Editor’s notes: The following statement is published on behalf of the Coalition on Human Needs by Deborah Weinstein, CHN’s Executive Director on February 24. 2026.

In the first year of Donald Trump’s second term, his administration has presided over stupendous growth in income and wealth among the very richest Americans, while the poorest workers have lost income and tens of millions of us struggle to afford basics like heat, rent, groceries, health care, and child care. The widening gap between the richest and the rest of us is not an accident. The trillions of dollars in tax cuts enacted this past summer overwhelmingly benefit the rich. Taking into account the impact of tariffs, which disproportionately hit people with lower incomes, and the loss of food assistance and health coverage they will endure, people with modest incomes will continue to lose ground.

So far, the actions of the Trump administration are trying to make the losses of tens of millions of people worse. In addition to the tax breaks benefiting the richest and the more than $1 trillion in health care and nutrition cuts in the mega budget bill, the administration, disregarding law, has repeatedly attempted to freeze funds for child care, SNAP food assistance, education programs, and environmental cleanups to protect the public health. It has proposed massive cuts in rental and home energy assistance. Many of these efforts have been rejected, both by the courts and Congress, but a lot of damage is being done. At the same time, the administration has gutted consumer protection efforts, curtailed tax enforcement, and widened tax loopholes so corporations can avoid paying taxes they owe, and face little chance of penalty for wrongdoing.

In considering the REAL state of the union, here are some facts the President should address (and the rest of us should not let anyone forget):

Workers in the lowest 10th of the economy lost income in 2025. Their income declined 0.30 percent, but had grown 2.4% from 2019-2024, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Low-income households will continue to lose ground because of the mega-bill tax policies and health care and SNAP food assistance cuts. In 2027, people in the lowest fifth of the income scale (with income below $18,000) will lose $165 because of the mega-bill.

But the mega-bill lavishes tax breaks on the rich. The top one-tenth of one percent, with incomes of $4,451,000 and up, will gain $301,550 in 2027.

When adding the impact of the original tariffs to the tax cuts in the mega bill, the lowest income 40 percent of taxpayers will see a tax increase, worse off even without counting the health care and nutrition cuts. Yes, the Supreme Court overturned the Trump tariffs counted here, but Trump has announced replacing them with other tariffs that will cost only slightly less.

While Trump has claimed that the tariffs will lead to growth in manufacturing in the U.S., in fact, there was a loss of 108,000 manufacturing jobs in 2025.

Even before the mega-bill hit, it was hard to make ends meet for millions of workers.

For rent to be considered affordable, it should not exceed 30 percent of your income. But nearly half our workforce – 74 million people – are in jobs that do not pay enough to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

In 2024, about one in three households with earnings up to $75,000 were paying half or more of their income on rent. More than one in four households with earnings up to $50,000 paid half or more of their income on rent. (Source: Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, Table B25074.) That meant they had little left over to pay for all their other needs, and those costs were rising.

During this winter, heating costs are rising a steep 11 percent, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association. This is especially tough for the 20 percent with the lowest incomes, who spend 9.86 percent of their $17,291 income on electricity and natural gas. Consumers across all income levels only pay an average of 2.35 percent of their income on these home energy sources.

Grocery prices have been rising faster than weekly earnings for the past four years. Jared Bernstein has shown that grocery costs went up 17.9 percent from December 2021 – December 2025, but wages only rose 16.9 percent over that period.

Nearly 48 million people lived in food insecure households in 2024, the most current data available. That includes 7.3 million children in households where both adults and children sometimes did not have access to enough nutritious food. This survey has been discontinued by the Trump administration, so there will not be data with 2025 findings. The administration has also discontinued the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse survey. It did collect data in August-September 2024, showing a 12 percent of people who said that their households sometimes or often did not have enough to eat in the previous seven days, up from 8 percent four years earlier. Fully 15 percent of people with children in their household sometimes or often did not have enough to eat; that was also true of 16 percent of Latino and 23 percent of Black households. In all cases, food hardship had worsened since four years earlier.

The Trump administration, instead of addressing growing lack of food, is making it worse, by signing into law the mega-bill, with a $187 billion cut in SNAP nutrition aid over the next decade, that is likely to reduce benefits for all the 40 million SNAP recipients and eliminate benefits for millions.

The Trump administration has repeatedly threatened to cut off SNAP benefits, both during the lengthy government shutdown and when states refused to share data that could be used to identify immigrants in mixed status families. Courts have ordered the administration to pay SNAP benefits.

The first impact of the SNAP cuts is coming from a cost-shift to states, requiring them to pay a greater share of administrative costs and for the first time to pay a share of benefits if their error rates exceed a certain amount. Because the prolonged government shutdown contributed to greater error rates, states have sought a delay in implementation for all states, which so far Congress has refused to do. The penalties will cost states billions of dollars they have had little time to plan for; some states are even threatening to leave the SNAP program; many will implement cuts that will hurt poor families.

The mega-bill will also cause about 15 million people to lose their health insurance, including 7.5 million from loss of Medicaid, 3 million from certain cuts to the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace insurance, and another 4.2 million because Congress has so far failed to extend the ACA’s enhanced premium tax credit.

Despite high child care costs, only 15 percent of children eligible for federal child care assistance get it, and the number is going down. Because child care subsidies were flat-funded in FY25, the Center for Law and Social Policy estimates that 24,000 fewer children got child care help (down from approximately 1.8 million). CLASP also projects that the flat funding enacted for FY26 will mean 50,000 fewer children will get care.

Instead of working to expand child care, the Trump administration has used it to punish its “enemies” – seeking to freeze child care funds in five “blue” states, baselessly accusing centers of fraud, and tying its freezes and accusations to its attacks on immigrants. According to a letter signed by 200 state lawmakers from all 50 states, if the freeze had taken effect, about 300,000 children and their families could lose their child care in the five states (MN, CO, IL, CA, NY), and all states could see funding delays that could force closures of some child care centers. Fortunately, courts have so far stopped these child care freezes.

While the Trump administration has cut, frozen and delayed funding needed by families with low incomes, and decreed tariffs that hurt these same families, the very richest among us are raking it in. An analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness shows that billionaires’ total wealth jumped by over a fifth (22%) during 2025, rising from $6.7 trillion to $8.2 trillion. The number of billionaires also increased, from 814 to 935.

We need a national strategy to increase the incomes of millions of families, through higher pay and federal investments in programs to make basic needs affordable. But the REAL state of the union in President Trump’s first year of his second term is one of lawless attacks on perceived enemies – immigrants, poor people, people of color, and blue states, to name some – and concerted efforts to further enrich billionaires. Increasingly, people are seeing past the lies; they are seeing the harmful reality.