Record-Low Poverty, If You Don’t Count the Bills
President Trump is touting the lowest official poverty rate ever recorded. The number is real. It is also built on a 1960s formula that ignores rent, medicine, taxes and child care, measures a year before his war and his safety-net cuts hit, and arrives as his administration shuts down the very surveys that would show what happens next.
On September 28 and again on September 29, President Trump stood in the Oval Office and claimed the best poverty numbers in American history. On the narrowest reading he is right. The Census Bureau’s annual report, released in mid-September, put the official poverty rate for 2025 at 10.2 percent, down half a point and the lowest since the government began counting in 1959. Child poverty and Hispanic poverty also hit record lows on that measure.
But a statistic can be accurate and still tell a lie by omission. When the Associated Press checked the claim, University of Chicago poverty scholar Steven Durlauf told the wire service that the president’s statement was factually correct but painted a misleading picture of poverty in America. The measure experts trust more is flat. The year being measured is mostly one Trump inherited. And the households now paying $4-plus for gasoline, double-digit increases on health premiums and seven-percent mortgages are nowhere in the number at all.
“We have the best poverty numbers in history.”
— President Donald Trump, Oval Office, Sept. 29, 2026, via the Associated Press
I. A Poverty Line Drawn in 1963
To understand why the official number flatters, you have to know how it is made. The formula dates to Mollie Orshansky, a Social Security Administration economist who, as NPR has documented, took the cost of a bare-bones government food budget and multiplied it by three, because families of that era spent roughly a third of their income on groceries. The thresholds have been raised for inflation every year since, but the basic recipe has barely changed in six decades.
Each year the Census Bureau compares a family’s pretax cash income against that threshold, scaled for family size and composition. As the Congressional Research Service notes, the line is the same in Manhattan as it is in rural Mississippi. Food is now a far smaller share of a family budget than in Orshansky’s day, while housing, medical care and child care consume far more. The official measure sees none of that shift.
(the one Trump cites)
no significant change
II. What the Official Number Cannot See
Since 2011 the Census Bureau, working with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has published a second yardstick, the Supplemental Poverty Measure. It counts what families actually receive, including SNAP, housing aid and refundable tax credits, and then subtracts what they cannot avoid paying: taxes, work and child-care expenses, and out-of-pocket medical bills. Its thresholds vary with local housing costs and rise with what typical families actually spend on basic needs. Experts the AP consulted called it the more accurate picture.
On that measure, poverty in 2025 was 13.1 percent, statistically unchanged from the year before. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities counts some 44 million people, more than one in eight Americans, below that line, along with after-tax income inequality at its highest in at least 17 years. The supplemental rate’s all-time low was 7.7 percent in 2021, when the expanded Child Tax Credit was in force under President Biden.
Medical bills
People pushed into poverty by out-of-pocket medical costs, the single heaviest expense the supplemental measure counts, according to Census Bureau analysts. The official line ignores them entirely.
Housing costs
The official threshold is identical in every county, so a family in high-rent Boston and one in low-rent rural Alabama are judged by the same dollar figure, as the CRS explains.
The safety net
In 2025, refundable tax credits lifted 6 million people above the line and SNAP lifted more than 3 million, per CBPP’s reading of Census data. Those are the programs Republicans just cut.
The cost of living
The supplemental rate stayed flat largely because its thresholds climbed with the rising price of basic needs, CBPP found. The official line, pegged to a 1960s grocery list, cannot register that squeeze.
Honesty requires a caveat, and it cuts against the president, not for him. CBPP also found that an inflation-anchored version of the supplemental measure dipped in 2025, and that the year’s data suggest modest gains for low-income households. Those gains came from wage growth in a labor market Trump inherited. The Census survey measures calendar-year 2025 incomes. As University of Michigan researcher Natasha Pilkauskas told the AP, the figures largely reflect conditions under Biden. The record the president is claiming predates almost every policy that defines his second term: the bulk of the SNAP and Medicaid cuts, the expiration of ACA subsidies, and the war with Iran that began on February 28, 2026.
