“This just seems to be in line with an administration that doesn’t allow data to show how their bad policies of cutting people off services, increasing tariffs, and making it more difficult to buy food will impact them,” Plata-Nino said.

While there are other federal reports that evaluate hunger, none have the same specificity and objectivity as the Household Food Security Report, Plata-Nino said. It asks more detailed questions that help analysts understand how other environmental factors, policy shifts, or major events at the time may have caused a person to experience food insecurity.

For example, the report allows analysts to see how the Great Recession led to spikes in food insecurity and how the influx of government assistance during the COVID-19 pandemic prevented these spikes.

“This data … is a one of a kind data source,” said Joseph Llobrera, director of food assistance at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

While the report began in 1995 under the Clinton administration, Llobrera noted it stemmed from a Reagan administration task force on food assistance, which found at the time no concrete way of measuring hunger.

The survey model has been incorporated into other federal surveys on hunger, like the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Both ask questions about food insecurity, but the NHANES data comes in a two-year cycle, and the sample is not large enough for demographic or state level analyses, Llobrera said.

The USDA report, however, provides information on an annual basis and uses a large enough sample size that analysts can better understand food insecurity at the national and state level, he continued. It also includes some demographic breakdowns to better understand what puts individuals more at risk of food insecurity.

“We need to measure what we care about, and if we care about people getting enough to eat … then there’s no other data collection mechanism and report that will help us gauge the best now and into the future,” Llobrera said. (Link to this post.)

This story has been updated to more accurately reflect the timing of NHIS and NHANES data reporting.