An old business adage suggests that “what gets measured gets managed.” By that logic, we will no longer “manage” food insecurity in the United States after the Trump administration announced on September 20 plans to cancel the Household Food Security in the United States report, a long-running annual report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The term “food insecurity” captures not just whether households have enough food to eat, but also their ability to eat balanced meals and how often they use common coping strategies when budgets are strained, like buying cheaper, lower-quality food, cutting the size of meals, or skipping meals altogether. Food insecurity was widespread during the COVID-19 pandemic: Millions more families in the U.S. struggled to keep food on the table, and levels have yet to come back down to where they were pre-pandemic. In 2023, nearly 1 in 7 U.S. households were affected by food insecurity. Among children, the picture looks even worse, with rates of food insecurity impacting nearly 1 in 5 kids — a rate nearly one-third higher in 2023 than before the pandemic.
In Massachusetts, where we live and work, the Greater Boston Food Bank estimates that more than 1 in 3 households in the state was food insecure at some point during 2024. If the federal government stops publishing the USDA report, (which has been published during both Republican and Democratic administrations for three decades) and ends the underlying data collection, state and federal policymakers, state agencies, community-based organizations and advocates, and policy researchers may become increasingly reliant on less robust state and local data. Because while state and local data are also important, they may be incomplete and limited in the populations they represent (for example, working adults, or families with school-age children). With these data, we may still be able to see some trees, but not the whole forest, losing sight of national trends and how states and certain groups — rural communities, seniors, Black or Latino families — compare on an apples-to-apples basis.