President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” is anything but for the nation’s poorest families. Among the numerous cruel elements to the new spending plan are food-program cuts that are expected to increase “food insecurity” for millions of Americans, including children.
What terrible optics going into the midterm election season. But no worries. Trump’s administration recently announced how it intends to address the politically inconvenient specter of coddling billionaires at the expense of impoverished Americans who will go hungry: It’s ending the longstanding hunger survey that counts them.
It’s part of a broader pattern on a wide array of issues on which this president — who routinely insists that reality is whatever clearly false thing he says — has moved to make sure nobody can confront him with unpleasant facts.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Sept. 20 that it is ending its annual Household Food Security Report, which has been in place more than three decades to assess hunger in America. The yearly report, the agency alleges, was “redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous.”
The announcement offered no evidence that’s true. What’s definitely true is that the cessation of the annual report will make it more difficult for anyone to accurately quantify the approaching misery from Trump’s (and congressional Republicans’) cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
The cuts to what used to be called food stamps are expected to mean as many as 3 million adults will lose their benefits entirely to unnecessary and unworkable work requirements — benefit cuts that will inevitably impact those recipients’ children.
The administration’s move now to end a key source of data that would track the human impact of those lost benefits is hardly surprising. This is the president, after all, who shortly after returning to office in January (promising to “drain the swamp”) purged his administration of more than a dozen inspectors general — the independent watchdogs assigned to monitor various federal agencies for unethical activity.
In the months since, Trump’s see-no evil-approach to his own policies has played out again and again about an array of topics. Consider:
› Crime. Trump’s Department of Justice has removed from its websites data on hate crimes against LGBTQ+ Americans and nixed a database that used to track police misconduct.
And just days after the recent assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the DOJ took down a previously posted study that had concluded right-wing extremists have killed far more Americans in recent years than any other form of domestic terrorism.
› The environment. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has ended emissions tracking of industry that has been conducted for more than a decade. It has effectively ended a congressionally mandated program that details the impact of climate change in the U.S. for use by local government planners. And it has scrubbed numerous federal websites that provided the public with the latest scientific data from NASA, the EPA and elsewhere regarding climate and the environment.
› Health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has deleted or altered thousands of documents on his websites related to COVID, HIV/AIDS and gun violence.
› Race. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture has removed exhibits and artifacts related to slavery and the Civil Rights movement.
This administration’s nixing of the annual hunger survey won’t prevent one child from going hungry — it will merely make it more difficult to count up the ones who will be, because of Trump’s cuts. That, like these moves to erase urgent data regarding so many other facets of civic life, is by design. On that much, the data is clear.