War on Poverty

In May 1965, one year after the Johnson Administration initiated the "War on Poverty," the Office of Economic Opportunity adopted Orshansky's poverty thresholds as a working definition of poverty. Soon after, Social Security Administration policymakers and analysts expressed concern about how to adjust the poverty thresholds for increases in the standard of living.


In 1969, the Poverty Level Review Committee was designated to re-evaluate the poverty thresholds for the Bureau of the Budget. After doing so, the Committee decided to adjust the thresholds for price changes, and not for changes in the general standard of living. The thresholds would be indexed by the Consumer Price Index rather than the per capita cost of the thrifty food plan. The Bureau of the Budget—now the Office of Management and Budget -- designated the poverty thresholds, with their revisions, as the federal government's official statistical definition of poverty.


Since 1969, several committees and task forces have been formed to explore the question of whether the poverty thresholds need to be adjusted and how that might be done. In 1992, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences appointed a Panel on Poverty and Family Assistance to conduct a study on Measuring Poverty. By May 1995, the Panel published its report called Measuring Poverty: A New Approach.


In the report, the Panel proposed a new way of developing an official poverty measure for the United States. It did not give any specific set of dollar figures. However, the federal government has made no significant changes to the method of calculation.