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Statement of Sharon Parrott, CBPP President, on President Biden’s 2024 Budget
President Biden’s 2024 budget invests in people and communities and creates a 21st century tax system that supports these investments to build toward an economy that works for everyone. It lays out an agenda that would move us closer to a nation where everyone — regardless of their background, identities, or where they live — has the resources they need to thrive and share in the nation’s prosperity.
The President’s budget would broaden opportunity, including among people and communities who have long been underinvested in.The budget makes important investments in a range of areas, including in children, supports for workers, housing affordability, education, and core government functions, among others, and finances these investments by raising taxes on high-income people and profitable corporations that have benefitted the most from the nation’s economy. The President’s budget would broaden opportunity, including among people and communities who have long been underinvested in, such as people with low incomes, people of color, Indigenous communities, and people in rural communities, among others.
The President’s budget priorities stand in stark contrast with the emerging House Republican agenda — an agenda that pushes more tax cuts for the wealthy and profitable corporations, and holds the economy hostage by demanding deep spending cuts in areas like K-12 schools, health care, medical research, college tuition help, and help buying groceries as the price for raising the debt limit. Taken together, this emerging agenda would increase hardship and narrow access to opportunity; widen already large differences in outcomes by race, ethnicity, and geography; and hurt the country as a whole.
As Congress and the Administration engage in the budget process this year, a central part of the debate will be deciding funding levels for defense, veterans’ medical care, and “non-defense discretionary” programs (outside of veterans’ health care) through annual appropriations. Non-defense discretionary programs fund a wide range of priorities including many that are central to strengthening the economy and promoting opportunity, as well as delivering basic government functions. The President’s budget makes sound investments here, showing an increase in overall funding for non-defense discretionary programs (outside of veterans’ health care) of about 7.3 percent as compared to 2023 funding levels, offsetting the effects of inflation and providing modest but meaningful resources for new investments in key areas. (The percent increase figures for program areas cited below do not take inflation into account.)
For example, the budget invests in helping people afford rent and supporting people experiencing homelessness. It provides $2.4 billion in additional funding for Housing Choice Vouchers, which bridge the gap between what a household can afford and the cost of rent in their communities, and an $122 million increase for homelessness services and supports, with $6 million targeted to people living with HIV/AIDS who need housing assistance.
The budget also increases discretionary child care funding by almost $1 billion (12 percent), building on a robust investment made in 2023, and boosts support for Head Start by $1.1 billion. Even with these increases, funding will remain well below what is needed to ensure that all families with low or moderate incomes have access to affordable and quality child care.
The budget invests in education, boosting Pell Grant funding and raising the maximum award by $500, building on progress in raising the grant level over the last two years to help students with low and moderate incomes afford college. The budget also increases K-12 funding that supports schools, students with low incomes, and students with disabilities.
The budget recognizes the importance of ensuring effective operation of basic government functions, increasing funding for the Social Security Administration by $1.4 billion or 10 percent, to begin addressing long wait times, short-staffed field offices, and long delays in disability benefit decisions, due to deep funding cuts since 2010.
The budget proposes to increase base funding for the IRS by $1.8 billion or 15 percent over the 2023 level. The increase reflects a commitment to deliver an IRS that honest taxpayers and business owners deserve: one that provides taxpayer assistance, efficiently processes tax returns, and collects legally owed taxes from people who would try to cheat. The budget recognizes that this will require both sufficient annual appropriations for the agency’s ongoing base operations as well as the funding provided by the Inflation Reduction Act.
These important proposals would move the nation forward, but most are modest in scope. The President’s budget recognizes that more significant investments in a number of areas are needed outside of appropriations to advance economic, health, and racial justice, and it lays out a more robust agenda that would support families and workers, address the affordable housing crisis, expand health coverage, and support older adults and people with disabilities. While political disagreements mean that most larger-scale advances can’t be achieved this year, putting them forward offers a clear vision of the policies necessary to create broadly shared prosperity.
