The public health emergency that was declared by the federal government shortly after the pandemic began will end on May 11, officials have announced.
That means that everything, in theory, will finally be “back to normal” again. It’ll be the day, in theory, that we all looked forward to seeing again during the darkest days of this pandemic. Forget about the new normal. It’ll be back to the old normal.
But the federal government has already started pushing some people back to the old normal. And it isn’t fun and games for those people.
For my friend, Tim, going back to the old normal means resuming frequently getting free food from his local food pantry. He hasn’t had to do that for almost three years because his monthly allotment under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) went up to $285 when the pandemic began.
For my friend, Tim, going back to the old normal means resuming frequently getting free food from his local food pantry.
But a few weeks ago, he received a notice from the Illinois Department of Human Services informing state SNAP recipients that the federal government will be cutting off the flow of money that has been funding the pandemic allotment increase as of March 1. Tim says this means his SNAP allotment will return on that date to its pre-pandemic level of $20 a month.
That’s not a typo. I did not mean to say that he will return to getting $200 a month. I did not even mean to say $20 a week. All Tim receives to purchase a month of groceries (in 2023!) is $20!
No wonder he has to return to the food pantry. No one can subsist on $20 worth of groceries a month—not even if you go on a diet of nothing but Kool-Aid.
Remember how financially burdensome this aspect of the new normal brought on by the pandemic was for all of us who don’t rely on SNAP to get enough food? Remember how we all struggled to put food on our own tables because our taxes were skyrocketing so people like Tim could be rolling in grocery dough?
Yeah, I don’t remember any of that either. And just like we didn’t notice any setbacks in our own lives when the allotments of people like Tim were enhanced, I doubt that we’ll feel anything when they are rolled back.
So I don’t know whose “good old days” we are bringing back with this rollback. The people who will most feel the impact of this return to the pre-pandemic old normal—people like my friend Tim—won’t likely feel too great.