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[Music] After kicking millions off food assistance, Trump is now telling the federal government to stop collecting data on hunger in America. My name is Britney Paige and this is the Page Perspective. We've reached the if you don't ask about the hunger, the hunger doesn't exist point in the administration in just under a year. And if you're feeling like this is very familiar, it's because it is. Trump tried this with COVID. remember in the early days of the pandemic when he said when you test you create cases. Yes. When you test for the disease, you find the disease. Very good, Donald Trump. Um because this is a man who refuses to learn anything. He's still going with this logic, but now he's taking it to hunger in America. As we see with this new reporting from the Wall Street Journal, quote, "Trump administration cancels annual hunger survey. The government has been measuring food insecurity since the mid 1990s and now says the report has become overly politicized. Politicized, you say, just in time for millions of newly hungry adults and children to be captured in the annual hunger survey after the GOP budget passed this summer. Trump says it's overly politicized. Right now, before we get into this, as we're facing the threat of government censorship of speech with Trump's FCC Commissioner, Brendan Carr, putting direct pressure on networks to censor their content, fire hosts, and cancel shows to ensure that Donald Trump is pleased. We never know what may come as far as YouTube, where we're already beholdened to an opaque algorithm that can be controlled to suppress content. If you rely on independent media that refuses to bow to this regime, please click subscribe and ensure that you're notified when I upload. I promise that I'm going to continue to do what I do and fight this administration even in the face of threats. And I need your support to continue doing that. Thank you. Now, continuing with not bowing to this regime, back in May, we spent a lot of time here talking about the GOP budget and their proposed cuts to programs like SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, and Medicaid. Over $1 trillion worth of cuts for programs for the working class with those cuts ultimately providing over $1 trillion worth of tax benefits to the top 5%. As you can see here in this graph from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Now, evidently, Republicans are afraid for you to see the consequences of these policy choices. We can all read the room here. You cut billions of dollars from SNAP, a program that is used by an average of 41.7 million people per month or 12.3% of Americans. And you're going to see hunger increase. Donald Trump wants to hide this from you, but we know better and we won't let him get away with this with trying to hide this brutal reality from us. I'm going to go through the consequences of what he's done, the damage that we're already seeing so that you're armed with information to take into your communities. But first, let's read from this Wall Street Journal reporting. Quote, "The USDA uses the survey to produce its annual food security report, which stands as the official government source of information on how many Americans have or do not have enough to eat. The decision to end the USDA data collection comes at a time when more Americans are struggling to get enough to eat. Food banks have seen requests for assistance from households rise over the past few years, driven by the end of the pandemic aid programs and the impact of inflation on grocery prices. In 2023, the USDA reported that an estimated 13.8 million children lived in households that struggled to get enough food at times, the highest number in nearly a decade, according to the most recent USDA survey. Data from 2024 is set to be released next month. Things are starting to come into clear focus here, right? Hunger is increasing. The highest number of hungry children recorded in nearly a decade in 2023 with that set to increase given Republican policy choices. And how do we prevent the truth from getting out? We cancel the data collection. I mean, we're we're almost at the point when we're going to see them cancel the uh homelessness count, right? And I'm I bet you're wondering now what this survey looks like, what kind of questions they ask. So, I'm going to show you. I want you to see what the Trump administration is trying to hide here. They don't want the general public to know how many Americans are answering yes to questions like these. We worried whether our food would run out before we got money to buy more. Was that often, sometimes, or never true for you in the last 12 months? In the last 12 months, were you ever hungry but didn't eat because there wasn't enough money for food? Yes or no? In the last 12 months, did you lose weight because there wasn't enough money for food? Yes or no? And then questions 11 through 18 were asked only if the household included children aged 0 to 17. In the last 12 months, were the children ever hungry, but you just couldn't afford more food? Yes or no? In the last 12 months, did any of the children ever not eat for a whole day because there wasn't enough money for food? Yes or no? A man who has never had to worry about whether he had enough to eat, whether his children had enough to eat, is cancelling the survey that collects data to inform our policy decisions to ensure we are creating conditions that enable Americans to feed themselves and feed their children. Think about that. He doesn't want to know whether Americans were able to feed their children for an entire day because then he would be forced to grapple with the consequences of slashing billions of dollars from SNAP to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy. He wants to hide this because he's afraid of the consequences. You know, Donald Trump is not a strong man. No, he's a weak man. He uses the power of the federal government to censor speech he does not like and to cancel data collection because that will expose his extensive errors and the pain he's inflicting on Americans because he's weak and afraid. It's actions like these that should tell you just how much power