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When the US entered WWII, the third locks project for Panama Canal capacity expansion was halted, but the project was never restarted after the war. Why was this the case?

WW2 and its outcome vastly reduced the strategic relevance of the canal. Prewar the US only had enough battleships for one proper fleet, and needed to be able to shift that fleet from one ocean to another quickly. The larger locks were intended to let the new Montana class battleships and Midway class aircraft carriers make the transit. The US faced two major fleets, Japan and Britain, as well as several minor ones which could be trouble.

Come postwar the Montana class is canceled, Midway scaled back to just 2 ships, but we have 20 Essex class carriers and 100+ CVLs and CVEs that can all make the passage. The British are out unquestioned ally, and France, Japan and Italy are all finished as strategically significant naval powers. Russia did not have a single remotely modern surface ship bigger then a light cruiser.

The US now could easily form two or three fleets each of which would be more powerful then any possible opponent, even if you counted the British as a possible enemy. The inability of the Midways to make the transit just didn’t matter. Meanwhile we needed to cut way back on military spending to save our economy from the kind of depression most of the world saw postwar (close run thing) and we needed to dump all the money we could into nuclear weapons. Nukes and bombers alone made a bigger canal a dubious military investment, one nuke in the right spot and all that work on a third set of locks is useless.

Civilian traffic meanwhile could not justify more locks, because it wasn’t until the 1960s that merchant ships started growing too big for the canal, and really, it was only oil tankers that roundly exceeded Pan-Max size until the late 1980s spawn of mega container ships and ore haulers. By then the US had already agreed to hand control of the cannal back to Panama, and it made no sense for the US to expand it.

Panama BTW used an awful lot of fuzzy math to justify the economics of expanding the canal in its recent project. Basically they assumed world economic growth and shipping demand would just keep rising exponentially at a high rate. Many people knew this and IIRC the vote to approve the project passed by only a narrow margin.