Data can show if government programs work or not, but the Trump administration is suppressing the necessary information

  The U.S. has the highest rate of maternal mortality among developed nations. Since 1987, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has administered the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System to better understand when, where, and why maternal deaths occur.

  In April 2025, the Trump administration put the department in charge of collecting and tracking this data on leave.

  It’s just one example of how the administration is deleting and disrupting American data of all kinds.

How the ‘big, beautiful bill’ will deepen the racial wealth gap – a law scholar explains how it reduces poor families’ ability to afford food and health care

  President Donald Trump has said the “big, beautiful bill” he signed into law on July 4, 2025, will stimulate the economy and foster financial security.

  But a close look at the legislation reveals a different story, particularly for low-income people and racial and ethnic minorities.

  As a legal scholar who studies how taxes increase the gap in wealth and income between Black and white Americans, I believe the law’s provisions make existing wealth inequalities worse through broad tax cuts that disproportionately favor wealthy families while forcing its costs on low- and middle-income Americans.

10 egregious things you may not know about the One Big Beautiful Bill Act

  Congressional Republicans passed a radical budget and tax bill—the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—on a party-line vote. Many of the plan’s key elements will increase families’ costs for health care, food, and utilities—such as historic cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) as well as terminating tax credits to produce more American-made energy—and are deeply unpopular according to recent survey data. Several provisions, however, remain less understood because they’ve received less media attention or were added during rushed negotiations that took place overnight and behind closed doors.

  This article details several lesser-known provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that will increase costs and limit Americans’ ability to meet their basic needs; create a slush fund for Trump administration overreach; and waste taxpayer money.

Britt and Tuberville enter Trump’s fantasy world at Alabama’s expense

  I have no inside sources in the White House.

  I do not have access to military intelligence. Or any expert knowledge of the Middle East.

  But I’ve spent my adult life watching American presidents try to bomb the region into peace. It never works.

  Which leaves me wondering how Alabama’s senators, who on paper have better sources than us Goat Hill wretches, think that President Donald Trump’s decision to attack Iranian nuclear facilities solved anything.

GOP lawmakers eye SNAP cuts, which would scale back benefits that help low-income people buy food at a time of high food prices

  Congress may soon consider whether to cut spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the main way the government helps low-income Americans put food on the table. The Conversation U.S. asked Tracy Roof, a political scientist who has researched the history of government nutrition programs, to explain what’s going on and why the effort to reduce spending on SNAP benefits, which can be used to purchase groceries, could falter.

Are social media apps ‘dangerous products’? 2 scholars explain how the companies rely on young users but fail to protect them

    “You have blood on your hands.”

    “I’m sorry for everything you have all been through.”

  These quotes, the first from Sen. Lindsey Graham, (R-S.C), speaking to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and the second from Zuckerberg to families of victims of online child abuse in the audience, are highlights from an extraordinary day of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee about protecting children online.

1 in 6 US kids are in families below the poverty line

  In the United States, children are more likely to experience poverty than people over 18.

  In 2020, about 1 in 6 kids, 16% of all children, were living in families with incomes below the official poverty line – an income threshold the government set that year at about US$26,500 for a family of four. Only 10% of Americans ages 18 to 64 and 9% of those 65 and up were experiencing poverty according to the most recent data available.

More Americans couldn’t get enough to eat in 2020 – a change that hit the middle class hardest

The big idea

  Americans in households with annual incomes from $50,000 to $75,000 experienced the sharpest increase in food insufficiency when the COVID-19 pandemic began – meaning that many people in the middle class didn’t have enough to eat at some point within the previous seven days, according to our peer-reviewed study that will soon be published in the Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics.

  We also found that food banks, food pantries, and similar emergency services helped reduce food insufficiency, especially for middle-income Americans, by the end of 2020.

The US is taking a bite out of its food insecurity – here’s one way to scrap the problem altogether

  The U.S. Department of Agriculture is set to permanently increase the value of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits by 25% above pre-pandemic levels in October 2021.

  It’s the biggest change since 1979 to this anti-hunger program, commonly known as SNAP, which currently helps over 40 million Americans.

The pandemic recession has pushed a further 9.8 million Americans into food insecurity

  The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed hardship on millions of vulnerable Americans through unemployment and reduced work hours. And this has increased food insecurity across the nation.

  There is no official figure yet for how many more families are struggling to provide regular meals around the table – the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s next annual report on food insecurity, defined as a lack of access to sufficient food due to limited financial resources, won’t be out until the fall.