we still have here. That he wants to hide what he's doing. That he wants to hide what he's doing from us tells us that he fears us. We cannot forget that. Briefly, let's jump back to the Wall Street Journal here. Craig Gunderson, a former economist at USDA who has studied the survey data for nearly 30 years, said the information has led to key insights into the causes and consequences of food insecurity, including the overlap between disability status, mental and physical health issues, and food insecurity. Quote, "Food insecurity has become the leading indicator of well-being for vulnerable Americans," said Gunderson, now a professor of economics at Baylor University in Texas. Lindseay Smith Tally, professor in the nutrition department at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Health said, "Without the study, the nation would have no real compass on a key health indicator for Americans." Quote, "Why would you not want to measure it?" She said, "I think the only reason why you wouldn't measure it is if you were planning to cut food assistance because it basically allows you to pretend we don't have this food insecurity problem." And that's exactly right. There is no other explanation. Just like Trump firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a a jobs report that illustrated Trump's abysmal handing handling of the economy that he said was designed to make him look bad. Trump is again trying to hide the truth because the truth makes him look bad. His policy choices are causing harm to Americans and he's desperate to hide the truth. But you, me, we, we need to keep talking about the truth. Over the past few months, there have been numerous articles about struggles at food banks, struggles to keep up with increasing demand for food while simultaneously balancing the fear of what is to come, giving Trump's policies. And one of my favorite pieces of writing on this comes from Tracy KD, who's also the author of one of the greatest books of all time, by the way, Rough Sleepers. He wrote a he wrote about a food bank in East Hampton, Massachusetts. specifically as well as uh food banks generally. Quote, "Cutting SNAP will drastically increase the pressure on food banks. Their pantries are a model of decency of coherent community efforts on behalf of people in need. Their offerings aid families suffering emergencies. But although they supplement SNAP, they don't fill nearly as many stomachs. According to Feeding America, which oversees food banks across the country, SNAP provides nine times as much food as all of its 200 food banks combined. Moreover, because SNAP money goes mainly to people who live in urgent need, the funds are spent quickly, injecting economic activity into local economies. Each $1 in SNAP benefits adds as much as $1.50 to the country's gross domestic product. a helpful buffer during economic downturns and recessions. The need for SNAP is obvious, dire, and nationwide. There is no county in America, no matter how wealthy, where the only hungry people are those on diets. The most recent data available estimates that 47.4 million Americans suffered from the threat of hunger at some point in 2023. Among these people, 13.8 million were children. This, of course, is based on data that Trump wants to stop collecting. By the way, almost 7 million households experienced what's referred to as very low food security, meaning they sometimes had to go without a meal or even a day's worth of meals and often didn't know where their next meal was coming from. disproportionate percentages of black and Latino Americans shared in the misery and donations to food banks, food banks in general, generosity of strangers of churches, they cannot fill this gap without the federal government. Food banks are left wondering how they're going to help feed their communities. With the federal government cutting billions of dollars in food assistance, the need only grows. In previous years, we would track this, collect data, analyze results, see how our policy choices have impacted those suffering. Donald Trump is now cancelling this survey to try to hide the damage he's caused. We cannot forget. You've heard me say before, and I'll say it again, I would not be where I am without public investments that laid the foundation for my success. from food stamps to pale grants. My early childhood identity as a poor person forever informs how I see the world around me. And because of those investments, I feel a duty to pay it forward in my advocacy and my work. I will never pull the ladder up behind me. I refuse to allow the efforts of the Donald Trump administration to obscure the reality of the policy choices that keep people in poverty. And I will continue to amplify the stories and voices of those who are directly harmed by these choices. And that includes an email from anonymous. And I'm saying anonymous because when you all email me and you don't put your name in the actual body of the email, I assume that you want to remain anonymous. But this anonymous person says they are homeless. And they sent me this story and they wrote, "Being homeless myself, I cannot I do not know how to respond. I'm heartbroken." and angry. I do not know what to do. And it's emails like this that remind us how many people care, how we are in community with one another, and how it's up to us to continue to amplify these stories as well as messages of hope. Because as long as you care, as long as I care, there is still hope to fight. I hope that Anonymous is taking care. I hope you all send messages of encouragement to anonymous below so that they can see them. And as always, I would love to hear what you think about this. Please share your thoughts in the comments below or call and leave me a fewer than threeinut voicemail at 2026561509 or send an email to info@thepagperspective.com. You can support my work by becoming a channel member by clicking the join button below for as little as $1.99 a month. Or you can go to patreon.compodcast. Be sure to follow me on social media. I'm Brittany Epage on Blue Sky, Instagram, Threads. And as always, thank you so much for being here. Take care and I'll see you next time.

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