III. Breaking the Measuring Stick
A government confident in its record would want more data, not less. The Trump administration has moved steadily in the other direction, firing the officials who report bad numbers and dismantling the surveys that would capture the damage from its own policies.
- July 4, 2025Trump signs the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which, as the Ohio Capital Journal details, cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid and $187 billion from SNAP over ten years while delivering large tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans.
- August 1, 2025Trump fires BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer hours after a weak jobs report, alleging manipulation without evidence. Bloomberg reported that even Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who served Reagan, both Bushes and Trump, dismissed the charge, noting a rigged agency would have reported a higher number.
- September 2025USDA terminates its 30-year Household Food Security Report, less than three months after the SNAP cuts, calling it politicized. At the administration’s direction, the Census Bureau also stopped collecting its long-standing food-insecurity measures, according to CBPP.
- Jan. 2025 – July 2026The Census Bureau loses 20 percent of its full-time staff, including a third of its senior staff, largely through DOGE actions.
- August 2026Commerce bans “noise infusion,” a standard privacy technique, through an order from political appointees. The Census Bureau then indefinitely delays the 2025 American Community Survey, the main source of state, local and demographic poverty data. The same month, an unsigned report on the Census website was cited by the White House to push debunked election-fraud claims, and Commerce quietly removed language barring political interference from its scientific-integrity directive.
- Sept. 28–29, 2026Trump claims the best poverty numbers in history, citing a dataset collected before most of his cuts took effect.
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Amy Matsui of the National Women’s Law Center told the Ohio Capital Journal that researchers are now flying blind on how women, communities of color and rural areas are faring. “They’re really trying to hide from view what people are experiencing,” she said. The pattern is plain: announce the good number, then stop collecting the next one.
IV. The Squeeze of 2026
The year the poverty report cannot see is the one Americans are living through now. Inflation ran at 3.4 percent in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, driven by energy prices up 16.3 percent and gasoline up 27.4 percent over the year after the U.S. attack on Iran choked oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz. Inflation had peaked at 4.2 percent in May.
Paychecks
Prices rose 3.4% in the year to July while hourly pay rose 3.2%, The New York Times reported. Jared Bernstein called the real wage the fundamental building block of working families’ living standards.
Jobs
September payroll growth, with unemployment up to 4.2%, 60,000 jobs revised away from July and August, and wage growth at its slowest pace since May 2021, per the BLS report.
Winter heat
Average projected heating bill, up 8.7%, more than twice inflation. Heating-oil homes face a 31.3% jump, and one in six households is already behind on utilities, says NEADA.
Health premiums
Out-of-pocket ACA premiums jumped 58% on average in 2026 after enhanced tax credits expired; insurers now seek a median 15% increase for 2027, KFF found.
Housing
The 30-year mortgage rate on October 1, up from 6.34% a year earlier and above 7% for the first time since January 2025, according to Freddie Mac data.
Tariffs
Annual cost to the typical household of current tariffs, the nonpartisan Yale Budget Lab estimated in August, after Trump imposed sweeping new levies on 60 trading partners.
These costs land hardest on exactly the households near the line. Gasoline averaged $4.46 a gallon at the end of September, CBS News reported, roughly 50 percent above its prewar level. Grocery prices are 32 percent above early 2020. Some relief is real: the Energy Information Administration expects households heating with natural gas or propane to pay somewhat less this winter. But families on heating oil, concentrated in the Northeast, face a sharp increase, and none of it registers in a poverty line built on a grocery list.
“Too many families are entering winter with no room left in their budgets.”
