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In a data dump on nearly New Year’s Eve, the Trump administration’s Department of Agriculture yesterday released its most recent report on domestic food insecurity. This report found that in 2024, 47.9 million Americans—half a million more than in 2023—lived in homes that could not afford enough food.
The same report found that one in five U.S. children lived in food insecure homes in 2024, a two percent increase over 2023.
This report on the 2024 statistics, the last data collected before the Trump administration cancelled its annual food security data collection and reporting, was supposed to be released on October 12, 2025. But the Trump administration used the government shutdown as a pretext to indefinitely delay its release, which only occurred after Hunger Free America, a national nonprofit organization, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the report.
In response to the findings in this last USDA food insecurity report, Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America, said:
“The 48 million Americans who struggled against hunger in 2024 equaled more than the combined total populations of Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, and Virginia. This soaring food hardship was caused by previous rounds of cutbacks in the federal safety net, combined with skyrocketing cost of living. It’s vital to note, though, that this 2024 data was collected long before the negative impacts of Trump and the G.O.P. implementing the latest round of food aid cuts, the deepest in U.S. history, before the government shutdown, and before the recent spikes in the cost of living and unemployment caused by Trump’s failing economic policies. We can only imagine how bad the hunger numbers are now. This is obviously why the Trump administration unilaterally decided to stop collecting and reporting new food insecurity data, and why they tried to bury these 2024 findings by releasing them when they thought no one would pay attention. But it’s clear that their ostrich approach—a North Korean-style cover-up of basic facts about America’s hunger crisis—is doomed to fail.”
This new USDA data was released a few weeks after Hunger Free America released data from a national survey which found that more than half of Americans with an annual income below $100,000 said that the food they bought just didn’t last, and that they didn’t have money to get more. In the same survey, 53% said they couldn’t always afford balanced meals. A separate Hunger Free America survey of food charities in all 50 states found that 90% of these programs reported feeding an increased number of Americans in the last year, and 80% struggled to have enough food to meet the growing demand.
Continued Berg,
“These reports prove that sky-high living costs, combined with the overall decline of the middle class, caused a major hunger crisis even before the shutdown. These reports demonstrate that the nation’s affordability crisis—combined with deep cuts in the social safety net—are the top reasons that U.S. hunger is continuing to skyrocket, impacting even many upper-middle-class families. This new federal data should be a wake-up call for federal, state, and local officials to enact sweeping new policies to slash hunger, strengthen the middle class, and boost economic opportunity for all.”
