USDA Ends Long-Standing Food Insecurity Survey 

At this point, I think it’s safe to say the Trump administration wants the American public to die by any means necessary. Be it from climate change through its dismantling of FEMA, or disease through unnecessary vaccine restrictions, the Trump administration has made a habit of uprooting historical norms simply to make life more dangerous in America. The Trump administration has now added starvation to the list, after the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) ended its annual food insecurity survey. 

According to NPR, the annual Household Food Security Report tracked how many low-income Americans lacked access to adequate food and provided data that helped shape policy meant to address food insecurity. While the USDA claimed the move was not driven by politics, its official statement announcing the end of the survey gives the opposite impression. 

“These redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies do nothing more than fear monger,” the statement reads. “For 30 years, this study—initially created by the Clinton administration as a means to support the increase of SNAP eligibility and benefit allotments—failed to present anything more than subjective, liberal fodder.”

You heard it here, folks. There’s absolutely nothing political at all in calling a survey designed to combat food insecurity “subjective, liberal fodder.” 

The USDA added in the statement that trends in food insecurity have “remained virtually unchanged,” though experts told NPR that’s untrue. “Last year’s report for 2023 showed an increase in food insecurity,” Kyle Ross, a policy analyst with 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 Household Food Security Report revealed a 3.2% increase in children suffering from food insecurity compared to the year before. The 2023 survey also revealed that 47.4 million people lived in “food insecure households,” meaning, “these households were uncertain of having or unable to acquire enough food to meet the needs of all their members.” Of that 47.4 million, almost 14 million were children. 

Ross told NPR that he believed new work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) introduced in President Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” are going to only increase the number of food-insecure households, which is what likely motivated the USDA to end the survey. 

“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 loss of the survey is also going to make it harder for lawmakers to make informed policy decisions on how to combat food insecurity. “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. “Without that data, we are flying blind, and we don’t know the impact.”

I’m really, really struggling to figure out how cutting SNAP benefits and making it harder to track food insecurity among children makes America great.

SEE ALSO:

The Growing Scale Of Food Insecurity

Misconceptions About Hunger As SNAP Benefits Get Cut