Trump Administration to Stop Measuring Food Insecurity
“The Trump administration has canceled the Agriculture Department’s annual report on food insecurity, a key measure of Americans’ access to adequate meals. This decision, following significant food stamp cuts, will hinder efforts to track the impact of aid reductions on food insecurity rates. The report, published for three decades, has been criticized by the administration as inaccurate and unnecessary.
The move strips the government of its main gauge of hunger in America, and will impede efforts to track the impact of aid cuts.
Two months after pushing through Congress the largest food stamp cuts in the program’s history, the Trump administration has canceled the government’s annual report measuring household food insecurity.
The move by the Agriculture Department strips the government of its main gauge of Americans’ ability to access adequate meals, and will impede researchers’ efforts to track the coming cuts in nutritional aid.
The department’s report has been published every year for three decades, and grew in part out of battles in the 1980s over President Ronald Reagan’s statements disputing that the United States had a hunger problem.
The most recent report found that in 2023, 13.5 percent of households, with 47 million people, were food insecure, meaning that during some portion of the year, not every member of household had access to enough food for a healthy lifestyle.
The Agriculture Department said in a statement on Saturday that the report had become “overly politicized, and upon subsequent review, is unnecessary to carry out the work of the department.”
The department will issue a final report next month covering 2024, based on a survey from last year, but will cease fielding future surveys, according to the statement.
The decision was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.
In a sharp break with precedent, President Trump has aggressively contested sources of government data that he thinks casts his policies in a negative light. Last month, after a weak jobs report, he fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, claiming with no evidence that the data was “rigged.”
The Agriculture Department report, Household Food Security in the United States, quantifies the share of households considered “food insecure” and “very low food secure,” a subset with a more severe designation of need that applied to 5.1 percent of households in 2023. It analyzes those categories by state, race and ethnicity. Rates are much higher among Black and Latino households than among white households.
The report also includes an age category, with data on children and the elderly.
The Agriculture Department’s statement attacked the food insecurity report as “rife with inaccuracies, wrong metrics, zero accountability,and a massive drive for bigger and larger” government programs.
Elaine Waxman, an expert on methods of measuring food insecurity at the Urban Institute, a Washington research group, said in an interview that “none of that is accurate.”
She added: “It is highly respected. It has well-validated questions. In no way does that reflect the view of anybody who works with the data. That is completely a pretext for eliminating data that can point out problems.”
The report was especially useful during the coronavirus pandemic, Ms. Waxman said, when it found that food insecurity stayed flat in 2020 despite a huge loss of jobs. Researchers credited the outpouring of government aid, which occurred under Mr. Trump.
The signature domestic policy bill that the president signed into law in July cut $187 billion from food stamps over the next decade, and the Congressional Budget Office estimated that about four million people would lose some or all of their assistance. That is about 10 percent of those currently enrolled.
The law greatly expanded work requirements for people receiving food stamps and shifted significant costs to states, giving them new incentives to reduce aid. Throughout the debate, nutrition advocates warned that those changes could increase food insecurity. But without the report, it will be much harder to know.
“Not publishing the numbers is going to hide the impact of the bill,” said Crystal FitzSimons, the president of the Food Research and Action Center.
Jason DeParle is a Times reporter who covers poverty in the United States.“
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