New isolation and quarantine rules and a program to help feed the hungry shouldn’t have much in common.

In our view, however, two state Health Department actions on totally unrelated topics have one common thread running through them — that unelected Health Department bureaucrats think they know more than the representatives we elect every two years.

We’ve covered the isolation and quarantine rules repeatedly in our pages and particularly in this space. Suffice it to say the Health Department chose to make changes after a similar change through administrative rulemaking after public backlash over a similar idea proposed in legislation prompted its rejection by Democrats in the Assembly. Senators had the good sense to never introduce a companion bill.

Nourish New York, in the same vein, was passed with a specific purpose to provide state money to the state’s 10 regional food banks to purchase fresh materials from farmers throughout the state after an emergency program created by Gov. Andrew Cuomo during the COVID-19 pandemic proved successful. Legislators made the program permanent with specific funding mechanisms and procedures to be followed.

But as we reported last week, state Health Department leadership thought they knew better than Sen. Michelle Hinchey, Sen. George Borrello, Assemblywoman Catalina Cruz and the rest of the legislators who wrote specific language governing the program. Instead, they merged it with another hunger program. The result wasn’t efficiency. Instead the Health Department’s actions hurt the very food banks the legislature was working to help.

We hope the Fourth Department Appellate Division is paying attention with oral arguments in the isolation and quarantine rules case coming in September. In our opinion, the Health Department’s actions in both instances come from the same starting point — a bureaucracy that thinks it can do whatever it wants through administrative rulemaking regardless of what elected legislators have written in law. It is the very dictionary definition of usurping the power of the legislature. And in our opinion it must be stopped.