The USDA Erases America’s Most Trusted Hunger Report
- contactbehindthesh
- Oct 27
- 2 min read
The U.S. government recently got rid of its most trusted gauge of hunger in America. Last month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced it would terminate the annual Household Food Security Report, ending a three-decade-long effort to systematically measure the struggle for families to put food on the table. In a public statement, the USDA dismissed the report as "rife with inaccuracies, wrong metrics, zero accountability, and a massive drive for bigger and larger" government programs. Instead of taking measures to correct these “inaccuracies”, the administration instead decided to eliminate the data altogether. For the millions of Americans, researchers, and anti-hunger advocates who rely on this data, the message is clear: the administration has chosen to turn a blind eye to a problem that’s clearly on the rise.
For approximately thirty years, the Household Food Security Report has been the definitive source for understanding food access in the U.S. It utilized a gold-standard survey, consistently administered to households, asking detailed questions relating to food insecurity. This annual report should have been indispensable; it’s comparable in importance to the unemployment rate or the poverty rate. It was the essential tool used to evaluate the effectiveness of core federal nutrition programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and to help food banks, non-profits, and state policymakers target resources to the communities that needed help the most.
The USDA’s decision comes on the heels of historic cuts to federal nutrition assistance programs. The removal of the Household Food Security Report essentially eliminates the primary metric of accountability for these major policy changes. When advocates argue that recent cuts to SNAP will increase hardship, the most powerful evidence to back that claim is the food insecurity data itself. Without this high-quality annual data, tracking food insecurity nationally becomes extremely difficult. It will be significantly harder for researchers and the public to prove a direct link between policy changes and a rise in hunger. Additionally, when the next national crisis hits, policymakers will lack the crucial information needed to rapidly assess the situation and deliver targeted relief. The reality is simple: You don't solve a crisis by ceasing to measure it.
While non-profit and private research groups may scramble to fill the gap, they cannot replicate the scale, consistency, or national reach of a government-administered survey. We are now in a new era of data scarcity on one of the country’s most fundamental social issues. By dismantling the nation’s primary hunger gauge, the administration is making the millions of families struggling to feed their children and themselves that much harder to see, and therefore, that much easier to ignore. It’s up to local advocates, community leaders, and the media to ensure that just because the government stops counting the hungry, we don't stop caring about them.
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