The Biden administration can eliminate food insecurity in the United States – here’s how

  The Biden administration faces many challenges, some of which may prove to be intractable. But in one key area affecting tens of millions of Americans, it is well-positioned to attain a truly monumental achievement – the near-total elimination of food insecurity in the U.S.

  This may at first glance seem a little far-fetched. After all, despite numerous efforts from the administration of John F. Kennedy through that of Donald Trump, the achievement of a hunger-free American has been elusive.

Why are SNAP benefits so confusing that even social workers can’t figure them out?

  Crystal Ortiz, a master’s student studying social work at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, has been receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP) benefits since 2017. The $200 a month she received made it possible for her to buy more fresh produce, especially bagged salad kits that made it easier for her to eat a healthy lunch when she didn’t have a lot of food prep time.

  This January, that was threatened when she received a letter stating that her benefits would be canceled if she did not fulfill a 20-hour-a-week work requirement.  When I first met with Ortiz, she stated that “I would have to make major cuts to the food that I get” if she lost her SNAP benefits.

What it tastes like to eat what you want for the first time

  All my childhood grocery shopping memories center on being poor: Walking 10 minutes from our two-bedroom home in the Malden Housing Authority’s projects to the local Stop & Shop and filling the cart with juice, eggs, and bologna. There was the joy of adding the small amount of treats we could afford — at the time, that meant fresh bakery chocolate muffins, apple turnovers, and Gushers fruit snacks — and the embarrassment of putting some of the food back at the register when it rang up over our limit.

I ate lobster on food stamps and it was delicious

  I was a food stamp kid for a few years in the early 1990s when my mom started college. I remember the first time we went to the H-E-B grocery store on the south side of San Antonio with our stamps. We always drove to a store in the next neighborhood over to shop. My mom had worked at the closest H-E-B when she was pregnant with me. People she went to high school with shopped there and so did her former in-laws. There was no way my mom was going to walk into that store with a wad of food stamps. We felt enough shame that we needed the help without adding in other people’s judgment.

How the Trump administration’s deregulation agenda has worsened the coronavirus pandemic

  In 2015, Donald Trump promised: “Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.” Yet, long before news of the COVID-19 outbreak reached the United States, the Trump administration had been dismantling policies and proposing new ones that have vastly exacerbated the coronavirus pandemic.

  As the United States braces to combat a public health crisis and a severe economic downturn, it is important to note that the Trump administration’s policies have contributed to this crisis. Three years of deregulation under the Trump presidency and a botched response to the COVID-19 pandemic have in part spurred what may be one of the costliest public health crises in American history—both financially and in terms of human life. This column breaks down four of the Trump administration’s deregulatory actions that have worsened the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.

Scaling back SNAP for self-reliance clashes with the original goals of food stamps

  Trump administration officials are trying to cut enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP but still sometimes called “food stamps.” They say that too many people are getting this aid in a strong economy.

  The program helped about 35 million low-income people buy food in 2019. The average recipient gets US$128.60 a month, about $1.40 per person per meal.

Trump’s newest budget would take food away from working families

  There are dozens of programs on the chopping block in the Trump administration’s fiscal year 2021 budget proposal. Yet the administration’s most blatant attempt to gut the programs on which American families depend comes in the form of additional cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the nation’s largest nutrition assistance program. The proposed budget contains a devastating $182 billion cut to SNAP over the next decade, a reduction of approximately 28 percent compared with the baseline level estimated by the Congressional Budget Office.

What it looks like to be hungry in college

  Over the past few years, the issue of food insecurity among college students has gained national attention—and with good reason. A study released last year by the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice found that 48 percent of students at two-year institutions and 41 percent of students at four-year institutions experienced food insecurity during the 30 days preceding the survey.

The next recession will be harder than it needs to be. Here’s why.

  Recessions are hardest on those who can least afford it.

  Take the Great Recession, the economic plunge that followed the 2008 financial crisis. It cost those in the poorest 10 percent of Americans more than 20 percent of their incomes, which was more than twice the drop experienced by the richest 10 percent. It was black and Hispanic workers, as well as workers who didn’t have a college degree, who saw higher rates of unemployment and longer durations without a job than other workers.

  Overall, the recession exacerbated already existing inequalities in wealth and income, with black and Hispanic families, as well as women, falling further behind their white, male counterparts in terms of asset building.

  And the next recession could be even harder.

Getting poorer while working harder: The ‘cliff effect’

  Forty percent of all working-age Americans sometimes struggle to pay their monthly bills.

  There is no place in the country where a family supported by one minimum-wage worker with a full-time job can live and afford a 2-bedroom apartment at the average fair-market rent.

  Given the pressure to earn enough to make ends meet, you would think that low-paid workers would be clamoring for raises. But this is not always the case.