The USDA Cancels Annual Hunger Study While Trump Policies Drive Up Food Prices

A chilling series of events played out over the past week, ringing alarm bells about the future of hunger in this country. First, new consumer price statistics showed that the cost of food continues to tick upward, promising to blow up grocery budgets for millions of people and drive more low-income households into what hunger experts call "food insecurity." And second, the Trump administration canceled its annual reporting of-wait for it-food insecurity.

The report cancellation was announced in a brief press release from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) on Saturday (apparently in response to an internal leak of the cancellation decision) that spouted nonsense about its Household Food Security Reports. Conveniently for the current occupant of the White House and his enablers, the USDA will only release food insecurity survey data for 2024, the last full year of the Biden administration, and nothing beyond that.

It's the latest sign that the president and his allies are hell-bent on eliminating science and data that don't support their political agenda.

What is food insecurity?

To understand the significance of this development, you need to know that food insecurity is not the same as hunger, but it's related. The experts at Feeding America define it in simple terms: "It's when people don't have enough to eat and don't know where their next meal will come from."

The Economic Research Service (ERS), the USDA unit that issues the Household Food Security Reports, further defines two distinct levels of food insecurity.

• Low food security (old label = food insecurity without hunger): Reports of reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet. Little or no indication of reduced food intake.
• Very low food security (old label = food insecurity with hunger): Reports of multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake.

In 2023, 47.4 million people lived in food-insecure households. But rates of food insecurity are not intractable and unchanging. Instead, food insecurity goes up and down as economic conditions and food prices change, and in response to changes in food assistance programs that help low-income households afford food. According to the USDA's most recent Household Food Security Report, the share of US households experiencing food insecurity increased from 12.8% in 2022 to 13.5% in 2023. It was the second annual increase in a row and a reversal of the previous trend-rates had hit a two-decade low in 2021 following congressional action to increase food assistance and other benefits for families with children during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a measure of individual or community well-being, food security/insecurity is limited. As a former colleague wrote back in 2023, "While current food insecurity rates may be shocking, they likely do not reflect the true scale of hunger and poor nutrition in this country. Our government only measures how much we eat, not whether what we eat is good for us, our communities, and our environment."

That said, it's the measure we have, and our national nutrition outlook won't be improved in any way by discontinuing it. Instead, eliminating future reporting of food insecurity in the United States will only hide the cascading impacts of many of the policies President Trump and his allies are pursuing right now.

Why are food prices going up?

That brings me to the reasons for recent rising food prices, which anyone who goes grocery shopping regularly is familiar with. New data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index show that food prices increased by 0.5% from July to August, the fastest monthly change in three years. And compared to August 2024, last month's overall grocery prices were up almost 3%. If this trend continues, it won't be long before many previously food-secure households will start to have trouble affording enough food.

And sadly, it may well continue. When you start looking at all the policies coming out of the current White House, it's not hard to see why.

A food industry analyst interviewed by CBS News named three drivers of high food prices: tariffs on imported food items, climate change, and a shortage of agricultural and food workers. In each case, the policies pursued by the president and his allies in Congress are exacerbating these problems rather than solving them.

Take the president's ever-changing and steep tariffs, many of which kicked in recently. These are driving up the cost of common imported foods including bananas, coffee, and seafood, along with staples like oatmeal, rice, and sugar. As winter arrives in the Northern Hemisphere in just a few months, more of the fruits and vegetables we eat will be imported from countries like Mexico and Peru, and if Trump's tariff policies continue, they will be more expensive.

Food prices will also rise in response to extreme weather driven by climate change. A recent study examined 16 examples of extreme heat, drought, or heavy precipitation around the world between 2022 and 2024, to see how they affected food prices in the short term. In one example, after a summer of extreme western US drought in 2022, the price of vegetables in Arizona and California shot up 80% compared with the previous November. But the president and his cronies continue to deny the science and impact of climate change.

As for the shortage of food and farm workers, that is playing out the way many of us predicted, only worse. ICE raids on US farms and food processing facilities have arrested and scared off immigrant workers, leaving crops unharvested and straining capacity at meat and poultry plants.

And there's another action the Trump enablers in Congress have taken that will surely worsen food insecurity in the months and years ahead. The infamous One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed on partisan lines earlier this year, took an axe to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps). The nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which studies the SNAP program, estimates that "approximately 4 million people in a typical month will lose some or all of their SNAP food benefits once the changes are fully implemented."

If an administration and Congress were trying to make more people hungrier, they'd be hard-pressed to take a combination of actions that would do it more effectively than the Trump playbook.

Having more data is never a bad thing

The move by the USDA to cancel its food insecurity survey comes as efforts to suppress inconvenient science are intensifying across the federal government. At the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and other agencies, scientists, economists, and statisticians are being muzzled and their findings buried.

In the case of the food insecurity study, the Trump loyalists now running the USDA justified its cancellation by calling it "redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous." Let's take those one at a time.

How are the data redundant? The USDA survey serves as the official data source of national food insecurity statistics. There is no secondary or alternative report with that information. Without it, we simply won't know.

Costly? Compared to what? The entire budget for the ERS, which produces the food security reports along with many, many other studies, was $310.5 million in FY 2024. That's a mere 0.2% of the entire USDA budget, which itself is just 3% of all federal spending. It's a tiny price to pay for data and analyses that inform a broad swath of food, farm, and rural policies. What's really costly is food insecurity itself. Research from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimated that US food insecurity levels in 2016 led to approximately $52.9 billion in unnecessary spending on health care-about 4% of total annual health care expenditures.

Politicized? The ERS has produced these reports for three decades, under both Republican and Democratic administrations. In charging politicization, the Trump administration is yet again making an accusation that is actually a confession. Canceling studies that highlight problems you don't want to solve-and are actively making worse-is the epitome of politicization.

And extraneous? How? Understanding trends in the ability of people to afford enough food seems deeply relevant to a healthy, functioning society. It's relevant to the stated mission of the USDA itself: to "provide leadership on food, agriculture, natural resources, rural development, nutrition, and related issues based on public policy, the best available science, and effective management."

We the people deserve the truth

According to a new report from colleagues here at the Union of Concerned Scientists, the current Trump administration carried out a mind-boggling 479 attacks on science in just its first seven months. That's about as anti-science as you can get. And when it comes to burying inconvenient data, the intent is clear: If we don't measure or report [FILL IN THE BLANK], we can say it isn't happening.

To make matters worse in this case, new Wall Street Journal reporting suggests that USDA leadership is retaliating against ERS employees accused of alerting the media and the public to this study cancellation.

In its hastily issued statement last weekend, the USDA said its food insecurity reports "do nothing more than fearmonger." But the truth is that people in this country are already afraid for the future, and with good reason.

We don't need to have bad news withheld-we need to know exactly what problems our country is facing, and what our government is doing to solve them.