USDA cancels survey tracking how many Americans struggle to get enough food

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) under the administration of President Donald Trump announced on Saturday that it will end a longstanding annual food insecurity survey, calling it "redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous."

The Household Food Security Report provides yearly data on the lack of access to adequate nutrition for low-income Americans, and helps shape policy on how to combat food insecurity and hunger.

The USDA's announcement comes after Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law this summer, which expands the work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. This, in effect, will leave an estimated 2.4 million Americans without food aid.

"The national food insecurity survey is a critical, reliable data source that shows how many families in America struggle to put food on the table," Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) told NPR. FRAC is an anti-hunger organization that advocates for food security in the U.S.

FitzSimons said that without the annual report, advocates and policymakers won't have a clear lens on the scale of hunger in America, and how to prevent it.

"Without that data, we are flying blind, and we don't know the impact," FitzSimons said.

According to the USDA, 47.4 million people lived in food insecure households in 2023. This means that at certain times, "these households were uncertain of having or unable to acquire enough food to meet the needs of all their members." Among those, nearly 14 million were children.

In the announcement, the Agriculture Department stated, "trends in the prevalence of food insecurity have remained virtually unchanged."

Experts are saying that's not true.

"Last year's report for 2023 showed an increase in food insecurity," Kyle Ross, a policy analyst with the progressive research group the Center for American Progress, told NPR. "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."

The 2023 report revealed that the number of food-insecure children in the United States increased by 3.2% compared to 2022's annual report, according to the FRAC.

Ross also said the Agriculture Department's claim that the annual report on food and nutrition insecurity in America might be politicized is not accurate.

"That has no bearing in reality whatsoever," Ross said.

Created during the Clinton administration, the Household Food Security Report has been a yearly fixture in understanding food insecurity and policy for vulnerable Americans. The survey has been published annually for 30 years, throughout both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Ross thinks that the higher job requirements people have to meet to access SNAP benefits, and the resulting rise in food insecurity, is the likely motive behind the Trump administration scrapping the report.

"This will substantially increase food insecurity, and unfortunately, that will make itself clear in the data of food insecurity reports in the next couple of years," Ross said.

The USDA did not respond to questions from NPR about the reasons behind the report's cancellation.

The last report will be released on Oct. 22, according to The Associated Press. It will cover 2024 data on food insecurity in the U.S.

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