Recently, the U.S. Department of Agriculture declared it would refrain from gathering data on food insecurity for 2025. This decision comes at an especially crucial moment.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as SNAP, is about to undergo significant changes as part of a comprehensive bill signed by President Trump last July. This new legislation will remove essential data resources that are vital for tracking and evaluating food security for the entire population.
Thanks to initiatives from USDA leaders over the past thirty years, we now have a clearer picture of the food insecurity landscape in America, along with an understanding of its causes, effects, and the effectiveness of various policy responses.
If the current administration doesn’t reverse this decision or if Congress doesn’t intervene to mandate data collection, our understanding of food insecurity in the nation may drastically diminish.
Since 1995, the USDA has been collecting annual information on households’ food security status as an addition to the month-to-month Current Population Survey, which is the basis for official unemployment figures.
Households are classified as either food secure or food insecure based on this ongoing research. Food insecurity indicates that, at some point in the past year, a household struggled to provide enough nutritious food to its members due to financial constraints. A more severe category, very low food security, denotes disrupted dietary patterns and reduced food intake.
This assessment aims not to measure actual hunger or voluntary dietary choices but to capture socioeconomic conditions that limit access to nutritious and safe food. The measures employed are rigorously tested and integrated into both federal and non-federal surveys.
In 2023, around 13.5 percent of U.S. households—approximately 47.4 million—experienced food insecurity. Of these, 5.1 percent fell into the very low food insecurity category. Notably, households with children are at a heightened risk, sitting at 17.9 percent.
Food insecurity is a challenge in both rural areas, clocking in at 15.4 percent, and urban regions, where it’s slightly higher at 15.9 percent. This issue varies across different regions, being reported at 14.7 percent in general and 13.4 percent in the Midwest. It’s noteworthy that food insecurity tends to decrease during better economic periods.
Monitoring national food security plays a crucial role, especially considering that food insecurity is tied to numerous adverse health outcomes. These effects include a heightened risk for birth defects, anemia, cognitive issues, and more severe problems like depression and cardiovascular health concerns among adults.
The financial toll of food insecurity can lead to significant healthcare costs, potentially amounting to tens of billions of dollars. Many healthcare facilities, including those under the Department of Veterans Affairs, actively monitor food insecurity during patient admissions.
Although poverty is a key factor contributing to food insecurity, it’s not the only one. Interestingly, fewer than half of people living in poverty report being food insecure, suggesting that many households above the poverty line can still face food-related challenges.
The increasing rate of food insecurity among children is intertwined with various factors, including parental mental health. Consequently, evaluating only poverty doesn’t provide a complete picture of food insecurity’s causes and effects.
USDA statistics on food security serve multiple purposes: they help evaluate programs like SNAP and inform major nonprofit organizations about service coverage across communities. For instance, Feeding America leverages these statistics for their annual report, which identifies areas with particularly high child food insecurity.
Without ongoing data collection, we’ll lack a systematic understanding of food insecurity’s extent and distribution in 2025, hampering efforts to meet this urgent need. Now is not the moment to step back from tracking this critical issue.
Colleen Heflin is a professor at Syracuse University specializing in public administration and international affairs. Hilary W. Hoynes serves as Chancellor’s Professor of Economics and Public Policy at UC Berkeley, while James P. Ziliak holds the Gatton Endowed Chair in Microeconomics and is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Poverty at the University of Kentucky.
