President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” is anything but for the nation’s poorest families. Among the numerous cruel elements to the new spending plan are food-program cuts that are expected to increase “food insecurity” — also known as hunger — for millions of Americans, including children.

What terrible optics going into the midterm election season. But no worries. Trump’s administration this month announced how it intends to address the politically inconvenient specter of coddling billionaires at the expense of impoverished Americans who will go hungry: It’s ending the longstanding hunger survey that counts them.

It’s part of a broader pattern on a wide array of issues on which this president — who routinely insists that reality is whatever clearly false thing he says it — has moved to make sure nobody can confront him with unpleasant facts.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Sept. 20 that it is ending its annual Household Food Security Report, which has been in place for more than three decades to assess hunger in America. The yearly report, the agency alleges, was “redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous.”

The announcement offered no evidence that’s true. What’s definitely true is that the cessation of the annual report will make it more difficult for anyone to accurately quantify the approaching misery from Trump’s (and congressional Republicans’) cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

The cuts to what used to be called food stamps are expected to mean as many as 3 million adults will lose their benefits entirely to unnecessary and unworkable work requirements — benefit cuts that will inevitably impact those recipients’ children. Other reductions and changes to the way the program is administered could mean reduced benefits for millions more, according to various studies.

The administration’s move now to end a key source of data that would track the human impact of those lost benefits is hardly surprising. This is the president, after all, who shortly after returning to office in January (promising to “drain the swamp”) purged his administration of more than a dozen inspectors general — the independent watchdogs assigned to monitor various federal agencies for unethical activity.

This administration’s nixing of the annual hunger survey won’t prevent one child from going hungry — it will merely make it more difficult to count up the ones who will be, because of Trump’s cuts. That, like these moves to erase urgent data regarding so many other facets of civic life, is by design. On that much, the data is clear.

— The St. Louis Post Dispatch