For example, the budget supports families by expanding the Child Tax Credit. It permanently extends the credit to the 19 million children — including nearly half of Black children, more than 1 in 3 Latino and American Indian and Alaska Native children, and 1 in 6 white and Asian children — who currently receive a partial credit or none at all because their families’ incomes are too low. And it permanently allows families to receive the credit on a monthly basis. The budget also temporarily increases the amount of the credit through 2025 (when policymakers must revisit tax policy because of the expiration of the individual tax cuts in the 2017 tax law). We know an expanded Child Tax Credit works. The American Rescue Plan’s temporary expanded Child Tax Credit provided the full credit for the first time to children in families with low incomes and to 17-year-olds and increased the credit amount overall, which helped drive down overall child poverty dramatically and narrowed the large differences in child poverty across racial and ethnic categories when these provisions were in effect in 2021.
Other provisions in the President’s budget also help workers and families. The budget’s game-changing $600 billion in new investments in child care and pre-K would support children’s development, help families make ends meet, and boost the economy by helping more parents afford the care they need to work, while the proposal for a national paid family and medical leave program would help workers take time off to care for their families while staying connected to their jobs. And the budget would permanently expand the Earned Income Tax Credit for workers without minor children at home to supplement the wages of low-paid workers and help them make ends meet.
The President’s budget makes some important advances in addressing the affordable housing crisis. In addition to the rental assistance funding for 2024 through regular appropriations, it includes $22 billion in additional funding over the next ten years for vouchers through the “mandatory” part of the budget: $9 billion to support the estimated 20,000 youth who age out of foster care each year and $13 billion to expand assistance to 450,000 veteran families with extremely low incomes, though more resources will be needed to reach all such families. While an important step forward, substantially more investment will ultimately be needed to help all of the 16 million households paying more than half of their income on rent or experiencing homelessness, housing instability, and overcrowding. But this is an important down payment and a recognition that resources outside of appropriations are necessary.
The budget takes significant steps toward universal health coverage and would improve health equity. It would expand coverage to more than 2 million people — most of whom are Black or Latinx — who lack any path to coverage because they live in states that have refused to adopt the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) Medicaid expansion. It also makes permanent expanded premium tax credits that make ACA marketplace coverage more affordable for millions of people and have resulted in higher coverage rates. The budget continues to lower prescription drug costs, saving money for consumers and for the federal government. And it increases funding for home- and community-based services through Medicaid, which are critical for helping older people and people with disabilities remain in the community and get the care they need.
In addition, the budget protects Social Security and Medicare, which provide income and health coverage to tens of millions of older and disabled people. It also shores up Medicare financing by securing further prescription drug savings, closing a tax loophole that deprives the program of revenues, and modestly raising the Medicare tax rate on high-income households. But protecting these programs from harmful cuts is not enough to meet the needs of low-income older adults and people with disabilities, and additional targeted support is needed, such as improvements in income support through the Supplemental Security Income program.
The budget calls for strengthening federal nutrition assistance programs as part of this year’s debate around the farm bill, which will reauthorize both SNAP, which helps millions of households buy groceries, along with farm and conservation programs. While some congressional Republicans have called for deep cuts in SNAP, the President’s budget calls for a farm bill that eliminates barriers to food assistance for vulnerable groups and moves the nation toward the goal of ensuring everyone has access to healthy, affordable food.
The budget raises revenues to pay for its investments and reduce the deficit. The revenue proposals move the country away from the flawed trickle-down path of the 2017 tax law and toward a tax code that raises more needed revenues, reins in multinational corporations’ ability to shift their profits offshore to avoid taxes, is more progressive and equitable, and supports investments that make the economy work for everyone.
The proposals address the long-standing problem that many of the wealthiest households who have gained the most from the nation’s economy pay very little in individual income taxes, and sometimes none at all. They push against high levels of inequality, help address longer-term fiscal challenges, and begin to restore the public’s faith that the government works on behalf of all people, not just the well-heeled. Altogether, the budget shows that its proposed policies would reduce deficits over the next decade by nearly $3 trillion.
The revenue increases take revenues as a share of the economy back to late-1990s levels, when growth was strong. Evidence is sorely lacking that the benefits from recent rounds of corporate tax cuts have trickled down, while multinationals continue to shift substantial profits offshore. The recent, deep cut in the corporate tax rate needs to be revisited and the U.S. needs to align our international tax rules with the global minimum tax agreement, as the President’s budget proposes. Moreover, the budget addresses a fundamental flaw in our tax code that allows some of the wealthiest households in the country to pay little or nothing each year in individual income taxes — the main federal tax — by requiring very wealthy people to pay taxes on a primary source of their income, unrealized capital gains.
