By Hunger Free America
Photos: YouTube Screenshots
Just weeks after President Trump’s budget bill cut a record $286 billion from domestic food assistance for struggling Americans, the Trump Administration has unilaterally ended the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 27-year practice of collecting and publishing nationwide and state-by-state statistics on how many U.S. households suffer from food insecurity, meaning they can’t always afford sufficient food.
The department plans to issue one last such report this fall, containing data from 2024. This final report will indicate the state of U.S. hunger in that year under then-President Biden, but the USDA will not collect or release any subsequent data on food hardship in American households under President Trump.
This development occurred just weeks after President Trump fired Dr. Erika McEntarfer from her role as Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), just after the BLS report of a national jobs slowdown.
After TheWall Street Journal broke this story on Saturday, the USDA was forced to issue a press release providing the Administration’s reasons for ending the annual study. In response, Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America, a direct service and policy organization and one of the nation’s leading anti-hunger advocates, said:
“A North Korean-style attempted cover-up of reality won’t hide the reality of soaring hunger nationwide due to a number of problems that are entirely or partially the fault of President Trump: slashed food aid, job losses, and still-high inflation. The USDA press release claimed that the annual hunger report was ‘redundant’ and ‘extraneous,’ but contrary to those vague assertions, this USDA household food security data is currently the only remaining federal mechanism for measuring and reporting on hunger and food hardship.
The USDA press release also misleadingly claims that this annual USDA food insecurity study was ‘initially created by the Clinton administration,’ when, in fact, such research was originally authorized by an act passed by Congress in 1990, and signed into law by Republican President George H.W. Bush.
All of the Trump Administration’s false claims for why they want to end this research aside, it’s obvious that – as with the case of the firing of the BLS Commissioner – they simply don’t want to be confronted by any hard data that makes them look bad. Such attempts by governments to whitewash away hard facts are hallmarks of dictatorships, not democracies.”
Hunger Free America is a nonpartisan, national nonprofit organization working to end domestic hunger and ensure that all Americans have sufficient access to nutritious food.
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