The Trump administration is canceling the federal government’s annual report on hunger, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Why? The administration says the data gets “politicized.” I think that means that lobbyists for the poor use the data to seek more funding for programs to feed people who are hungry.

The data, which is collected each December and analyzed by the U.S. Agriculture Department, measures food insecurity across states and demographic groups. 

The data has been collected every year since the mid-1990s, and is widely used by federal, state and local policymakers to make funding decisions for food-assistance programs, and to evaluate how well those programs work.  

The decision to discontinue the survey for 2025 was announced in meetings with USDA employees this past week by an administrator for the Economic Research Service, an arm of the Agriculture Department, according to people present at the meetings….

“This nonstatutory report became overly politicized and upon subsequent review, was unnecessary to carry out the work of the Department,” USDA spokesman Alec Varsamis said. 

He added that the 2024 report will be released on Oct. 22, but the 2025 report has been discontinued…

Employees inside the USDA as well as economists outside the agency who work closely with the data reacted with shock and anger as word spread about the cancellation. 

“For the past 30 years, the USDA food insecurity measure has provided insight into the extent that American families have been able to cover their food needs,” said Colleen Heflin, a professor at Syracuse University, who has been studying the data since its inception, and learned of the study’s cancellation from contacts inside USDA. “Not having this measure for 2025 is particularly troubling given the current rise in inflation and deterioration of labor market conditions, two conditions known to increase food insecurity.”

The administration has criticized government data related to the job market, saying it had been used as a political weapon. President Trump recently fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a particularly poor jobs report. He accused her of manipulating the numbers to make him look bad, which economists have refuted…

The decision to end the USDA data collection comes at a time when more Americans are struggling to get enough to eat. Food banks have seen requests for assistance from households rise over the past few years, driven by the end of pandemic aid programs and the impact of inflation on grocery prices. 

In 2023, the USDA reported that an estimated 13.8 million children lived in households that struggled to get enough food at times, the highest number in nearly a decade, according to the most recent USDA survey. Data from 2024 is set to be released next month. 

Ignorance is bliss.