President Donald Trump’s decision last September to end a decades-long federal food security survey has left a gap in official monitoring just as major changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, begin to take effect. Experts and former agency staff say the cancellation will make it harder to determine whether cuts to food assistance translate into greater food insecurity in the United States, and particularly among children.
Legislation signed last July introduced sweeping adjustments to SNAP, including shifting substantial program spending to state budgets and broadening work requirements. Since those changes were enacted, 4.7 million people - roughly 11% of participants - have lost SNAP benefits, and that number is expected to increase as states continue to implement the law.
In announcing the survey’s termination, the U.S. Department of Agriculture described the instrument as "redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous." The survey had been administered for three decades as a supplement to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. Between 1995 and 2025, USDA funded the Census Bureau to include an 18-question module that asked households whether they had skipped meals in the prior year because of lack of food and whether they were able to afford balanced meals.
Researchers and policy analysts who relied on that data called the survey the gold standard for measuring household food access. Craig Gundersen, an economist at Baylor University, described it in those terms, arguing the dataset provided an authoritative basis for tracking the prevalence of food insecurity over time.
Without that regularly collected national data, analysts say it will be more difficult to assess cause and effect between programmatic changes to SNAP and shifts in food insecurity. "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 worked at USDA’s Economic Research Service and led the agency’s food assistance branch.
A USDA spokesperson noted that other federal and state surveys continue to collect hunger-related information, and emphasized that the raw number of people receiving SNAP does not, by itself, equate to food insecurity. The agency also pointed to a body of past USDA-funded research linking SNAP benefit increases to reductions in food insecurity among low-income households, and associating benefit decreases with higher rates of food insecurity.
Still, analysts caution that the available alternatives do not replicate the scope and regularity of the USDA module. Other surveys conducted by organizations such as the Urban Institute and the University of Southern California capture some measures of household food security, but, according to Ver Ploeg, "the bottom line is there’s nothing quite comparable" to the discontinued federal instrument.
Parke Wilde, a food economist at Tufts University, said nonprofit groups and food banks may publish survey results of their own, but those data are unlikely to be as comprehensive or nationally representative. "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.
The final USDA report, released last December, indicated that 13.7% of households experienced food insecurity at some point during the year. That rate was the highest in a decade and capped several years of rising food insecurity, according to the survey’s findings. USDA releases did not attribute the increase to specific causes, but other research has identified the cessation of pandemic-era food aid and general inflationary pressure as significant contributors.
Matthew Rabbitt, a visiting scholar at Cornell University who led the USDA survey’s final three years of publication, warned that policymakers have lost an important tool for responding to hunger. "If we don’t have measures of food insecurity at this point, we can’t make informed policy decisions," he said. He added that tracking child food insecurity will be especially difficult because alternative surveys do not collect comparable child-specific data. "We’re no longer monitoring child food insecurity in the U.S.," Rabbitt said.
Some states and lawmakers are moving to fill the information gap. In March, Maine passed legislation to conduct an annual state-level survey of food insecurity, the first such requirement in the country. The state had previously used the USDA survey to gauge its trajectory toward a goal of ending hunger by 2030, according to Jackie Farwell, a spokesperson for Democratic Governor Janet Mills. Farwell said Maine officials are coordinating with nonprofits and national experts to produce a statewide hunger report by early 2027.
At the federal level, Democratic members of Congress have introduced bills aimed at reinstating the USDA survey. Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester, a co-sponsor of a Senate measure to restore the module, argued that the combination of SNAP policy changes and the survey’s cancellation "have weakened federal efforts to address food insecurity and made it more difficult to understand where service gaps exist." She added: "Accurate data is critical to ensure we target resources where they’re needed most." The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Summary
The discontinuation last September of the USDA-backed household food security survey removes a longstanding national benchmark just as major changes to SNAP are being implemented. Experts say no current data source matches the survey’s scale or child-specific measures, complicating efforts to determine if reductions in food stamp benefits have increased hunger levels.
Key points
- The SNAP changes enacted last July shifted funding responsibilities to states and expanded work requirements; 4.7 million people - about 11% of participants - have since lost benefits, with further losses expected as states implement the law.
- The USDA survey, administered as an 18-question supplement to the Current Population Survey between 1995 and 2025, has been characterized by researchers as the gold standard for measuring household food security.
- States and nonprofits may collect related data, and some federal and state surveys still include hunger measures, but analysts say none provide a fully comparable, nationally representative replacement, making child food insecurity particularly hard to monitor.
Risks and uncertainties
- Information gap risk: The loss of the USDA survey creates a void in national, consistent food insecurity metrics, which could hinder evidence-based policy responses; this affects federal and state budgets and social services planning.
- Program impact uncertainty: With fewer direct means to measure household food security, it will be harder to quantify how SNAP reductions change demand for food assistance providers and local food banks, affecting nonprofit and social service sectors.
- Child monitoring shortfall: The absence of comparable child-specific data increases uncertainty about trends in child food insecurity and could impede targeted interventions in education and public health sectors.
Tags
- SNAP
- food
- hunger
- USDA
- policy