The U.S. has high levels of hardship, with millions of households even before the pandemic unable to afford the basics. This level of hardship is a policy choice, not an economic inevitability.
We saw during the pandemic that public policy can sharply reduce poverty and hardship, with poverty overall and among children reaching historically low levels in 2021; those efforts, however, have ended. Other wealthy nations make different policy choices and have different outcomes: lower poverty rates, universal health coverage, affordable child care, and better protections for workers. Taken together, these higher-investment policies often result in higher labor force participation rates than in the U.S.
The President’s budget lays out a vision of 21st century investments paid for by a sound tax system that requires those who have benefitted the most from our economy to pay a more reasonable amount in taxes. That path is one that leads to broader opportunity, greater economic and health security, lower levels of hardship, and a nation where everyone can thrive.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is one of the nation's premier policy organizations working at the federal and state levels on fiscal policy and public programs that affect low- and moderate-income families and individuals.
A member of his legal team noted that "the immigration prosecutor, judge, and jailer all answer to Donald Trump, and that one man is eager to weaponize the system in a desperate bid to silence Mahmoud Khalil."
Mahmoud Khalil and his lawyers on Wednesday affirmed their plan to fight an immigration court ruling that paves the way for his deportation, months after plainclothes agents accosted the lawful permanent resident and his US citizen wife outside their home in New York City.
"It is no surprise that the Trump administration continues to retaliate against me for my exercise of free speech. Their latest attempt, through a kangaroo immigration court, exposes their true colors once again," Khalil said in a statement.
"When their first effort to deport me was set to fail, they resorted to fabricating baseless and ridiculous allegations in a bid to silence me for speaking out and standing firmly with Palestine, demanding an end to the ongoing genocide," he continued. "Such fascist tactics will never deter me from continuing to advocate for my people's liberation."
While President Donald Trump has a broad goal of mass deportations, his administration has targeted Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student with a valid green card, and other foreign scholars in the United States for criticizing Israel's US-backed genocide in the Gaza Strip.
"We have witnessed a constant lack of humanity and allegiance to the law throughout proceedings in this farcical Louisiana immigration court."
Federal agents arrested Khalil, an Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent, in March. He wasn't released from a federal immigration facility until June. During his 104-day detention, his wife, Noor Abdalla, gave birth to their son. Over the past six months, he has been a part of multiple legal battles: his challenge to being deported in a Louisiana immigration court; a civil rights case before US District Judge Michael Farbiarz in New Jersey; and a fight for $20 million in damages.
In a Wednesday letter to Farbiarz—an appointee of former President Joe Biden who has already blocked his deportation while the civil rights case proceeds—Khalil's legal team explained that on September 12, Jamee Comans, an immigration judge (IJ), "issued three separate orders denying petitioner's (1) motion for an extension of time, (2) motion to change venue, and (3) application for a waiver, without conducting an evidentiary hearing."
"In denying petitioner's request for a waiver absent a hearing, as well as his motions for extension of time and for change of venue, the IJ ordered petitioner removed to Algeria or Syria... while reaffirming her decisions denying petitioner any form of relief from removal," the letter says. Khalil now has 30 days from September 12 to start an appeal with the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA).
Noting "statements targeting petitioner by name for retaliation and deportation made by the president and several senior US government officials," Khalil's lawyers "have ample reason to expect that the BIA process—and an affirmance of the IJ's determination—will be swift," the letter continued. "Upon affirmance by the BIA, petitioner will lose his lawful permanent resident status, including his right to reside and work in the United States, and have a final order of removal against him."
"Compared to other courts of appeals, including those in the 3rd and 2nd Circuits, the 5th Circuit almost never grants stays of removal to noncitizens pursuing petitions for review of BIA decisions. As a result, the only meaningful impediment to petitioner's physical removal from the United States would be this court's important order prohibiting removal during the pendency of his federal habeas case," the letter points out, referring to Farbiarz's previous intervention.
Khalil is represented by Dratel & Lewis, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR), Van Der Hout LLP, Washington Square Legal Services, and the national, New Jersey, New York, and Louisiana arms of the ACLU.
