By Leah Douglas
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s decision to end its annual food insecurity survey will make it harder to measure the impact of the Trump administration’s cuts to nutrition programs such as food stamps, anti-hunger advocates said on Monday.
The USDA on Saturday announced it was canceling the Household Food Security report because it was redundant, costly and politicized. It said it would instead use “the bevy of more timely and accurate data sets available.”
But the report, which gathers data through the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey and has been published since 1998, is the only data set with state as well as national statistics, and is crucial to assessing the efficacy of government programs, according to food security experts.
“To say it’s duplicative is a little misleading because this is the most comprehensive source we have,” said Megan Lott, deputy director for the Healthy Eating Research program at Duke University.
President Donald Trump’s tax cut and spending bill passed in July included significant cuts to the nation’s largest food aid program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, including expanded work requirements for recipients and state cost-sharing requirements that state governments will likely struggle to afford.
Without the hunger report, it will be more difficult to determine whether those cuts cause food insecurity rates to rise, said Eric Mitchell, president of the Alliance to End Hunger.
“There’s no way to determine what that impact will look like if the government isn’t tracking the data,” Mitchell said.
The lack of data will also make it harder to ensure the efficacy of existing federal programs, including the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, said Georgia Machell, president and CEO of the National WIC Association.
The USDA did not respond to a request for comment.
About 13.5 percent of U.S. households were food-insecure during some point in 2023, according to the most recent USDA report.
Hunger has risen in the U.S. since 2021, driven by rising food costs and the end of temporary programs that expanded food aid during the COVID-19 pandemic. Food banks have struggled to keep up with demand.
(Reporting by Leah Douglas in Washington; Editing by Edmund Klamann)
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