OK, here’s the final installment in the series of updates on 5 things the Trump administration has been doing to attack our health and wellness. If you didn’t already, please leave a comment letting me know whether you’ve preferred having more frequent, shorter updates over the last week, instead of the less frequent longer update!
5. Attacking our access to food
There’s one effort to prevent us from having the data we need to keep people healthy that deserves a focus all of its own: On September 20, reporters at the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is ending its annual report on household food security. This annual report started back in the 1990s, and it was designed to help state and local health officials distribute food assistance to the people who needed it most. Last year’s report showed that in 2023, 18 million households in the United States experienced food insecurity, so this is a big issue. Food policy expert Colleen Hefflin is quoted in the WSJ article saying, “Not having this measure for 2025 is particularly troubling given the current rise in inflation and deterioration of labor market conditions, two conditions known to increase food insecurity.” Nutrition expert Lindsey Smith Taillie is quoted as saying, “I think the only reason why you wouldn’t measure it is if you were planning to cut food assistance, because it basically allows you to pretend like we don’t have this food insecurity problem.” And of course, this administration IS planning on cutting food assistance: the budget reconciliation law that Republicans passed in July cuts the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, colloquially known as “food stamps”) by $186 billion—the largest cut in history (about 20% of total funds). When the USDA announced they were ending the report, they claimed it was because “These redundant, costly, politicized and extraneous studies do nothing more than fearmonger.”
Your Local Epidemiologist did a great take-down of this statement, pulling apart each piece of the claim with a point-by-point response:
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Claim: The survey is politicized. Response: The survey has been consistently utilized by the USDA under multiple administrations, including both Republican and Democratic administrations.
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Claim: The survey is expensive. Response: The food insecurity questions aren’t a stand-alone survey; they consist of 10-18 questions that are embedded once a year in a larger one (Current Population Survey). Removing them doesn’t save money.
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Claim: Trends in the prevalence of food insecurity have remained virtually unchanged. Response: This is false.
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Claim: The survey is redundant. Response: This is the go-to source for data. It provides consistent, comparable, and nationally representative measures of food security over time, which is crucial for identifying reliable trends. Other surveys do collect information on food security; however, they are less targeted, less consistent, and often drawn from different populations.
Why does this matter so much? Nearly 20% of children in the United States are food insecure—this means they do not have access to the food they need to be healthy and avoid going to bed hungry. In the United States. In 2025. There is no excuse for 1 in 5 children to be experiencing this. Especially when our HHS secretary has identified poor diet as a factor that contributes to chronic diseases in children, which he purports to care about. But if he really cared about it, he wouldn’t have stood silent while Congress slashed SNAP more than has ever been done in its history. He wouldn’t be standing silent while the USDA stopped tracking and reporting the very data that would allow us to know how bad child hunger is getting in the US as a result of these actions. Don’t let yourself be fooled.