47 ways Trump has made life less affordable in the last year
Report • By Celine McNicholas, Margaret Poydock, and Josh Bivens • January 13, 2026
In the first year of his second term, President Trump has actively made life less affordable for working people. Affordability has two sides—prices and pay. While public debate fixates on rising costs, the administration’s most serious harm has come from its policies that hold down wages and weaken workers’ bargaining power. The 47th president has pursued an agenda that undercuts incomes for all but the wealthiest households, slows job growth, and invites employer exploitation and abuse—including unprecedented attacks on federal workers’ collective bargaining rights that make him the biggest union buster in U.S. history. His policies have systematically stripped workers of leverage in the labor market, driving down pay and making it harder for working families to afford the basics.
At its core, affordability is shaped by whether workers’ paychecks keep pace with the cost of living. What many now describe as an affordability crisis is the predictable result of decades of policies that have suppressed wage growth and eroded workers’ bargaining power. In the decades before the pandemic, owners and corporate executives claimed an ever-larger share of the income generated by what workers produced. Had pay for typical workers kept pace with productivity over the last 45 years—rather than being suppressed—their paychecks would be roughly 40% larger today. This wage shortfall is the driving force in America’s affordability crisis—and reversing it must be central to any serious affordability agenda.
While workers’ wages—particularly those of low-wage workers—saw sharp inflation-adjusted increases between 2019 and 2024, these gains fell far short of recouping the losses of the four prior decades. These wage increases were largely obscured amid the anxieties of the immediate post-pandemic period, including a large jump in inflation that eclipsed even larger wage gains for most workers. But instead of building on the first real progress in decades, Trump’s policies over the last year will make this wage shortfall worse and are likely to contribute to greater wage suppression in the longer run. Absent an about-face in Trump’s economic agenda, life will continue to become even less affordable for working people.
In this report, we examine 47 of the most significant actions Trump has taken in the first year of his second term to make it harder for working families to afford the cost of living. We organized these actions into five categories:
1. Eroding workers’ wages and economic security;
2. Undermining job creation;
3. Weakening workers’ rights;
4. Enabling employer exploitation; and
5.Creating an ineffective government.
https://www.epi.org/publication/47-ways-trump-has-made-life-less-affordable-in-his-first-year/