W elfare is about political gain, not merely people’s well-being. This self-serving mentality largely explains Joe Biden’s dramatic growth of the welfare state since 2021 at a cost of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and a weaker economy. Yet two of the Biden administration’s lesser-known regulations especially clarify his political machinations, showing that for this White House, welfare is whatever benefits the president.

A regulation, finalized last month by the Social Security Administration, redefines eligibility standards for Supplemental Security Income, a program designed to help disabled adults and children as well as low-income elderly people. Beginning on September 30, 2024, more people receiving food stamps will benefit from the program. The Biden administration estimates that 109,000 more people will get on the dole and another 277,000 will get bigger checks. While the White House is selling this expansion as a benefit for the vulnerable, it merely sweeps more people into government dependency, which is the first sign of partisan motivations.

The timing is also highly suspicious, to put it mildly. More taxpayer money will hit people’s pockets about a month before Election Day. Writing government checks is a proven way to change someone’s answer to the popular electoral question: Are you better off today than you were four years ago? People who answer yes are obviously more likely to reward the incumbent.

But the bigger story is the language the Biden administration used in this final rule: It redefined “public assistance” to include food stamps, which had long been excluded from SSI determinations to keep the program targeted on the most vulnerable. This rhetorical switch may not seem like a big deal, but it greatly expands the number of those eligible for SSI.

Meanwhile, an earlier Biden rule had defined “public assistance” in the exact opposite way, excluding food stamps for the sake of political convenience.

In 2022, the Biden administration repealed a Trump-era immigration regulation that had made it harder for immigrants who receive food stamps to become permanent residents on the grounds that they would constitute a “public charge.” While the Trump-era rule protected taxpayers, it infuriated immigration activists, who typically want immigrants to receive government support regardless of their residency or citizenship status. The Biden administration repealed the rule to please these activists, excluding food stamps from the definition of “public assistance.” Federal law still requires the government to limit immigration eligibility for those who are likely to become a public charge. The White House is simply discounting welfare to make it harder to prove that someone might be a burden on taxpayers.

These dueling rules are more than mere wordplay. Whether food stamps are public assistance doesn’t matter to the Biden administration. Food stamps, like other welfare programs, are a tool for achieving political results. They can be used to expand taxpayer handouts immediately prior to the presidential election, buying votes with public money. They can also be used to make it easier for immigrants to be allowed into America, mollifying immigration activists whose votes the president needs. The definitions of “public assistance” are different, but the result is the same: A political benefit for Joe Biden.

Some may think that it’s hard to draw such a conclusion based on two rules by two agencies issued two years apart. Yet Biden has repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to go to extreme lengths to leverage welfare for political gain. This is the same president who unilaterally and illegally expanded food-stamp benefits by more than $250 billion, who repeatedly extended the Public Health Emergency for Covid-19 long after the pandemic had ended, thereby keeping billions of dollars in taxpayer handouts in place, and who already plans to make a dramatically expanded welfare state a priority for his second term.

This administration is fixated on welfare. It knows what it’s doing. Joe Biden is abusing the taxpayers’ generosity to reward constituencies whose support he needs to pave the way to his reelection.