"When the immigration prosecutor, judge, and jailer all answer to Donald Trump, and that one man is eager to weaponize the system in a desperate bid to silence Mahmoud Khalil, a US permanent resident whose only supposed sin is that he stands against an ongoing genocide in Palestine, this is the result," CLEAR co-director Ramzi Kassem said Wednesday. "A plain-as-day First Amendment violation that also puts on sharp display the rapidly free-falling credibility of the entire US immigration system."
In addition to calling out the Trump administration for its unconstitutional conduct, Khalil's lawyers expressed some optimism.
"We have witnessed a constant lack of humanity and allegiance to the law throughout proceedings in this farcical Louisiana immigration court, and the immigration judge's September 12 decision is just the most recent example of what occurs when the system requires an arbiter that is anything but neutral to do the administration's bidding," said Johnny Sinodis, a partner at Van Der Hout LLP. "As with other illegal efforts by the government, this too will be challenged and overcome."
"The Trump administration has taken a sledgehammer to our capacity to hold sex offenders to account and undermined support and services for crime victims," said Rep. Jamie Raskin.
Congressional Democrats and victim advocates took aim Tuesday at President Donald Trump's gutting of federal programs combatcing human trafficking, belying campaign promises to aggressively target perpetrators of such crimes.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, on Tuesday released an 18-page memo "detailing how the Trump administration has repeatedly sided with sex offenders and human traffickers over their victims—often rewarding sexual predators and elevating them to positions of power within the US government while crippling key offices, programs, and grants that combat sex crimes and support survivors."
This seemingly flies in the face of Trump's "Agenda 47" campaign platform, which vowed to aggressively crack down on human traffickers, and the groundswell of Trump supporters' unheeded calls for action and accountability in the Jeffrey Epstein case. Fighting child sex trafficking—both real and imagined—has long been an issue of passionate importance for the MAGA movement.
"Trump began his second term promising to 'make America safe again.' But safe for whom? Law-abiding citizens or dangerous criminals?"
Noting that "Trump and his supporters have gone from demanding the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files to doing everything in their power to prevent their release, openly tampering with potential witness Ghislaine Maxwell and calling the matter a 'Democrat hoax,'" the memo—titled Epstein Is the Tip of the Iceberg—begins by asking: "Trump began his second term promising to 'make America safe again.' But safe for whom? Law-abiding citizens or dangerous criminals?"
The memo notes that in the past seven months, Trump has:
Trump has also been found civilly liable for sexual abuse and has been accused of rape, sexual assault, or harassment by more than two dozen women.
Following whistleblower claims "that the Trump administration concealed information about the safety of unaccompanied Guatemalan children they tried to deport in the dead of night," Sens. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) on Tuesday called for an oversight hearing to examine the US Office of Refugee Resettlement's "mass child deportation efforts and apparent lies under oath."
"The urgent call for a hearing comes after the disclosure alleged that at least 30 of 327 unaccompanied Guatemalan children the administration attempted to deport without due process 'have indicators of being a victim of child abuse, including death threats, gang violence, human trafficking, and/or have expressed fear of return to Guatemala,'" Padilla's office said in a statement Wednesday.
An investigation published Wednesday by The Guardian also detailed how the Trump administration "has aggressively rolled back efforts across the federal government to combat human trafficking."
Jean Bruggeman, executive director of the advocacy group Freedom Network USA, told The Guardian that “it’s been a widespread and multipronged attack on survivors that leaves all of us less safe and leaves survivors with few options."
Numerous critics have warned of the dangers of Trump's diversion of federal resources and personnel dedicated to combating human trafficking to enforcing mass deportations.
As Raskin told Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel during a charged Wednesday hearing, "When Trump decided that rounding up immigrants with no criminal records was more important that preventing crimes like human trafficking of women and girls, drug dealing, terrorism, and fraud, you ordered FBI’s 25 largest field offices to divert thousands of agents away from chasing down violent criminals, sex traffickers, fraudsters, and scammers to help carry out Trump’s extreme immigration crackdown."
"You ordered hundreds of FBI agents to pore over all the Epstein files," Raskin said, "but not to look for more clues about the money network or the network of human traffickers, pulled these agents from their regular counterterrorism, counterintelligence, or anti-drug trafficking duties to work around the clock, some of them sleeping on their office desks, to conduct a frantic search to make sure Donald Trump’s name and image were flagged and redacted wherever they appeared."
