Today’s new poverty and health data from the Census Bureau continue to show the impact of policy decisions — and losses faced by children and adults alike when the help that makes a crucial difference in their lives is torn away.

While poverty mostly remained steady over the past year, there were warning signs of people being left behind. More than one in five Black Americans is below the federal poverty line, an increase of more than one million people in poverty. When taking the impact of tax policies into account, inequality has risen 14 percent from 2009 to 2024, comparing the incomes of the bottom 10 percent to the top 90 percent.

“We could be at the start of an explosion of inequity, if Congress does not reverse the Trump-promoted policies of slashed health care and food assistance along with massive handouts to the ultra-wealthy,” said Deborah Weinstein, Executive Director of the Coalition on Human Needs. “We are seeing the reversal of hard-won progress because people with low incomes have lost tax credits, health coverage, and nutrition assistance. Jobs are being lost; prices for food and housing remain high. And yet, Congress’ brutal budget law will make all of this far worse for millions of people. Today’s poverty and health coverage data are a warning of much worse to come, and Congress must reverse course, undo the damage of this summer’s budget package, and instead ensure that Americans can meet their basic needs and thrive.”

The data released today show that substantial progress in health coverage is on the verge of being reversed. In previous years, Medicaid was expanded to cover lower-income people previously excluded from coverage. In addition, low- and moderate-income people got enhanced subsidies through tax credits to help pay their health insurance premiums through the Affordable Care Act. But the end of emergency pandemic Medicaid provisions starting in 2023 resulted in fewer people receiving Medicaid. The new data show that the number of people receiving Medicaid dropped from 62.7 million in 2023 to 59.4 million in 2024. This was offset by an increase in Affordable Care Act Marketplace insurance (for individuals), which meant that overall there was no statistically significant increase in the number of uninsured. But next year, unless severe cuts are reversed, we will see the number without health insurance rise.

The reversals of the progress we are starting to see tell us this: good policies help people; cuts and restrictions hurt them. At the end of this year, if Congress does not act, the enhanced Affordable Care Act Premium Tax Credits will end. The Congressional Budget Office projects that 4.2 million more people will be uninsured by 2034 if this reduction takes effect. Beyond that, the unprecedented cuts in health care programs Congress just passed and President Trump signed (affecting Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act), will cause 10 million more people to be uninsured.

SNAP food assistance lifted about 3.6 million people out of poverty in 2024 (down from a high of 3.7 million in 2022), while school lunch programs lifted 1.1 million above the poverty line (down from a high of 1.4 million in 2022, when pandemic-related expansion of access was in place). This static or declining level of help, coming at the same time food prices were rising, caused more people to go without enough to eat. A year ago, 12 percent of people said that their households sometimes or often did not have enough to eat in the past 7 days – that was up from 8 percent in 2021, when people were getting help from the Child Tax Credit and more SNAP benefits, and food prices were not yet rising. For households with children, the numbers were worse – fully 15 percent of such households reported going without food in the previous week in 2024, up from 10 percent of households with children in 2021. These levels of hardship, again, are a warning: the cuts to SNAP enacted by Congress will soon be denying benefits to millions of people, meaning that fewer people will be lifted out of poverty.

Rather than use tax policy as a tool to fund basic needs programs and provide opportunity, the data released today helps us understand the cost of failing to use the tax code to address poverty. The year before the Child Tax Credit was expanded, 7.2 million children were poor, taking tax credits and other government programs into account. In 2021, the one year when the CTC expansion was in place, the number of poor children plunged to 3.8 million. But after Congress let the expanded tax credit expire, and allowed a reduction in SNAP benefits as well, child poverty shot back up, year after year, with 9.7 million children poor in 2024.

“Over the past 20 years, we have seen a widening of inequality,” said Weinstein. “Households with college educated workers gained 13 percent in income over the past 20 years; households with workers who did not go beyond high school made no gains. Income inequality by race/ethnicity remains a serious problem. President Trump and his majority in Congress have taken multiple steps to make this far worse: slashing health care, nutrition assistance, and education while massively increasing tax breaks for the rich and reducing tax help for people with low incomes – all this will happen as the economy weakens, and in fact will make our economy weaker. Americans are watching to see if Congress will act to reverse these self-inflicted wounds.”