Analysis-Trump cut to food security survey could make measuring US hunger harder

WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump's cancellation last year of a government food security survey could make it difficult to assess whether his cuts to the food stamp program lead to a rise in U.S. hunger, especially among children.

Trump's tax and spending law signed last July shifted significant Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program spending to states and expanded work requirements, among other changes.

Since then, 4.7 million people -- about 11% of participants -- have lost SNAP benefits, or food stamps, with that figure expected to rise as states continue implementing the changes.

Trump, a Republican, last September canceled the U.S. Department of Agriculture's survey, which for 30 years served as a measure of a household's access to enough food for a healthy lifestyle.

At the time, the USDA called the survey, which officials used to inform policy and agency programs, "redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous," in a press release.

Yet that report was the "gold standard" for understanding food access, said Craig Gundersen, an economist at Baylor University.

Without that data, experts said, understanding whether hunger will rise as a result of Trump's changes to SNAP is much more difficult.

"It's definitely going to be a void in information on prevalence of food insecurity," said Michele Ver Ploeg, a senior fellow at the nonprofit National Center for Food and Agricultural Policy, who previously worked at USDA's Economic Research Service, including as chief of the agency's food assistance branch.

A USDA spokesperson said that the federal government, as well as some states, continue to collect hunger data through other surveys, and that the number of people receiving SNAP is not representative of food insecurity.

However, past USDA-backed studies have shown SNAP benefit increases reduced food insecurity among low-income households, while benefit decreases led to higher rates of food insecurity.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

'NOTHING COMPARABLE'

Between 1995 and 2025, the USDA funded the Census Bureau to administer an 18-question survey on food security as a supplement to its Current Population Survey.

The survey asked questions like whether anyone in a household had skipped meals in the prior year for lack of food and whether respondents could not afford to eat balanced meals.

Other surveys by the Urban Institute and the University of Southern California collect some data about household food security, but "the bottom line is there's nothing quite comparable" to the USDA survey, Ver Ploeg said.

Food banks or other nonprofits may release their own survey data, but it won't be as comprehensive or representative, said Parke Wilde, a food economist at Tufts University.

"It's not like nobody is going to be reporting relevant statistics; it's just that the statistics that they report won't be as good," Wilde said.

RISING HUNGER

The final USDA survey, released last December, showed that 13.7% of households were food insecure at some point during the year, the highest figure in a decade that capped several years of rising food insecurity.

The USDA reports did not provide reasons for the increase. Other research has pointed to the end of pandemic-era food aid and inflation as major drivers.

Matthew Rabbitt, a visiting scholar at Cornell University who worked on the survey at USDA and led its final three years of publication, said policymakers have lost a tool for responding to hunger, including the impact of Trump's SNAP cuts.

"If we don't have measures of food insecurity at this point, we can't make informed policy decisions," Rabbitt said.

Child food insecurity will be particularly hard to assess, he said, as other available surveys don't collect comparable information on children. "We're no longer monitoring child food insecurity in the U.S."

REVIVAL EFFORTS

Maine lawmakers in March passed a law to produce an annual survey of food insecurity in the state, the first of its kind in the country.

The state had previously relied on the USDA survey to benchmark its progress towards a goal of ending hunger by 2030, said Jackie Farwell, a spokesperson for Democratic Governor Janet Mills.

"The Trump Administration's cancellation of the report means states are no longer able to measure progress against the national average and fellow states," said Farwell by email.

Farwell said the governor's office is working with nonprofits and national experts to produce a report on statewide hunger by early 2027.

Democrats in the U.S. Congress have introduced bills that would reinstate the USDA survey.

Democratic Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester, who co-sponsored a Senate bill to revive the survey, said Trump's cuts to SNAP and the survey "have weakened federal efforts to address food insecurity and made it more difficult to understand where service gaps exist."

"Accurate data is critical to ensure we target resources where they're needed most," she said.

(Reporting by Leah Douglas in Washington; editing by Timothy Gardner and Aurora Ellis)

Copyright Reuters or USA Today Network via Reuters Connect.

This story was originally published July 9, 2026 at 4:19 AM.