— Mark Wolfe, Executive Director, National Energy Assistance Directors Association, via TNND
V. Congress: Cutting the Floor While Prices Rise
The Republican Congress has not merely failed to address this squeeze. It legislated much of it. About 5.2 million Americans have lost SNAP since the 2025 law took effect, according to the Food Research & Action Center, and enrollment is at its lowest since 2019. The law extended work requirements to adults up to age 64 and to parents of children 14 and older. On October 1, states began paying 75 percent of SNAP’s administrative costs, up from half. Beginning in October 2027, states with high error rates must cover up to 15 percent of benefits, which has led officials in Alabama to openly discuss ending the program. FRAC president Crystal FitzSimons called the changes “absolutely unprecedented.”
Health coverage followed the same path. Republicans let the enhanced ACA premium tax credits expire at the end of 2025. HHS data show 3 million fewer people enrolled in marketplace plans in February 2026 than a year earlier, and the Congressional Budget Office projects about 15 million more uninsured by 2034 because of the 2025 law and related administration policies. The largest Medicaid cuts, tied to new work requirements, arrive in 2027.
What Congress has done this fall is buy time. It passed a stopgap spending bill, by a 370–48 House vote, that keeps the government open and SNAP funded at current levels through December 11. That sets up the real fight in the lame-duck session: whether to delay the state SNAP cost-share, whether to add the extra heating aid that energy-assistance directors are urging, and whether to restore any ACA help before premiums rise again.
VI. What Democrats Are Promising
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries launched the party’s “Fighting for an Affordable America” agenda on July 26 in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, pledging that a Democratic House would work to lower the cost of groceries, gas, housing and health care, protect Medicare and Social Security, crack down on price gouging, and ban stock trading by the president, vice president and members of Congress. He tied the squeeze directly to the war in Iran, saying that for families, “the cookie jar is empty” while Washington funds what he called a reckless war of choice.
Jeffries also hammered Republicans for letting the ACA tax credits lapse and for cutting Medicaid to fund tax breaks for wealthy donors. We should be candid about the gap: Al Jazeera noted that Jeffries offered few concrete specifics, and much of the agenda amounts to reversing what has happened since January 2025. That is a meaningful start for families losing food aid and coverage. It is not yet a plan to reduce poverty. The 2021 child tax credit showed what such a plan looks like, cutting the supplemental child poverty rate to a record 5.1 percent. Democrats who win in November should campaign on bringing it back.
VII. What the President Is Actually Doing
Set against these facts, the president’s answer to rising costs has been to promise a check. At the Republican midterm convention in Dallas on September 9, he pledged a $5,000 “Trump Dividend” to every adult citizen, conditioned on Republicans holding both chambers. “If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000,” he said, as the AP reported. The plan would cost more than $1 trillion, has no funding mechanism, and would need congressional approval. His earlier $2,000 tariff dividend never materialized.
Meanwhile the White House defends the SNAP cuts as restoring work requirements and fighting fraud, and the president has claimed that millions were lifted off food stamps by a stronger economy. Food banks describe the opposite. And the administration has kept tariffs flowing through new legal channels even after the Supreme Court struck down the previous ones. The priorities are visible in the ledger: tax cuts weighted to the top, a costly war abroad, tariffs that function as a tax on consumers, a smaller safety net, and fewer federal statistics to measure the results.
An Article I Question.
The poverty story calls for a different constitutional lens: Congress’s own powers, and its failure to use them. Article I gives Congress, not the president, the power to lay taxes and duties. On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court held 6–3 in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the president to impose tariffs. Within hours he imposed a replacement global tariff under Section 122 of the Trade Act, which the statute limits to 150 days unless Congress extends it. A Congress that took its taxing power seriously would decide for itself whether working families should keep paying more than $1,000 a year in import taxes.
The same applies to information. Accurate national statistics are how Congress exercises its spending power responsibly and how the public holds power to account. The 14th Amendment requires the census to count “the whole number of persons in each state,” yet the administration has proposed excluding some immigrants from the 2030 count. Congress funds the Census Bureau and the BLS. It can protect their independence by statute, require the restoration of the food-security survey, and condition appropriations on the timely release of the American Community Survey. Accountability here does not require a cabinet vote. It requires a Congress willing to act.
