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During the first term of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the Reagan administration denied that hunger and malnutrition were significant issues in the U.S. In response, the Food Research & Action Center and other anti-hunger advocacy groups began developing large-scale hunger surveys to chart the problem.
The advocacy groups started collecting large-scale hunger data first in Connecticut and Washington during the middle years of the Reagan presidency, added seven more states at decade’s end, and in the early 1990s began surveying several more. In 1995, they convinced the Census Bureau to add food insecurity questions into the population survey, and in 1997, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Census Bureau began conducting national surveys aimed at understanding food insecurity in the United States.
Those massive surveys, carried out by the USDA’s Economic Research Service, have been the gold bar for understanding hunger in the country for nearly 30 years. The most recent survey revealed that one in seven Americans, or more than 47 million people, were food insecure, meaning they were reliant on federal assistance, were using food banks and pantries, were skipping meals, or were worried about where they would find the money to put food on the table.
The surveys help researchers understand amongst which groups and geographic locations hunger is clustered, what hunger’s relationship is to broader economic and social trends, and what strategies are effective in mitigating hunger.
However, in late September the Trump administration abruptly announced that it was ending the survey.
The announcement followed the administration strong-arming Congress into passing a budget that eviscerates spending on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by more than $180 billion over the next nine years — a cut of 20 percent, which would put the food benefits of roughly 5 million people at risk. The budget also slashes funding for other vital nutritional programs, places limits on who can qualify for SNAP, and shifts the cost burden of paying for nutritional assistance onto the states. Moreover, the budget removes affordable health care from millions of Americans (thus furthering their general poverty) and redistributes the tax burden away from the wealthy and onto the backs of the poor.
“We’re losing our understanding of the number of families across the country struggling to put food on the table — at a time when Congress voted to cut SNAP by 20 percent and food prices are rising.”
As a result, experts worry that the U.S. will soon be stymied when it comes to trying to craft effective anti-hunger strategies. “It means we’re losing our understanding of the number of families across the country struggling to put food on the table — at a time when Congress voted to cut SNAP by 20 percent and food prices are rising,” Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research & Action Center, told Truthout. “We’re very concerned about what is going to happen to food insecurity over the next year. I don’t think there is a legitimate reason for the federal government to stop putting out data on food insecurity.”
For Nicole Woo, an economist who has worked at many of the top anti-hunger agencies around the country over the last several decades, and who is currently the director of research and economic policy at the Hawaii Children’s Action Network, the decision to cancel the survey means hard data will be replaced with anecdotal information.
Amid recent cuts to SNAP and moves that make it harder for families to get certified for WIC (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children) and for free and reduced-price school meals, “we need to know how this is going to affect people on the ground,” she told Truthout.
“Without that data we only have anecdotes,” Woo said. “The loss of the data is really worrying. It seems almost like they want to hide what the effects of that bill are going to be. It’s going to cause a real loss of knowledge and understanding of what is happening around the country. It’s going to be a huge loss for those of us at the local level.”
Feeding America put out a statement saying that the survey’s findings helped anti-hunger networks and policy makers craft targeted investments that “helped reduce rates of food insecurity, supported improved health and significantly reduced financial burdens in communities across the nation.” The loss of the survey, Feeding America noted, could result in “losing consistent national benchmarks that have helped guide solutions.”
A couple days after the Wall Street Journal broke the story about this decision, a dozen Economic Research Service staffers were summarily placed on indefinite administrative leave, which their union believes is retribution for the release of information about the survey’s shuttering. “We don’t know who made the decision” to place them on leave, said Laura Dodson, vice president of AFGE local 3043, the union that represents USDA workers, in an interview with Truthout. “They were looking for someone to blame, and just happened on these 12.” The researchers were summarily locked out of their government email accounts, refused access to the building in which they work, and made to turn in their computers.
This punitive measure was entirely in keeping with the Trump administration’s actions across a range of agencies in recent months. When FEMA employees sounded the alarm about cuts to the agency by publishing a letter warning of the risk of a Hurricane Katrina-scale disaster, those who put their names to the letter were suspended from their jobs. EPA employees who wrote about the collapse of integrity at the agency were likewise removed from their work. Justice Department staffers who have criticized recent DOJ decisions have been fired. HUD employees who blew the whistle on the administration no longer enforcing anti-discrimination laws in housing were also fired. USAID employees who went public with their criticisms of the destruction of their agency have been subject to investigations. And, with the federal government now shut down, the Trump administration has made it clear it will use the shutdown as an excuse to fire tranches of additional federal employees.
As of now, the union representing the suspended Economic Research Service employees is seeking redress for the suspensions. But, even if the researchers are ultimately put back on the job, the damage is done. One of the most valuable data-collection programs run by the U.S. government has been scrapped, and with it has gone the ability to meaningfully shape a federal anti-hunger strategy to better the lives of the tens of millions of Americans who on a daily basis struggle to feed themselves and their families. Unless public opinion can be marshaled in outrage against this, the lives of the country’s hungry millions will get ever harsher over the coming years.
“We are calling on our policy makers in Congress to really weigh in with the USDA to reverse this decision,” said the Food Research & Action Center’s FitzSimons. If they don’t, she concludes, groups such as hers won’t be able to fully understand the extent of the hunger crisis — and that, she says “makes it very difficult to develop solutions.”
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