The federal government shutdown is stretching into a second week with no end in sight. As Democrats and Republicans in Congress face a politically charged funding impasse, nutrition experts warn that women and children reliant on federal food assistance funding are particularly vulnerable to imminently losing their grocery benefits.
In the midst of it all, America’s ability to track the real-world impacts of the shutdown on hunger is disappearing. Shortly before the shutdown, the Department of Agriculture moved to scrap the Household Food Security Report, the nation’s primary tool for tracking food insecurity, and in doing so, stripped away the very infrastructure needed to remedy rising hunger in America.
“If you want a functioning country where people are food-secure, this is the survey that gives you an indication of how food-secure people are. And that data shows us that food insecurity has gone up,” says Zia Mehrabi, a data scientist researching climate change and food insecurity at the University of Colorado Boulder. “So, actually, as a country, the government response to that should be, ‘How do we fix that?’ rather than say, ‘Oh … let’s cut the whole survey altogether.’”
If the shutdown continues into next week, the lapse in government funding could directly affect the nearly 7 million American pregnant women, new mothers, infants, and young children that rely on WIC, or the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children. The National WIC Association has warned that the program is days away from running out of money. The USDA told state agencies last week that they will not receive their quarterly allocation of money for WIC because of the lapse in federal funding, CNN reported.
On Tuesday, the White House stated that it would use revenue from some of President Donald Trump’s tariffs to pay for the WIC budget shortfall. Just how much funding would be provided, and how that would work, however, went unspecified. “While Democrats continue to vote to prolong the government shutdown, blocking funding for mothers and babies who rely on Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), USDA will utilize tariff revenue to fund WIC for the foreseeable future,” a USDA spokesperson told Grist. The representative did not provide clarification on the impacts of the shutdown on nutrition funding, nor did they provide further details about Trump’s proposed tariff revenue strategy. The White House declined Grist’s request for comment.
According to Mitch Jones, managing director of policy and litigation at Food & Water Watch, the president’s tariff move is “likely impossible” without an act of Congress to appropriate the funds. The nonprofit mapped where the most young children at risk of losing benefits live, finding that the shutdown will affect the highest proportion of kids in Puerto Rico, California, and New York.
“It is poor women and children who will feel the impacts first and worst,” said Jones.
In the U.S., food insecurity is not a problem of production. (America grows and imports more than enough food to feed its population.) Food insecurity is an economic and social condition. When low-income households are forced to decide between rent, utilities, gas, or groceries, research shows that food is almost always one of the first costs that people cut.
The 2023 Household Food Security Report found that 13.5 percent of American households, or roughly 47.4 million people, were struggling to afford enough food to meet basic nutritional needs. Nearly 14 million of them were children. The survey gathers data about economic status, food accessibility, and participation in federal and other food assistance from a nationally representative sample of roughly 30,000 U.S. households. That report, which contains the most recent data available, also revealed that not only had food insecurity overall risen from the year before, but that the number of food-insecure children had leapt by 3.2 percent in that same time period.
The idea for the survey came to a head during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when anti-hunger activists and policymakers ramped up discussions about tracking the economic levers that contribute to food insecurity on a large scale. It became evident that there was no relevant government data to enable their work, which sought to counter the Reagan administration’s move to shrink nutrition assistance funding based on a stagnating number of people using federal food benefits — a benchmark of national hunger. The government’s stance was in sharp contrast with soaring demand reported by food banks, and what activists and media coverage were capturing at the time.
In 1990, Congress passed legislation that mandated nutritional monitoring and research, which would serve as the formal basis for the creation of the annual food security survey carried out by the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, or ERS.
In the decades since, the data has been widely regarded as the federal government’s most accurate, reliable, and comprehensive way of measuring national food insecurity and Americans’ economic well-being. “I think that it is on the same level as the unemployment rate and the poverty rate. It’s one of those central measures,” said Colleen Heflin, a professor at Syracuse University who researches food insecurity, nutrition, and welfare policy.
When the USDA announced its termination of the survey on September 20, the agency called it “redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous,” and claimed that it does “nothing more than fear monger.” Shortly after, roughly a dozen ERS staffers were placed on administrative leave.
Other federal datasets do capture some of the indicators recorded by the food security survey. But those reports are scarce and limited in their scope, according to Heflin. The Household Trends and Outlook Pulse Survey is one example — collected every other month, it asks fewer and much less detailed questions about food insecurity. Heflin says it’s a poor substitute for the annual report. She also strongly objects to the USDA’s claim about the purpose of the survey. “Clearly the person that wrote that announcement has never read the food security report,” said Heflin. “It is a very, very dry and clearly written report that just describes the statistics. There’s nothing about fear-mongering. [That’s] so far from the truth.”
The USDA’s press release also noted that trends in the prevalence of food insecurity have remained “virtually unchanged” despite substantive increases in SNAP spending — and evidence of rising food insecurity captured by earlier surveys.
“For 30 years, this study — initially created by the Clinton administration as a means to support the increase of SNAP eligibility and benefit allotments — failed to present anything more than subjective, liberal fodder,” a USDA representative told Grist. When asked how USDA plans to track food insecurity in America moving forward, the spokesperson noted the agency “will continue to prioritize statutory requirements and where necessary, use the bevy of more timely and accurate data sets available to it.”
Heflin warns that the loss of the report will have wide-reaching consequences. “It really leaves a huge hole in our understanding of who is food insecure, where food insecurity is most prevalent, and how changing economic conditions and policy conditions are impacting the American population,” said Heflin.
“I think of it as driving without your speedometer,” she said. “We’re not going to have accurate information to guide our reactions, both from a federal policy level and community level … We really are driving blind.”
The timing could not be worse. Food prices are at the highest they’ve been in five years, up 29 percent since 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. America’s public safety net is shrinking, too: Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” cut an estimated $186 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and tightened work requirements that reduce eligibility of who can qualify for the benefits.
“People are struggling to put food on their tables, and farmers are losing support, and food banks are being pushed beyond capacity,” said Jenique Jones, the executive director of the nonprofit WhyHunger. “Removing this data specifically — it silences the reality of hunger in America.”
All the while, climate change is further inflating the cost of food. It’s another reality that University of Colorado Boulder’s Mehrabi sees worsening as Trump continues his misinformed climate denial campaign and regulatory rollbacks. The growing destabilization of food supply chains — wrought by the compounding impacts of extreme weather events, global warming, the spread of diseases and pests, and migration and conflict — makes climate change one of the biggest threats to global food security, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Rising carbon levels also diminish the nutritional values of the food we eat, making it even harder for people to get the base nutrition they need.
“There’s really clear evidence that things like zinc, vitamin A, iron, these really important micronutrients that we are really dependent on, are going to go down with climate change,” said Mehrabi. “Climate change is putting up the price, and pushing down the nutritional content. So what do you think that’s going to do to low-income households that are trying to feed kids that need their micronutrients?”
All the while, the government shutdown has left thousands of workers across the nation bereft of income, in danger of falling behind on bills and over the “hunger cliff.” And without the national hunger dataset, Mehrabi warns that our ability to track the longer-term effects of government policy on food insecurity — or of the shutdown’s possible lapse in food assistance benefits — will be very difficult to do. As will efforts to combat what’s driving more and more Americans to struggle to afford food.
“The government wants to reduce accountability. This is the big picture of what’s happening right now. You’d be blind to think this is just the USDA, just one thing. This is a whole systematic attack,” he said. “There’s a story being told that this is going to make America great again. Actually, this is going to make America worse.”
