The Trump administration’s elimination of annual food insecurity reports will plunge the nation into the dark when it comes to feeding hungry Americans, nutrition advocates say.
“Ultimately, this is a loss not just for data collection, but for the millions of people whose experiences with hunger may now be harder to quantify, understand and address,” said Jeremy Everett, executive director of the Baylor University Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty.
Jeremy Everett
“Without this report, we lose a common language and consistent framework for understanding hunger in the U.S. The reach, reliability and accessibility of the survey go far beyond what an independent group could easily replicate,” he said.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has conducted the Household Food Insecurity Report since 1995 to gauge food insecurity and malnutrition among low-income Americans. The annual data are used by researchers to measure the effectiveness of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
But under the Trump administration, the USDA criticized the studies and said they offer inflated, inaccurate and politically biased information about food insecurity in the U.S. Thus, the reports will end with the October release of 2024 hunger statistics.
“These redundant, costly, politicized and extraneous studies do nothing more than fear monger,” the agency asserted in its Sept. 20 announcement. “For 30 years, this study — initially created by the Clinton administration as a means to support the increase of SNAP eligibility and benefit allotments — failed to present anything more than subjective, liberal fodder.”
Food insecurity has not decreased since the advent of the report despite increases in SNAP spending from the end of Trump’s first term to 2023, the agency claimed. “USDA will continue to prioritize statutory requirements and, where necessary, use the bevy of more timely and accurate data sets available to it.”
The statement omitted the fact the report has been conducted under Republican and Democratic administrations alike and that it emanated from the Reagan administration’s Task Force on Food Assistance.
The announcement follows the July passage of President Donald Trump’s comprehensive spending bill granting more than $4 trillion in tax cuts to wealthy Americans in part by slashing about $186 billion from SNAP over the next decade.
Last year’s report found 47.4 million Americans experienced food insecurity in 2023, including 13.8 million children.
USDA’s claims that SNAP spending has not addressed hunger in America and that the report was politically motivated are “not grounded in reality,” according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress.
“It does not include policy recommendations or attribute trends in the data to recent policy changes,” the think tank explained. “The cancellation of the food security report is the latest attempt from the Trump administration to interfere with the collection and reporting of federal statistics.”
More than 20 Democratic House members, including some on the House Agriculture Committee, protested the USDA announcement and demanded the reports be continued.
“They are the most important high-quality, consistent measure of national and state-level food insecurity we have in the U.S., giving us critical insight into how many Americans each year have to cut the size of meals or were hungry because they had too little money for food,” the representatives said in a Sept. 25 letter to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.
Last year’s report found 47.4 million Americans experienced food insecurity in 2023, including 13.8 million children, and that 12 million lived with “very low food insecurity,” the letter noted.
“Understanding who is hungry in America is not ‘unnecessary to carry out the work of the Department.’ It is vital.”
It is currently unknown how the study can be replicated, and its elimination likely will result in a significant setback to those working to end hunger, Everett added.
“I’m deeply concerned. This survey has long served as a vital tool for shining a light on food insecurity and evaluating the impact of programs and policies designed to address it. More importantly, it represents real American families. Without this data, the experiences of those struggling with limited access to food risk being overlooked or ignored.”
Jason Coker
Cutting the data gathering is devastating because it mostly serves impoverished families with children, said Jason Coker, national director of Together for Hope, the rural development coalition of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
Ending the annual hunger report will place those families in even deeper scarcity by purposely ignoring their numbers, location and needs, he said. “What they are trying to do is basically make it impossible for us to know who those people are and in the process pull people off the SNAP rolls. They want to prohibit poor families from eating; that’s really what they are talking about.”
He also disputed the administration’s claim that documenting hunger and feeding the poor have become a political ploy somehow advancing liberal causes. But there is a spiritual component involved, he said.
“It’s clear to me in the gospel of Jesus Christ we are called to feed the hungry. Hard stop. Jesus says in Matthew 25, ‘When you did not feed the least of these, you did not feed me.’ Taking care of hungry people, taking care of hungry children, is a direct commandment to take care of the most vulnerable.”
Ending the hunger report comes just weeks after Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, saying she had “RIGGED” jobs figures “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
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