The federal government is nixing its most prominent research program designed to track national food insecurity.
The Agriculture Department ended its Household Food Security Report over the weekend, referring to the 30-year study as “redundant.”
“These redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies do nothing more than fear monger,” the USDA said in a press release Saturday, further deriding the research as “liberal fodder.”
“Trends in the prevalence of food insecurity have remained virtually unchanged, regardless of an over 87 percent increase in SNAP spending between 2019-2023,” the release noted, referring to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
But there is about to be a dramatic uptick in the number of Americans struggling to eat. Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act expanded the work requirements to qualify for SNAP earlier this year, a rescission that’s expected to leave at least 2.4 million Americans without food aid, according to NPR.
Further still, experts say the Agriculture Department’s claim that food insecurity has remained “unchanged” is patently untrue. Kyle Ross, a policy analyst with the progressive research group the Center for American Progress, told NPR that there was an uptick in food insecurity as recently as 2023. That year, the rate of food-insecure children in the United States grew by 3.2 percent over the year prior, according to data from the Food Research and Action Center.
“At that point, it has been the largest rate of food insecurity that the country has seen since 2014 and substantially larger than just two years prior,” Ross told the radio network.
The last iteration of the Household Food Security Report, published in 2024, found that 13.5 percent of American households were food insecure “at least some time during” 2023, which the report noted was “statistically significantly higher than the 12.8 percent in 2022.”
Anti-hunger researchers described the data provided by the national food insecurity survey as “critical.”
“Without that data, we are flying blind, and we don’t know the impact,” Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research and Action Center told NPR.
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