"Put on your big boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are," Raskin added.
"Trump promised to lower prices on day one and be 'the champion of the American worker,' yet his economic agenda has delivered higher prices, a stalled job market, and sluggish growth," said another economist.
As working-class Americans contend with a stalled labor market and rising prices under US President Donald Trump, economist Alex Jacquez warned Wednesday that the Federal Reserve's "small rate cut will do little to address Trump's economic turmoil."
"Driven by a stagnant job market, the Fed's move offers no real relief to American households, consumers, or workers—all of whom are paying the price for Trump's economic mismanagement," said Jacquez, who previously served as a special assistant to former President Barack Obama and is now chief of policy and advocacy at the think tank Groundwork Collaborative. "No interest rate tweak can undo that damage."
Jacquez's colleague Liz Pancotti, managing director of policy and advocacy at Groundwork, similarly said Wednesday that "President Trump promised to lower prices on day one and be 'the champion of the American worker,' yet his economic agenda has delivered higher prices, a stalled job market, and sluggish growth. He's leaving families and workers high and dry—and no move by the Fed will save them."
The president has been pressuring the US central bank to slash its benchmark interest rate, taking aim at Fed Chair Jerome Powell, whom Trump appointed during his first term. Powell remained in the post under former Democratic President Joe Biden.
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) voted to lower the federal funds rate by 0.25 percentage points, from 4.25-4.5% to 4-4.25%. It is the first cut since December 2024, and Powell said the decision reflects a "shift in the balance of risks" to the Fed's dual mandate of price stability and maximum employment.
Daniel Hornung, who held economic policy roles during the Obama and Biden administrations and is now a policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, said in a statement that "beyond the Fed's September cut, the main story from the Fed's projections is a cloudy outlook for the economy and monetary policy over the rest of the year."
The cut came after Trump ally Stephen Miran was sworn in to a seat on the Fed's Board of Governors on Tuesday—which made this FOMC gathering "the most politically charged meeting in recent memory," as Politico reported.
The new appointee "was the only Fed official to dissent from the decision," the outlet noted. "Miran called for twice as large a cut in borrowing costs, and the Fed's economic projections suggest that one official—likely Miran—would support jumbo-sized rate cuts at the next two meetings as well—an estimate that is conspicuously lower than the other 18 estimates."
Hornung highlighted that "an equal number of members favor hiking, no further cuts, or one cut to the number of members who favor two more cuts, and one outlier member—presumably, President Trump's current Council of Economic Advisers chair—favors the equivalent of five cuts."
"Besides Miran’s outlier status, which sends concerning signals about continued Fed independence," he added, "the wide range of views on the committee is a reaction to the real risks that tariff and immigration policy pose to both sides of the Fed's mandate."
Federal immigration agents across the United States are working to deliver on Trump's promised mass deportations, despite warnings of the human and economic impacts of rounding up immigrants living and working in the country. The president is also engaged in a global trade war, imposing tariffs that have driven up prices for a range of goods.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced last week that overall inflation rose by 2.9% year-over-year in August and core inflation rose by 3.1%. Jacquez said at the time: "Make no mistake, inflation is accelerating and American families continue to feel price pressures across the board from children's clothing, to groceries, to autos. Rate cuts will not ease the inescapable financial pain that the Trump economy is inflicting on households across the nation."
That came less than a week after BLS revealed in its first jobs report since Trump fired the agency's commissioner that the US economy added only 22,000 jobs in August, and the number of jobs created in July and June were once again revised downward.
Jacquez had called that report "more evidence that Trump’s promises to working families have fallen flat."
Recent polling has also exposed how working people are suffering under Trump's second administration. One survey—conducted by Data for Progress for Groundwork and Protect Borrowers—shows that "American families are trapped in a cycle of debt," with 55% of likely voters reporting at least some credit card debt, and another 18% saying they “had this type of debt in the past, but not anymore.”
The poll, released last week, also found that over half have or previously had car loan or medical debt, more than 40% have or had student debt, and over 35% are or used to be behind on utility payments. Additionally, nearly 30% have or had “buy now, pay later” debt through options such as Afterpay or Klarna.