//Joe Biden is taking office amid a poverty crisis

Joe Biden is taking office amid a poverty crisis

Christina Animashaun/Vox

Columbia researchers project that 5 million to 12 million more people will be in poverty in January than a year before.

Poverty actually fell in early to mid-2020, as the pandemic took hold, due to an unprecedented expansion of government safety net programs. But it has since grown and surpassed its early 2020 level, and is poised to increase more if the economic situation remains dire.

Those are the major findings from projections made by researchers at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy (CPSP) at Columbia University, who have been developing methods for monthly estimates of poverty during the Covid-19 pandemic. The researchers — Zach Parolin, Chris Wimer, Jane Waldfogel, Jordan Matsudaira, and Megan Curran — use a metric known as the “supplemental poverty measure,” designed as a more consistent and reliable measure of hardship than the official poverty