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The department’s report has been published every year for 3 decades, & grew in part out of battles in the 1980s over President Ronald Reagan’s statements disputing that the #US had a #hunger problem.
The most recent report found that in 2023, 13.5% of households, w/ 47M people, were #FoodInsecure, meaning that during some portion of the year, not every member of household had access to enough #food for a healthy lifestyle.
#law #Trump #SocialCleansing #EconomicDiscrimination #plutocracy #USpol
The #Agriculture Department said in a statement that the report had become “overly politicized, & upon subsequent review, is unnecessary to carry out the work of the department.”🤯
The department will issue a final report next month covering 2024, based on a survey from last year, but will cease fielding future surveys, according to the statement.
#PublicHealth #hunger #FoodInsecurity #law #Trump #SocialCleansing #HealthyIfYoureWealthy #Aporophobia #EconomicDiscrimination #plutocracy #USpol
In a sharp break with precedent, #Trump has aggressively contested sources of government #data that he thinks casts his policies in a negative light. Last month, after a weak #jobs report, he fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor #Statistics, claiming with no evidence that the data was “rigged.”
#PublicHealth #Health #hunger #FoodInsecurity #law #SocialCleansing #HealthyIfYoureWealthy #Aporophobia #EconomicDiscrimination #plutocracy #USpol
The #Agriculture Dept report, Household #FoodSecurity in the #UnitedStates, quantifies the share of households considered “#FoodInsecure” & “very low food secure,” a subset with a more severe designation of need that applied to 5.1% of households in 2023. It analyzes those categories by #state, #race & #ethnicity. Rates are much higher among #Black & #Latino households than among #white households.
#PublicHealth #Health #hunger #law #Trump #SocialCleansing #EconomicDiscrimination #plutocracy
The report also includes… #data on #children & the #elderly.
The #Agriculture Dept’s statement attacked the #FoodInsecurity report as “rife with inaccuracies, wrong metrics, zero accountability, & a massive drive for bigger & larger” government programs.
Elaine Waxman, an expert on methods of measuring food insecurity at the Urban Institute, a Washington research group, said in an interview that “none of that [statement] is accurate.”
She added: “It is highly respected. It has well-validated questions. In no way does that reflect the view of anybody who works with the #data. That is completely a pretext for eliminating data that can point out problems.”
The report was especially useful during the #coronavirus #pandemic, Waxman said, when it found that #FoodInsecurity stayed flat in 2020 despite a huge loss of jobs. Researchers credited the outpouring of government #aid….
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