A decision by President Donald Trump to eliminate a key government food security survey could leave the nation flying blind when it comes to measuring hunger — particularly as millions of Americans lose access to food stamp benefits.
Trump’s tax and spending legislation, signed into law last July, made sweeping changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as SNAP or food stamps. The law shifted a significant portion of SNAP costs to individual states and broadened work requirements for recipients, among other changes.
Since those changes took effect, approximately 4.7 million people — roughly 11% of all SNAP participants — have lost their benefits. That number is expected to climb as states continue rolling out the new rules.
Last September, Trump canceled a U.S. Department of Agriculture survey that had been tracking household food security for three decades. The survey measured whether families had reliable access to enough food to maintain a healthy lifestyle.
At the time of the cancellation, the USDA described the survey in a press release as “redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous.”
But Craig Gundersen, an economist at Baylor University, described that same survey as the “gold standard” for understanding food access in America.
Experts say that without the data the survey provided, determining whether Trump’s SNAP reductions are pushing more people into hunger will be extremely challenging.
“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 served at USDA’s Economic Research Service, including as head of its food assistance branch.
A USDA spokesperson responded that both the federal government and certain states continue gathering hunger-related data through other means, and argued that the number of SNAP recipients does not directly reflect food insecurity levels.
However, previous USDA-supported research found that increases in SNAP benefits reduced food insecurity among low-income households, while benefit cuts were linked to higher rates of food insecurity. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Nothing Quite Comparable
From 1995 through 2025, the USDA paid the Census Bureau to conduct an 18-question food security survey as part of its broader Current Population Survey. The questionnaire asked things like whether anyone in a household had skipped meals in the past year due to lack of food, or whether they couldn’t afford to eat balanced meals.
While organizations like the Urban Institute and the University of Southern California collect some food security data, Ver Ploeg said “the bottom line is there’s nothing quite comparable” to what the USDA survey provided.
Parke Wilde, a food economist at Tufts University, noted that food banks and nonprofits may release their own survey findings, but those won’t carry the same weight. “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.
Hunger Already on the Rise
The final edition of the USDA survey, published last December, found that 13.7% of U.S. households experienced food insecurity at some point during the year — the highest level in a decade, capping several years of worsening numbers. The report did not identify causes for the increase, though other research has pointed to the end of pandemic-era food assistance programs and rising inflation.
Matthew Rabbitt, a visiting scholar at Cornell University who worked on the survey at USDA and oversaw its final three years of publication, said policymakers have now lost a critical tool for responding to hunger.
“If we don’t have measures of food insecurity at this point, we can’t make informed policy decisions,” Rabbitt said.
He added that tracking child hunger will be especially difficult going forward, since other available surveys don’t capture comparable data on children. “We’re no longer monitoring child food insecurity in the U.S.,” he said.
States and Congress Push Back
Some states and lawmakers are working to fill the gap. In March, Maine became the first state in the country to pass a law requiring an annual statewide food insecurity survey.
Maine had previously relied on the USDA survey to measure its progress toward a goal of ending hunger by 2030. Jackie Farwell, a spokesperson for Democratic Governor Janet Mills, said the cancellation of the federal report means states can no longer compare their progress to national figures or other states.
“The Trump Administration’s cancellation of the report means states are no longer able to measure progress against the national average and fellow states,” Farwell said in an email.
Farwell said the governor’s office is collaborating with nonprofits and national experts to produce a statewide hunger report by early 2027.
At the federal level, Democrats in Congress have introduced legislation to bring the USDA survey back. Democratic Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester, a co-sponsor of a Senate bill to revive the survey, said Trump’s SNAP cuts combined with the survey’s elimination “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.
