Trump administration to stop measuring food insecurity

WASHINGTON – Two months after pushing through Congress the largest food stamp cuts in the programme’s history, the Trump administration has cancelled 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 US had a hunger problem.

The most recent report found that in 2023, 13.5 per cent 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 Sept 20 that the report had become “overly politicised, and upon subsequent review, is unnecessary to carry out the work of the department”.

The department will issue a final report in October covering 2024, based on a survey from 2024 but will cease fielding future surveys, according to the statement.

The decision was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.

In a sharp break with precedent, President Donald Trump has aggressively contested sources of government data that he thinks casts his policies in a negative light.

In August, after a weak jobs report, he

fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labour Statistics

, claiming with no evidence that the data was “rigged.”

The Agriculture Department report, Household Food Security in the United States, quantifies the share of households considered “food insecure” and “very low food secure,” a subset with a more severe designation of need that applied to 5.1 per cent of households in 2023.

It analyses those categories by state, race and ethnicity. Rates are much higher among Black and Latino households than among white households.

The report also includes an age category, with data on children and the elderly.

The Agriculture Department’s statement attacked the food insecurity report as “rife with inaccuracies, wrong metrics, zero accountability, and a massive drive for bigger and larger” government programmes.

Dr Elaine Waxman, an expert on methods of measuring food insecurity at the Urban Institute, a Washington research group, said in an interview that “none of that is accurate”.

She added: “It is highly respected. It has well-validated questions. In no way does that reflect the view of anybody who works with the data. That is completely a pretext for eliminating data that can point out problems.”

The report was especially useful during the coronavirus pandemic, Dr Waxman said, when it found that food insecurity stayed flat in 2020 despite a huge loss of jobs. Researchers credited the outpouring of government aid, which occurred under Mr Trump.

The signature domestic policy Bill that the

President signed into law in July

cut US$187 billion (S$240 billion) from food stamps over the next decade, and the Congressional Budget Office estimated that about four million people would lose some or all of their assistance. That is about 10 per cent of those currently enrolled.

The law greatly expanded work requirements for people receiving food stamps and shifted significant costs to states, giving them new incentives to reduce aid.

Throughout the debate, nutrition advocates warned that those changes could increase food insecurity. But without the report, it will be much harder to know.

“Not publishing the numbers is going to hide the impact of the Bill,” said Ms Crystal FitzSimons, the president of the Food Research and Action Center. NYTIMES