Why Reporting On Hunger Matters

While food insecurity is on the rise and millions of Americans are grappling with rising costs, economic uncertainty, and fragile social safety nets, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s decision to cancel its longstanding Household Food Security Report is especially troubling.

What an insult to humanity by announcing this decison during September, the Hunger Action Month, as designated by Feeding Amercia going back to 2007. The annual survey has been a critical tool in understanding who is going hungry, how severe the problem is, and whether public programs are actually working. Doing away with it doesn’t make food insecurity vanish—it makes it harder to see, to measure, and to address.

Despite worrying about themselves, American households care very much about their fellow man as identified by recent Gallup research. In 2023 about 13.5% of U.S. housholds were food insecure at some point. Roughly 47.4 million people lived in food-insecure houselds in 2023, nearly 14 million children. This large and growing population deserves to be seen and certainly counted as we collectively attempt to ease their burden.

The annual USDA report has served for nearly 30 years as a gold standard. It has allowed policymakers, advocates, researchers, and the public to track how many households are food insecure, the trends over time, and disparities among states, rural and urban areas, households with/without children, etc.

Without regular, independent reporting, decisions about funding, programs, benefit levels, eligibility, and priorities are being made with less accountability. If you don’t have up‐to‐date data, you’re flying blind.

Eliminating the report under the pretext of being “politicized” or “redundant” is not credible. All large data collection efforts have limitations; what matters is how data are improved and used—not whether it’s perfect.

Many federal, state, and community programs rely on USDA data to shape and evaluate interventions. For example, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), food banks, school lunch programs, emergency food assistance, etc., use these annual measures to learn whether their efforts are helping. Without a reliable benchmark, it’s much harder to see where gaps exist or where help should be targeted.

With cuts to food assistance policies under way, raising work requirements for SNAP, inflation affecting food prices, and rising housing and transportation costs—all things that tend to increase food insecurity—the need for current data is more acute than ever. It should be noted that roughly 22.3 million families would lose some or all SNAP benefits under the current proposed changes by the administration.

There is a danger of undercounting and complacency in removing tools that quantify problem risks. The lack of data creates a perception that the problem is “solved,” or not serious—especially if other comparable data collected is less visible, less frequently updated, or less precise. When data collection is curtailed or dropped, marginalized or vulnerable populations—children, elderly, people with disabilities, communities of color—are disproportionately harmed because their experiences tend to be least visible already. It’s often the case that when governments cease to measure something reliably, it’s easier to dismiss or minimize it. But the absence of data does not equal the absence of a problem.

USDA claims there are “more timely and accurate data sets” that can replace the annual report. But so far, none match all the dimensions: national, state-level, demographic detail, longitudinal trends, policy evaluation. Using imperfect or proxy data might obscure things like seasonal fluctuations, the impact of specific policy changes, geographic variation, or how households are coping (e.g. reducing dietary quality, skipping meals). These subtleties matter for a humane, effective response.

If the report needs modernization, invest in improving it. But do not abandon the only nationwide, independent measure of food insecurity. Americans deserve policies informed by facts—not blind guesses.

The policy consequences are already huge, without the USDA’s survey, it will be harder for Congress, state legislatures, and local governments to make the case for or against policy adjustments—whether that’s SNAP eligibility, emergency allotments, school meals, expansions of food bank funding, or other interventions.

Ending the USDA’s Household Food Security Report is not just a blow to statistical tracking—it’s a blow to accountability, to targeted policy, and to recognizing the lived realities of millions of Americans.

The moral dimension should not be ignored given people are going hungry, it’s society’s responsibility to know it, to count them, and to act. A government that declines to count and report large-scale suffering is shirking its duty.

Congress should press USDA to reverse this decision immediately. Hunger should be fought, not hidden. We can, and should demand better!

For now, there is a way for you to make a difference, be part of the fight to end hunger and food insecurity in America. Join Feeding America’s The Campaign to End Hunger by signing the pledge. Elected officials will listen to combined forces that care about ending hunger!