In September 2025, the USDA quietly terminated the 『Household Food Security Survey』 with no public announcement and no replacement plan [FRAC]. The timing couldn’t be more charged: the most recent data showed food insecurity climbing to 13.5 percent of U.S. households in 2023, up from 12.8 percent the year before [USDA ERS]. That’s 18 million households struggling to keep their kitchens stocked with even the basics: rice, beans, cooking oil, the staples that form the backbone of affordable meals. Now, as 2026 policy debates intensify around SNAP funding and school meal programs, the data that informed those conversations no longer exists. The question isn’t whether hunger persists. It’s whether anyone in Washington will still bother to measure it.
What Vanished With the Report
The USDA’s Economic Research Service had published its 『Household Food Security in the U.S.』 report every year since 1995.
Photo by The final edition, covering 2024 data, was released on December 30, 2025 [USDA ERS]. Then nothing.
This wasn’t a minor bureaucratic adjustment. The report surveyed tens of thousands of households and measured food insecurity on a layered spectrum, distinguishing between families who occasionally worried about groceries and those experiencing very low food security: meals were skipped, portions were cut, and pantries went bare. That nuance matters. A family rationing tortillas and canned vegetables faces a different crisis than one missing meals entirely, and the report captured both.
What made it irreplaceable:
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30 years of consistent, comparable data across all 50 states
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A standardized definition of food insecurity used by researchers worldwide
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State and demographic breakdowns that no other federal survey replicated
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A baseline that nonprofits and food banks used to calibrate their own models
Without it, the federal government has no recurring, standardized way to answer a basic question: how many Americans are going hungry?
Who Depended on This Data
The report’s influence stretched far beyond academic journals.
Photo by Federal and state legislators cited its numbers to justify funding for SNAP, WIC, and school breakfast programs. Food banks used it to decide where to send trucks loaded with canned goods, fresh produce, and shelf-stable proteins. Public health researchers traced connections between food insecurity and chronic conditions, the kind of long-term analysis that requires decades of consistent measurement.
The American Statistical Association put it bluntly:
“Failing to both collect and publish the results of the gold standard FSS eliminates a critical, irreplaceable set of indicators that measure the health of our economy.” [ASA]
The National Women’s Law Center echoed that alarm, warning that eliminating the survey would mean “eliminating the federal government’s ability to monitor food insecurity nationwide” [NWLC]. For community organizations running food pantries, the ones who know exactly how many neighbors line up each Saturday morning for bags of rice, canned tomatoes, and day-old bread donated by local bakeries, the USDA report was the shared language connecting local need to national resources.
One in seven households, 47.4 million people including 13.8 million children, were food insecure according to the most recent ERS data [FRAC]. That number now has no scheduled successor.The Broader Shift Behind the Cut
The termination didn’t happen in isolation.
Photo by It arrived alongside a wave of federal data rollbacks affecting reports on poverty, climate, and inequality. The pattern suggests a deliberate recalibration of what the government chooses to see and what it chooses to ignore.
Critics argue that data elimination often precedes policy elimination. If hunger isn’t measured at the federal level, it becomes easier to frame it as a local problem requiring local solutions, shifting accountability from Congress to already-strained community food banks and charitable kitchens. The quiet nature of the announcement reinforced that concern. No press conference. No transition plan. No alternative agency tasked with picking up the work.
For anyone who has volunteered at a community kitchen, stirring enormous pots of bean soup or stacking boxes of cereal for families who arrive before dawn, the abstraction of “data policy” feels distant. But the funding that keeps those kitchens open often traces directly back to the numbers this report provided.
What Alternative Sources Remain
A handful of partial substitutes exist, though none match the scope of what was lost:
Photo by - Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey includes some food security questions but with less frequency and granularity
- CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System touches on food access but uses different definitions
- Census Household Pulse Survey tracks food insufficiency weekly and launched during COVID-19, but uses a narrower framework than the USDA’s multi-tiered approach
- Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap estimates county-level food insecurity, but its accuracy depends on federal survey data as a calibration baseline
These tools were designed to complement the USDA report, not replace it. They’re fragments of a mosaic that no longer has a center. Researchers who built careers on longitudinal food security analysis now face a gap in their primary dataset, like a chef losing the one ingredient that tied an entire recipe together.
What Communities Can Do Right Now
The federal data pipeline may be broken, but local measurement tools still exist.
Photo by The USDA’s 6-question and 2-question food security screeners remain publicly available: free, validated instruments that any health department, school district, or nonprofit can deploy independently.
Steps worth considering:
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Run local food security surveys using USDA screening tools at food pantries, clinics, and schools
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Support food banks as data collectors: many already track client demand trends in real time, and that information becomes more valuable when federal data disappears
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Contact elected representatives to advocate for restoring food security measurement, whether through the USDA or an alternative agency like the CDC or Census Bureau
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Amplify coalition efforts: over 50 anti-hunger organizations have already submitted formal requests to restore federal food security reporting
None of this replaces what was lost. But communities that document their own hunger data create accountability that doesn’t depend on Washington’s willingness to look.
The USDA’s decision doesn’t make hunger disappear. It makes hunger harder to prove. For three decades, this annual survey gave policymakers, food banks, and researchers a shared, evidence-based picture of who was going without meals and where. That common ground is now gone. The alternatives are fragmented, political will to restore federal measurement remains uncertain, and food insecurity continues to climb. Communities that take up local surveying, support their food banks, and push for legislative restoration aren’t just filling a gap. They’re insisting that a nation’s willingness to feed its people starts with the willingness to count them.
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- FRAC: USDA terminated future ERS Household Food Security reports, September 2025
- USDA ERS: Key Statistics and Graphics on Food Security in the U.S
- American Statistical Association response to USDA data RFI
- National Women’s Law Center comment on USDA ERS RFI
- USDA ERS: Food Security in the U.S. overview page
