WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump’s administration is doing some wild and unprecedented stonewalling of congressional investigations, but don’t sleep on Trump’s methodical attempts to unravel the social safety net that are going on in the background.

This month, the administration signaled it would like to change how the government adjusts its official poverty threshold for inflation every year, which could result in millionsfewer Americans qualifying for a wide range of benefits over time.

It’s only the most recent of many unilateral moves Trump has made on social policy, which all seek to fulfill an Inauguration Day promise to “get our people off of welfare and back to work.”

The anti-welfare agenda notably targets immigrants, such as by trying to bar rent subsidies to families of undocumented immigrants, but any domestic program is potentially threatened.

Last year, the administration said it would allow states to add “work requirements” to Medicaid, contrary to the program’s statutory purpose of providing health benefits to people with low incomes. It cut spending on Obamacare outreach and pushed to allow employers with ”moral″ objections to drop birth control from their health plans. And in December, the administration took a proposed food benefit cut ― one that House Republicans had drafted but the Senate rejected ― and stuck it into a regulation. No Congress needed!

It’s difficult to compare the unilateral actions of different presidencies, but it seems that the Trump administration’s social policy power grabs have been drastic by recent standards, said Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

“I think this administration’s actions on poverty and on birth control are beyond anything I have seen in the past,” said Haskins, who previously crafted welfare policy for Republicans as a staffer on Capitol Hill and in the White House.

Last week, in a formal ”request for comment″ published in the Federal Register, the Office of Management and Budget asked for input regarding how the government adjusts the Official Poverty Measure for inflation each year. Currently, a family of four is officially poor if the household earns less than $25,465 annually. Later this year, the government will update the number based on the rise in prices for things like food and shelter since last year.

The government has different ways of tracking inflation that it uses for a variety of purposes, such as adjusting eligibility thresholds for federal programs, repositioning tax brackets, and increasing Social Security benefits. The Trump administration hinted in its request for comment that it might prefer to adjust the poverty threshold with an inflation measure that rises more slowly than the others.

Eligibility for programs such as nutrition assistance and Medicaid is linked to the poverty thresholds, so holding down the official poverty line would slow the growth of enrollment in those programs, since fewer people would qualify as average incomes outpace the slower inflation measure.