VIII. What You Can Do
Voting on November 3 matters most, and it is not the only lever. These are the concrete steps that can change outcomes before and after the election.
- Press your members of Congress before December 11The stopgap funding bill expires that day. Call your representative and senators through the Capitol switchboard and ask three specific things: a two-year delay of the state SNAP cost-share, more LIHEAP heating aid for this winter, and restoration of ACA premium tax credits. Specific asks get logged; general anger does not.
- Protect your own coverage this fallACA open enrollment begins November 1. With premiums rising again, re-shop rather than auto-renew, and check whether you qualify for Medicaid or a different subsidy tier. Help an older relative do the same.
- Apply for heating help nowLIHEAP funds are limited and distributed through state and local agencies, often first come, first served. If your household is near the line, apply early; many states also run utility shut-off protection programs in winter.
- Demand the data backAsk your members to back the Census Bureau’s independence, restore the USDA food-security survey, and require release of the delayed American Community Survey. State and local officials, who depend on that data to plan services, are natural allies.
- Support the local safety netFood banks report rising demand as SNAP rolls shrink. Money stretches further than canned goods, and volunteer hours at SNAP application clinics help eligible neighbors keep benefits they are still owed.
An honest assessment: with Republicans controlling both chambers until January, the December fight will likely produce delays rather than reversals. Pressure now can still keep states in SNAP and keep homes heated this winter. Real reversal depends on who holds Congress in 2027.
Editorial Conclusion
A record-low poverty rate that ignores rent, medicine, child care and taxes, measures a year before the war and the cuts, and is announced by an administration dismantling the surveys that would test it, is not a record. It is a mirage. Tens of millions of Americans are falling behind on gas, heat, food and health care while their president offers a campaign check and his allies shrink the safety net. A democracy that cannot count its poor cannot govern for them. Congress must restore the statistics, reclaim its taxing power, and rebuild the floor beneath working families, and voters must hold accountable every official who chose to stop counting instead.
Sources & References
- Associated Press (via KTAR): Fact Focus: The poverty rate is at an all-time low, but there are other factors to consider
- U.S. Census Bureau: Poverty in the United States: 2025 (P60-290)
- Congressional Research Service: Poverty in 2025 (IN12737)
- Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: Official and anchored supplemental measures show poverty declined in 2025
- CBPP (via InsuranceNewsNet): New Census data underscore importance of food assistance and health coverage
- U.S. Census Bureau: How programs and expenses affect poverty measurement
- NPR: Five decades later, time to change the way we define poverty?
- Ohio Capital Journal: How is Ohio doing amid safety-net cuts? Trump hasn’t released the data
- Bloomberg Government: Trump fires labor statistics head, prompting concerns about data
- Bureau of Labor Statistics: Consumer Price Index — August 2026
- The New York Times (via GV Wire): As inflation eats up pay gains, workers fall behind
- BabyPips: U.S. jobs report, September 2026: payrolls miss
- TNND (via WLOS): Home heating costs expected to rise 8.7% this winter
- U.S. Energy Information Administration: EIA expects a mixed picture for winter fuel costs this year
- Trading Economics / Freddie Mac: US mortgage rates climb further in October
- KFF: How much and why ACA Marketplace premiums are going up in 2027
- ABC News: Tariffs will cost US households over $1,000 a year, Yale Budget Lab says
- Perkins Coie: Supreme Court holds IEEPA tariffs unlawful
- CBS News: Millions of Americans are losing SNAP benefits
- AMCHP: House passes continuing resolution through December 11, 2026
- Al Jazeera: Hakeem Jeffries puts affordability at centre of Democrats’ midterm campaign
- Associated Press (via KTAR): Trump makes dubious pledge to give every US adult $5,000 if GOP wins
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