the latest determination would have extended them through at least March 2023. Harris’ bill was never officially scored, but it would conservatively cost $500 billion per month—or an incredible $18 trillion overall. Every time an HHS Secretary re-issued the emergency declaration, another $1.5 trillion in federal benefits would have been paid.

A less expensive version of this idea is reflected in senior lawmakers’ proposals for “reforming” the nation’s unemployment insurance system. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) in April 2021 released a proposal that, among other federal benefit expansions, would mandate “emergency enhanced unemployment compensation” that “increases the wage replacement rate of unemployment benefits to 100 percent during public health emergencies or other major disasters or emergencies.” In the midst of what the Washington Post today calls “widespread labor shortages,” that would have resulted in every current unemployment benefit recipient collecting a bigger benefit check matching their prior paycheck. The intent was to lock in—and, in a significant number of cases, increase—$300-per-week (the successor to prior $600-per-week) federal unemployment bonuses. Those bonuses expired in September 2021, which even President Biden admitted “makes sense.” But if the nation enters a recession in the coming months, expect the Wyden-Bennet proposal to be offered as a way to permanently expand benefits, well beyond just the coming downturn or future emergencies.

These proposals, in the context of the latest HHS emergency determination, add an important twist to Rahm Emanuel’s adage that “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” It’s no surprise that some lawmakers continue to exploit such crises “to do things that you think you could not do before,” as Emanuel put it. But the proposals also display how taxpayers should be extraordinarily wary of even supposedly “targeted” plans that would tie expanded benefits to the federal government’s emergency declaration, now extended into 2023. Not only is that determination subject to manipulation, especially when it might affect large benefit payments. But as this episode also reflects, the declaration itself tells us precious little about when federal benefits are needed—or might have long since become counterproductive.

The post The Pandemic Is Over, but the Public Health Emergency Continues—Along with Calls for More Federal Benefits Tied to It appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.