The decision to cancel the reports was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, and comes as the department was set to release its 2024 survey data.
The Trump administration has previously cracked down on other government departments over data it considers to be politically motivated. Erika McEntarfer, the former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was ousted after revised data showed lower jobs growth in May and June. President Trump criticized her as a Biden appointee overseeing what he falsely called “faked” jobs numbers.
Kyle Ross, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, questioned the Trump administration’s claim that the USDA food security survey had become politicized, noting that it has been produced annually by Republican and Democratic administrations for around 30 years.
“It is also not redundant, as this survey serves as the official data source of food insecurity statistics,” he said in an email.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
The decision to scrap the report comes amid steep cuts to USDA programs that provide food to schools and food banks, triggering alarm among aid groups that provide food to millions of struggling Americans.
Legislation passed by Congress in July reduced federal funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps.
Barbara ​Laraia, professor and chair of the University of California Berkeley’s Food Nutrition and Population Health Program, said that the USDA report has been “the gold standard” for studying food insecurity in America.
“It has helped us measure how the federal food programs are working,” she said.
According to Laraia, researchers often use the term “food insecurity” instead of hunger to more broadly encompass a number of important factors that go beyond the physical sensation of hunger. Those studying food insecurity, for example, often look at how a household might adjust its eating behaviors to scrape by or whether a family is able to get enough nutrients to remain healthy, she said.
In its 2023 survey, the USDA found that about 6.8 million American households experienced a more severe form of food insecurity. These families “absolutely feel hunger,” Laraia said, adding that it’s not uncommon to hear of people skipping meals, going an entire day without eating, or losing weight due to a lack of food.
“When families get squeezed, especially when there’s inflation and rising housing costs and food costs rise, they’re going to pay all of their fixed expenses first — their rent, their transportation, their utilities, and then they’ll compromise on their food budget,” she said.
The report was especially useful during the coronavirus pandemic, when it found that food insecurity stayed flat in 2020 despite a huge loss of jobs, said Elaine Waxman, an expert on methods of measuring food insecurity at the Urban Institute, a Washington research group. Researchers credited the outpouring of government aid, which occurred under Trump.
The signature domestic policy bill that the president signed into law in July cut $187 billion from food stamps over the next decade, and the Congressional Budget Office estimated that about 4 million people would lose some or all of their assistance. That is about 10 percent 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 Crystal FitzSimons, the president of the Food Research and Action Center.