After nearly three decades of issuing annual reports on food security, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced last month (Sept. 20) it would discontinue the Household Food Security Report after releasing the 2024 edition on Oct. 22.
In the USDA’s announcement, the agency called the report, “redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous.” The agency added that for 30 years, the reports “failed to present anything more than subjective, liberal fodder.”
Losing this “gold standard” source of data on food security will make tracking hunger and food insecurity among adults and children much more challenging for journalists, policymakers and social-service advocates, especially since USDA and the Trump administration are already making deep cuts to federal food assistance. There will be more cuts late next year, or sooner in some states, when new Medicaid work requirements take effect.
Journalists will need other sources
For health and policy reporters, food insecurity is poised to dominate headlines in the coming months for two primary reasons:
1. Cuts to SNAP and WIC
The budget megabill that President Trump signed on July 4 calls for steep cuts in funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which serves nearly 42 million Americans, and the Special Supplemental Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), which serves about 6 million families, as we reported on Sept. 30. Americans who rely on SNAP and WIC will feel the loss of that funding starting in 2027 or earlier if states choose.
2. New Medicaid work requirements
Work requirements for adults ages 19 to 64 on Medicaid will take effect on Jan. 1, 2027, or earlier if states choose in the 41 states and the District of Columbia that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Two other states, Georgia and Wisconsin, which have implemented partial Medicaid expansions, also will be required to implement work requirements, according to the National Health Law Program.
Under the new requirements, Medicaid recipients must complete 80 hours of work or community service each month or meet exemption criteria such as engaging in any of what the law calls “qualifying activities” at least 80 hours per month, according to this KFF report.
Food banks already under strain
Even before these policy changes take full effect, food banks nationwide are struggling to meet a growing demand. Just three months after the budget bill was signed, Kyle Swenson and Liam Bowman reported for The Washington Post that 820,000 adults in the Washington, D.C., area had regularly skipped meals and had struggled to find food in the past year. Also, the number of residents facing the most severe form of hunger had risen for the third consecutive year, they wrote.
Their reporting was based on a 74-page report the Capital Area Food Bank published in June, showing that hunger is significant and deepening in the region. Based in the nation’s capital, the food bank supplies emergency food and meals to more than 400 food pantries, distribution sites and shelters. A food bank is a nonprofit that stores food for delivery to local food programs, such as food pantries, according to Feeding America, a nationwide network of food banks, food pantries and local meal programs and provides links to local food banks nationwide.
Across the country, food banks have been sounding alarms for months. In March, food banks were already straining to meet a rising demand and had less food to distribute because the USDA had cut $1 billion in funds for food banks and other nonprofits, according to reporting from Leah Douglas, P.J. Huffstutter and Renee Hickman for Reuters.
The Reuters team interviewed staff at food banks in seven states: California, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Food banks and pantries in those states have lost millions of federal dollars and funding for food deliveries, they added.
The cuts reduced spending in two major USDA programs:
- The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), which buys food from U.S. farms for distribution through food pantries.
- A school food assistance program that helps provide meals to children.
Many food banks now expect to offer fewer staples — such as produce and meat — to families seeking help.
An alarming lack of food security data
The household food security reports originated with an initiative started during the Reagan administration, Joseph Llobrera, Ph.D., senior director of food assistance at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), told AHCJ. During the Clinton administration, the USDA published the first household food report in 1995 and published those reports annually during Republican and Democratic administrations, he said.
No other sources offer such robust data on food insecurity as the Household Food Security Report, Llobrera said. “It is alarming that USDA is ending this trusted report that many refer to as the gold-standard data just as huge cuts are coming to the biggest nutrition assistance program in the country,” he added. “We’re talking on the order of a 20% cut to the program over the next decade or so.”
“We won’t be able to tell that definitively because we won’t have this data in place to allow us to see what happens when big policies take effect,” Llobrera commented.
When breaking the story about the Household food security data for The Wall Street Journal, Dan Frosch, Patrick Thomas and Andrea Petersen quoted Alec Varsamis, USDA’s acting director of communications. Without the annual food security report, Varsamis said the agency will use “more timely and accurate data sets,” without naming any sources of such data.
Llobrera also addressed another misstatement in the USDA’s announcement. In its press release, the USDA said the prevalence of food insecurity has been “virtually unchanged,” while spending for SNAP has risen over 87% from 2019 through 2023.
“If USDA had looked at their own data over time, they would know that it’s absolutely not true that the prevalence of food insecurity was ‘virtually unchanged’ from 2019 to 2023,” Llobrera wrote in an email.
Also, he added, during the Great Recession from December 2007 to June 2009, the household food security reports showed that hardship spiked in those months. “It’s also possible to see that food hardship didn’t rise in 2020 and 2021 during the pandemic in part because of stimulus payments from the government and increases in the tax credits for families with children,” he added.
“Those initiatives helped to ensure that food insecurity didn’t spike in those years,” Llobrera noted. But when those programs ended after the pandemic, food insecurity rose again in 2022 and 2023, he added. “In other words, the data in the food security reports help to tell that story,” he said.
Resources
- Hunger in America, Feeding America.
- Now is not the time to stop measuring food insecurity, The Hill, Oct. 10, 2025.
- An American Hunger Crisis Is Coming, Anne Kim, Washington Monthly, Oct. 8, 2025.
- “How States Are Reckoning with Republican Health Reforms,” Tradeoffs, Oct. 2, 2025.
- ‘You open the fridge – nothing’: renewed threat of US hunger as Trump seeks to cut food aid, Ed Pilkington, The Guardian, June 28, 2025.
- Why Many Struggle To Access Charitable Food While Demand Remains High, Urban Institute, June 2025.
- Food Security in the U.S. – Key Statistics & Graphics, USDA, updated, Jan. 8, 2025.
- Hunger & Poverty in America, Food Research & Action Center.
- Five Facts About Hunger in America, Feed the Children.
