The Trump White House will order an end to federal measurement of food insecurity. That’s a situation where Americans either fail to have the resources to eat regularly, or live in so called “food deserts,” where access to groceries including fresh fruit and vegetables is limited.This is an on-going problem in Alabama.
Published reports say the action by the Trump administration would order the U.S. Department of Agriculture to stop measuring food insecurity in the United States. The latest USDA report, from 2023, included forty seven million Americans without enough to eat. That’s roughly fourteen percent of the U.S. population. The non-profit group Feeding America says about eight hundred thousand Alabamians face food insecurity, or about one in every seven residents in the State. That includes a quarter of a million children. That’s the same number who received help from a Federal program known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP.
Recent federal budget cuts to SNAP, would shift the responsibility to the States. Nicole Williams, CEO of the Community Food Bank of Central Alabama, talked to APR news about the implications of those cuts.
“Unfortunately, in Alabama, we rank in the top ten for food insecurity amongst seniors, and so the eligibility for a senior that age got raised. So we're definitely going to be seeing additional people in the line for food here in Alabama,” she said.
APR Gulf coast correspondent Cori Yonge reported on the implication of SNAP cuts in Alabama. She also visited a local dollar food store with a chef from Gulf Coast Community College to tips on how cook healthy on a budget in Alabama’s so called “food deserts.”
The Trump administration is ending the federal government's annual report on hunger in America, stating that it had become “overly politicized” and “rife with inaccuracies.”
The decision comes two and a half months after President Donald Trump signed legislation sharply reducing food aid to the poor. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the tax and spending cuts bill Republicans muscled through Congress in July means 3 million people would not qualify for food stamps, also known as SNAP benefits.
The decision to scrap the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Household Food Security Report was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. In a press release Saturday, the USDA said the 2024 report, to be released October, 22nd would be the last.
“The questions used to collect the data are entirely subjective and do not present an accurate picture of actual food security,'' the USDA said. ”The data is rife with inaccuracies slanted to create a narrative that is not representative of what is actually happening in the countryside as we are currently experiencing lower poverty rates, increasing wages, and job growth under the Trump Administration.''
The Census Bureau reported earlier this month that the U.S. poverty rate dipped from 11% in 2023 to 10.6% last year, before Trump took office. Critics were quick to accuse the administration of deliberately making it harder to measure hunger and assess the impact of its cuts to food stamps.
“Trump is cancelling an annual government survey that measures hunger in America, rather than allow it to show hunger increasing under his tenure,” Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said on social media. “This follows the playbook of many non-democracies that cancel or manipulate reports that would otherwise show less-than-perfect news.”
