In the early, panicked days of the pandemic, the United States government did something that was previously unimaginable. It transformed itself, within weeks, into something akin to a European-style welfare state. Congress rapidly fortified the social safety net, making it much stronger than at any point. It made policies like Medicaid and food stamps more generous. It created new federal benefits like paid sick and caregiving leave, and free school lunches. And it made some pandemic benefits, like stimulus checks and child allowances, nearly universal. The government is estimated to have spent about $5 trillion helping individuals and businesses since March 2020.
Children and families
Through Sept. 2024
Child care system grants
Required paid leave
Child tax credit expansion
Child care provider grants
Emergency food benefits
Free school meals
Through Sept. 2026
Remote WIC services
Paused work requirement
Meals outside of school
Food benefit increase
Through Dec. 2025
Through Sept. 2025
Through Sept. 2030
Extra for self-employed
Note: The selection of programs is not comprehensive, but it represents those with the highest costs or those affecting the most people. Some policy rollouts varied by state, so time frames may not apply to the entire country. WIC refers to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, and E.I.T.C. refers to the earned-income tax credit.
Since then, most of it has been disbanded. When the public health emergency ends Thursday night, certain benefits, including free Covid tests and extensions for food stamp recipients, will begin to expire. Last month, Medicaid began unenrolling an estimated 15 million Americans who were guaranteed coverage during the pandemic, one of the longest-lasting benefits. A few policies — including rental assistance, child care grants and more generous health insurance credits — won’t expire until next year or the year after. But for the most part, the pandemic-era American welfare state is over. This was by design: The policies were created as a response to the crisis and wound down as the acute phase of the pandemic ended and the economy reopened. Efforts to extend certain programs — or to formally create a more generous safety net, as President Biden laid out in his large social spending bill — have failed.
Through Sept. 2024
Required paid leave For illness or to care for child Stimulus checks Three rounds of payments Child tax credit expansion Including money for the poorest E.I.T.C. expansion For workers without children Child care provider grants Note: E.I.T.C. refers to the earned-income tax credit.There has been little political will to make policies permanent because they did not emerge from a deeper shift in how Americans view the role of government or the rights of citizens, said Sheri Berman, a political science professor at Barnard College who has studied social democracies. “The set of goals — protecting people from the downsides of unemployment, helping families with children and ensuring access to health care — are totally accepted in Western Europe,” she said. During the pandemic, she added, “we looked more like that, in our own patchwork way.” “But people did not have an ideological conversion, a new view of what American citizenship could be,” she said. Rather, it was a recognition that during the crisis, “without these things, the entire system could go under.”
Yet the country’s brief flirtation with a much more generous safety net left its mark, researchers said. In March, North Carolina opted to expand Medicaid, following other states that had reversed their opposition since 2020. Some Republicans have joined Democrats in proposing policies like a child tax credit or paid family leave. A few of the new benefits, originally temporary, have become lasting, including the option for states to extend Medicaid for 12 months postpartum; an increase in the maximum SNAP allotment; and summer grocery money for school-aged children who qualify for free or reduced lunch during the school year.
Through Sept. 2026
Paused work requirement For adults without kids Meals outside of school Summer meals made permanent Increase in max. benefit By 15% at first, then 21% WIC benefit increase For fruit and vegetablesNote: WIC refers to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children. States may choose to continue some policies, like the suspension of the food benefit work requirement, after the federal policy lapses.
None of these represent big, structural change, the way that other large-scale crises have reordered societies throughout history. But they suggest that pandemic policies may have made way for incremental changes in the role of government in supporting people during hard times, Professor Berman said, by showing what is possible. “I’m not making the argument that we have a budding Western European welfare state, but I also don’t think we’ve gone entirely backward on some of these issues,” she said. “And I’d expect in the next election for a lot of these issues to be more prominent.” The United States has historically been opposed to the large government programs and high tax rates seen in much of Europe. As a result, it is unusual among its peers in not providing universal health care, entitlements for children and generous cash assistance to the poor, said Robert A. Moffitt, an economics professor at Johns Hopkins. The benefits it does provide are narrower, vary by state and have more restrictions on who qualifies.
Political polarization and congressional gridlock have made a permanent expansion of social benefits more difficult. So has the current economic climate, with high inflation and interest rates. While Republicans argue that the increases in government spending during the pandemic fueled inflation, people in the Biden administration have countered that other factors have played a bigger role, like the oil shock from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and pandemic-related challenges like supply chain tangles and shifts in what Americans have wanted to buy. “The politics of trying to make these programs permanent just isn’t there today, not to mention budget constraints,” said Samuel Hammond, an economist at the Lincoln Network, a right-leaning think tank. “The macro environment has turned in a way that has sort of reaffirmed the fiscal conservatives.”