In 2023, 44 million Americans lived in food insecure households, meaning that they had difficulty providing enough nutritious food for all members of the household due to insufficient funds or other resources. We know this number because of the Food Security Supplement, whose data is then compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture into the annual Household Food Security Report. Originally mandated in 1990, the data collection began in 1995 and has since been the bipartisan gold standard for measuring hunger in the United States. It’s used by policy makers around the country to assess federal nutrition assistance programs, track how food insecurity responds to major events and target interventions towards vulnerable groups.
Under the Trump administration, the USDA cancelled the annual report in September, claiming it was “redundant, costly, politicized and extraneous,” used only to fear-monger and push “subjective, liberal fodder.” It also blamed the Clinton administration for the creation of the survey and stated that “trends in the prevalence of food insecurity have remained virtually unchanged, regardless of an over 87% increase in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program spending between 2019-2023.” Somehow, in just five sentences, the Trump administration was able to squeeze in several outright lies and misleading statements.
The Food Security Supplement, which was signed into law by former President George H.W. Bush, not former President Bill Clinton, is fairly cheap to produce and distribute — it’s simply an addition to the already-existing Current Population Survey, which is a monthly labor survey conducted by the Census Bureau. The virtually unchanged prevalence of food insecurity between 2019 and 2023 is also misleading: During Covid-19, when benefits expanded, food insecurity declined, serving as proof that SNAP benefits work, not that food insecurity trends shouldn’t be studied — or that SNAP should be cut at all. And there’s nothing redundant, politicized or subjective about the report, which doesn’t provide policy recommendations, but validated results from peer-reviewed and standardized data collection.
What President Donald Trump doesn’t seem to understand is that unlike him and the unqualified people he appointed to run the U.S. government, most scientists and researchers do not make up data to push an agenda; they use the scientific method to help contribute to the public good.
Ironically, this cancellation goes against a huge movement that Trump and his Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have run on: Make America Healthy Again. Food insecurity does not only cause hunger; it’s directly linked to cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, an increased risk of birth defects and several other chronic health issues that the Trump administration claims to want to reverse.
This is just one of several surveys the Trump administration and Republicans across the three branches have cancelled because its data doesn’t fit into the factually apathetic MAGA ideology. The House 2026 Appropriations Bill has completely eliminated every program related to gun violence — not just by cutting funding for gun violence prevention research such as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Firearm Injury and Death Prevention research, but by wiping out the National Violent Death Reporting System, which is the backbone data system that helps states track shootings and suicides. The Environmental Protection Agency, run by Secretary Lee Zeldin, who had little-to-no knowledge on the field when appointed, has shut down programs which monitor environmental hazards, including lead poisoning and other exposures.
These cuts aren’t an accident either; they directly coincide with policies proven to cause the very issues that cancelled research and studies report. The Household Food Security Report’s elimination came with Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which cut $186 billion from SNAP programs meant to directly reduce food insecurity. On top of the cancellation of the National Violent Death Reporting System, mental health programs have been cut and common-sense gun control laws repealed. The EPA works tirelessly to erase their responsibility to monitor and avert environmental hazards at the same time as the Trump administration rolls back environmental regulations, including mercury and air toxicity standards, which control emissions of harmful air particles.
Trump, in a moment of desperation, has realized that he can’t prove his policies work through real, evidence-based data. He can trick his constituents by eliminating any programs which show otherwise. But just because you don’t measure it, doesn’t mean the problem goes away. Americans continue to go hungry, die from gun violence and suffer from environmental issues, regardless of whether our dysfunctional government records it or not.
WSN’s Opinion desk strives to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented in the Opinion desk are solely the views of the writer.
Contact Sam Kats at [email protected].