WASHINGTON (February 11, 2026) – Senator John Kennedy (R-La.) recently introduced the Poverty Statistics Enhancement Act, a bill that would instruct the United States Census Bureau to include an additional poverty metric in its annual reporting that considers a family’s access to federal benefits when determining its income relative to the poverty line.
Kennedy penned this op-ed in National Review to explain how the Census Bureau’s current metrics paint a misleading picture of poverty in America by considering only wages and cash benefits, such as Social Security benefits, Supplemental Security Income, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families—and not the tens of thousands of dollars of in-kind benefits Americans may receive through food stamps, Medicaid, housing subsidies, and other federal welfare programs.
Key excerpts of the op-ed are below:
“Over the past 50 years, the federal government’s welfare spending has increased by 765 percent, yet the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line hasn’t budged. Roughly 12 percent of Americans lived in poverty in 1974. Today, it’s roughly 11 percent.
“Is America really that bad at bringing people out of poverty?”
. . .
“If you include the non-cash benefits and cash payments (from the person’s earnings and from the federal government), the actual percentage of Americans with incomes at or below the poverty line is only 1 percent.”
. . .
“Last week, I introduced the Poverty Statistics Enhancement Act to require the Census Bureau to include the [Congressional Budget Office’s] methodology in its reporting on poverty in America. This would not eliminate the Census Bureau’s current narrow poverty definition, but it would ensure that Congress can consider both numbers when deciding how to improve welfare programs in America. . . . When the nation is more than $38 trillion in debt, we cannot afford to let misleading survey numbers dupe the country into more costly, fraud-prone welfare programs.”
Read Kennedy’s op-ed here.
Full text of the Poverty Statistics Enhancement Act is available here.
Watch Kennedy discuss the Census Bureau’s poverty data with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent here.
Watch Kennedy discuss the Census Bureau’s poverty data with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick here.
