The Number That Matters

One in 11 American adults smoked cigarettes in 2025. The year before, for the first time ever, the rate dipped below 10%. Now it's sitting at 9%.

That's the headline from preliminary CDC survey data released this week, based on responses from more than 24,200 adults, according to ABC News.

In the mid-1960s, 42% of American adults smoked. Getting from 42% to 9% took six decades of taxes, bans, price hikes, anti-smoking ad campaigns, and a major cultural shift in how Americans think about lighting up in public.

What Mainstream Coverage Is Getting Wrong

Most outlets — AP News, ABC News, WCCB Charlotte — ran this story as a feel-good health item with one political hook: the Trump administration cut the CDC's Office on Smoking and Health (OSH), and advocates are upset.

That's real. The deeper issue is what gets buried in most coverage: the massive inequality hiding inside that 9% figure.

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health's Vaughan Rees, director of the Center for Global Tobacco Control, flagged this in an April 2026 analysis: people in the lowest income brackets and those with the least formal education smoke at three or more times the rate of the general population.

Same story for people who are unhoused, people with substance use disorders, people with mental health conditions, and people with histories of incarceration.

For several decades, Rees noted, smoking rates among those groups have seen little or no improvement — even as the overall number keeps dropping.

When reporters lead with "all-time low" and leave it there, they're telling a true but incomplete story. The national average looks great. The bottom of the income ladder remains stuck.

The Trump Cut — Real, But Needs Context

Yolonda Richardson, president and CEO of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, told ABC News that the Trump administration's elimination of the CDC's Office on Smoking and Health was a serious setback. She specifically called out the cancellation of the "Tips from Former Smokers" ad campaign.

Her numbers: the "Tips" campaign helped more than 1 million Americans quit smoking and saved over $7.3 billion in healthcare costs, according to Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids estimates.

Those figures come from an advocacy group with a clear interest in restoring the program's funding, but the underlying point stands: shutting down a federal office mid-campaign is a problematic way to manage public health infrastructure, especially when the data shows measurable returns.

Harvard's Rees made a similar point without the politics: federal data on tobacco use is still being collected through national health surveys, but federal analysis and policy guidance have stopped entirely. Academic researchers are now scrambling to fill that gap themselves.

This is where smaller government runs into a real-world problem. There's a version of federal program cuts that makes sense — cutting bureaucratic bloat, redundant agencies, wasteful spending. Shutting down an office that demonstrably saved billions in healthcare costs and helped a million people quit smoking is harder to defend on fiscal grounds. The math doesn't work.

If the Trump administration has a cost-benefit case for this cut, they haven't made it publicly.

E-Cigarettes: The Wildcard

The rise of electronic cigarettes doesn't get nearly enough attention in this story.

According to ABC News, adult e-cigarette use has been inching upward for years, though it held roughly steady at about 7% in 2025. That's not a catastrophe, but it's significant.

The public health community spent 60 years winning the war on cigarettes. E-cigarettes are a different product with a different risk profile — but ZERO long-term data exists yet because the product hasn't been around long enough. Anyone who tells you vaping is definitely safe or definitely as dangerous as cigarettes is guessing.

That uncertainty alone is a reason to keep federal monitoring capacity intact. Cutting the OSH right when a new nicotine delivery mechanism is gaining market share is poor timing.

What Decades of Decline Actually Proves

This 60-year decline happened because of a combination of market forces and targeted government intervention working together.

Cigarette taxes made smoking expensive. Price hikes by manufacturers compounded that. Smoking bans removed social permission. Ad campaigns — including government-funded ones like "Tips" — provided the final nudge for millions of people on the fence about quitting.

You don't have to love big government to acknowledge that some of this worked. The data is clear: 60 percent fewer American adults smoke today than did in 1965.

At the same time, the market did real work too. Social norms changed organically. Employers stopped allowing smoking breaks. Restaurants went smoke-free before laws required it in many places.

Both market forces and government intervention contributed to this outcome.

The Takeaway

Nine percent of American adults smoking cigarettes in 2025 is a legitimate public health achievement.

But the poorest, most vulnerable Americans are still smoking at two to three times that rate — and have been for decades. The federal office built to track and address that disparity is now gone. And a new nicotine product is quietly establishing a foothold with no long-term safety record.

The progress is real. So is the work left to do.