Washington ? A wildly unpopular government rescue program credited by economists with preventing another Great Depression will go out of business Sunday, two years to the day it was created.

On Oct. 3, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as the bank bailout bill, loses authorization to make new expenditures. From that point forward, TARP will be in wind-down mode, although much of money lent out already has been repaid — at a profit for taxpayers.

Originally envisioned as a blank check for the government to spend as much as $700 billion to rescue the financial system, the actual cost to taxpayers is estimated now to be only a seventh of that amount. The government has earned almost $13 billion in dividends from the bank stock it received in exchange for the taxpayers’ investment, and earned another $8.2 billion from the sale of preferred stock.

The Treasury Department estimates that taxpayers are still on the hook for about $100 billion at this point — a number expected to shrink with continued repayments and asset sales. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently put the estimated total TARP cost at around $66 billion.

Thursday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the latest internal estimates put the number under $50 billion.

Still, TARP became politically poisonous. People considered it free money for Wall Street executives whose recklessness dragged the world into the Great Recession. Now those executives are wallowing in bonuses again while taxpayers remain plagued by 9.6 percent unemployment.

“Objectively, TARP has been an economic success. Politically it’s been a miserable failure,” said Darrell West, director of governance studies at Washington’s Brookings Institution, a center-left policy research center.

Even though TARP was a Bush administration initiative and got strong congressional support from Republicans in 2008, today’s GOP has painted TARP alternately as a Wall Street bailout or a cash kitty to fund Democrats’ wish list.

“TARP turned out to be a slush fund,” said Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Neb. “I would come to the office in the morning and see the latest thing the president has spent money for out of the TARP fund. It just turns my hair gray.”

President Barack Obama “has not done as good a job communicating as he should. He’s allowed the opponents to frame the issue unfavorably,” West said.

In the recently released “Pledge to America,” a campaign document from Republicans in the House of Representatives, GOP lawmakers vow billions in savings by eliminating the TARP.

Problem is, recently passed legislation to revamp financial regulation already did that, and set the Oct. 3 TARP expiration date. That legislation also prevents the Obama administration from taking repayments to TARP and directing them to other priorities.

When first presented by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, TARP money was supposed to be used to buy toxic assets from banks to bolster their balance sheets, allowing them to resume lending. Soon after the Oct. 3, 2008, creation of TARP, however, Paulson shifted gears and chose instead to inject $245 billion directly into banks.

That infuriated politicians and taxpayers alike. Then in 2009, after taking taxpayer money, many of the financial firms paid their executives huge bonuses.

Some $40 billion in TARP money was also used to backstop insurer American International Group, which was rescued by the Federal Reserve in September 2008 to shore up the financial sector.

In December 2008, President George W. Bush authorized some $17 billion in TARP funds to help General Motors and Chrysler avoid bankruptcy. Eventually, expanding under Obama, some $82 billion in TARP money went to rescue the two automakers and keep credit flowing to their suppliers.

Unsavory as it was politically, economists credit these TARP efforts with helping to stabilize the financial sector and preventing an even worse outcome.

“I think it was a great success. The bank bailout part of TARP was an astounding success. Couldn’t have gone any better,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist with forecaster Moody’s Analytics.