The Food Security Supplement (FSS) to the Current Population Survey has been around for roughly 30 years, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) last weekend announced the survey would no longer be funded because the reports “became overly politicized,” according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal. While 2024 data will still be included in the upcoming October 22 report from the USDA, the series will end there.
The cancellation comes just a few months after congressional Republicans and the Trump administration enacted the largest cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in history, gutting a program that serves 1 in 8 people in the United States, including 1 in 5 children, by nearly 20 percent. The timing is no coincidence, as research has repeatedly shown that SNAP participation helps reduce instances of food insecurity by as much as 30 percent. SNAP is particularly valuable for households that are more likely to experience food insecurity, such as those in or near poverty and households with children or people with disabilities. (see Figure 1) By canceling the FSS, the administration is making it more difficult for policymakers and the public to track the harms of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which is projected to eliminate or substantially reduce benefits for 4 million low-income Americans who rely on SNAP to feed their families.
This is not the administration’s first attempt to hide data it dislikes, as a similar situation is ongoing at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) following the firing of BLS Commissioner Erica McEntarfer after the release of a weak jobs report that the president claimed without evidence was rigged to make him look bad.
Food security is a key metric for nutrition programs
The USDA needs food security data to properly assess the effectiveness of its nutrition programs. The mission statement of the Food and Nutrition Service even reads:
Our mission is to increase food security and reduce hunger in partnership with cooperating organizations by providing children and low-income people access to food, a healthy diet, and nutrition education in a manner that supports American agriculture and inspires public confidence.
Ending the food security report deprioritizes the outcomes of the nutrition programs related to health and wellness that the USDA oversees. Beyond just SNAP, these include other major programs including school meals, the Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer program for Children (Summer EBT), and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), all of which are associated with lower rates of food insecurity for households with children. This likely will lead to heavier weighting of other measures, such as cost or error rates, that remove the human element and real-world impact from these programs, making it easier for policymakers to call for further cuts.
Despite the USDA’s claim that trends in food insecurity have remained virtually unchanged in recent years, the evidence suggests otherwise. Food insecurity actually fell to its lowest rate in decades in 2021 thanks to the economic stimulus provided to families in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which included temporary expansions to SNAP. The data clearly show that policy intervention is measurable and important in people’s lives. Two years later, in 2023, food insecurity rose to levels not seen since 2014 as the temporary assistance expired and inflation rose. (see Figure 2) The historic cuts to SNAP enacted under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will push food insecurity even higher.
History shows that measuring food insecurity is not a partisan issue
Both the USDA’s press release and reporting emphasize the production of the report being politicized as a reason for its cancellation, but this is not grounded in reality. The report has been produced annually for roughly 30 years under both Republican and Democratic administrations, and it simply provides the results from the survey questions fielded by the U.S. Census Bureau. It does not include policy recommendations or attribute trends in the data to recent policy changes.
In fact, it was the Reagan administration that established a Task Force on Food Assistance, which stated that the absence of a credible indicator to measure the extent of hunger “contributes to a climate in which policy discussions become unhelpfully heated and unsubstantiated assertions are then substituted for hard information.” While it did not use the term “food security,” the task force’s report laid out the framework for the concept that would later be fleshed out.
In 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed into law the National Nutrition Monitoring and Related Research Act, which resulted in the creation of a plan that required an interagency federal working group to “recommend a standardized mechanism and instrument(s) for defining and obtaining data on the prevalence of ‘food insecurity’ or ‘food insufficiency’ in the U.S.” The survey was in the field by 1995 as part of the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey and has been fielded each year since. While the questions are included in other surveys, the data that come from the Census Bureau and are reported by the USDA remain the federal government’s official measure of food insecurity.
Conclusion
The cancellation of the food security report is the latest attempt from the Trump administration to interfere with the collection and reporting of federal statistics. Without consistent, accurate food security data from the Census Bureau, policymakers, researchers, and USDA staff alike will have a harder time measuring changes in household well-being as the largest SNAP cuts in history reduce food access for millions of people. Congress should demand the USDA answer for this sudden change of course and propose legislation requiring the USDA to continue this essential work.