On Friday the Bureau of Labor Statistics postponed the release of the annual report on consumer expenditures—a key report for understanding inflation—without explanation.

This weekend, Dan Frosch, Patrick Thomas, and Andrea Peterson of the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is ending its annual report on household food security. Those reports began in the 1990s to help state and local officials distribute food assistance. Last year’s report found that 18 million U.S. households experienced food insecurity during 2023. In a statement, the Department of Agriculture said: “These redundant, costly, politicized and extraneous studies do nothing more than fearmonger.” Whitney Curry Wimbish of The American Prospect reported last week that food banks across the country are seeing more visits even as immigrants are staying away from them out of concern that their information might be shared or that Immigration and Customs Enforcement might show up.

Nutrition scholar Lindsey Smith Taillie of the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health told the reporters: “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 like we don’t have this food insecurity problem.” The budget reconciliation law the Republicans passed in July cuts funding to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by about 20%, or $186 billion through 2034, the largest cuts to SNAP in its history.

The information we are getting is being throttled and manipulated, whether at the War Department, where in February, the out long-standing media outlets who had been covering the Pentagon, including NPR, the New York Times, and NBC News, were thrown out and replaced by right-wing outlets including Newsmax and Breitbart or at the FCC after Trump told reporters, on Friday in the Oval Office, that covering the administration negatively is “really illegal.” He went on: “Personally, you can’t take, you can’t have a free airwave if you’re getting free airwaves from the United States government.”

If you make your decisions and form your attitudes based on assuming the government's data is accurate, start opening your container of salt.

Jeff