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.
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