UConn's Rudd Center Criticizes USDA’s Elimination of Annual Household Food Security Report

Last fall, the United States Department of Agriculture announced the cancellation of the federal agency’s annual Household Food Security Report. This survey, according to the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health at the University of Connecticut, has been released since the mid-1990s, and it has been “instrumental in guiding policies and research related to food insecurity.”

One of our core mantras at the Rudd Center, officials point out, is: “What gets measured gets changed.”  In the organization’s latest newsletter, Caitlin Caspi, Director of Food Security Initiatives, indicates that “Not reporting on food insecurity doesn’t mean the problem will somehow magically disappear.”

“Last year,” she continues, “the prevalence of food insecurity in the U.S. reached 13.7%, which was the highest level reported in a decade. Obscuring the data will only make it harder to address the issue and support families in need. This is especially the case considering that food assistance programs that address food insecurity are simultaneously being scaled back.”

The Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health promotes solutions to food insecurity, poor diet quality, and weight bias through research and policy. It was founded in 2005 at Yale University, with a contribution from the Rudd Foundation. After 10 successful years the Center joined the University of Connecticut's Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy (InCHIP) in 2015.

The alignment between UConn and the Rudd Center, officials explain, provided a new platform for researchers to elevate their work to improve the food environment and public health. UConn’s commitment to multi-disciplinary scientific collaboration and research on health and wellness provided new and ideal opportunities for the Rudd Center to further its mission.

In eliminating the annual Household Food Security Report last September, the USDA said “These redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies do nothing more than fear monger,” adding that it “failed to present anything more than subjective, liberal fodder.”

A letter last September to the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture from more than two dozen members of Congress, including Connecticut’s Jahana Hayes, urged that the agency “continue issuing the Household Food Security Report,” pointing out that the annual reports “are the most important high-quality, consistent measure of national and state-level food insecurity we have in the U.S., giving us critical insight into how many Americans each year have to cut the size of meals or were hungry because they had too little money for food.”

“In the most recent report, ERS found that, in 2023, 47.4 million Americans lived in food-insecure households, including 13.8 million children; 12.2 million people lived in households with very low food security.”

In the February 2026 newsletter, Caspi goes on to note that “The good news is that many states (including Connecticut) are working on new strategies to monitor food insecurity. However, measuring food insecurity on a state-by-state basis cannot fill the gap left by the discontinuation of a national data source.”

“The USDA’s report was a consistent, year-over-year picture of the state of food insecurity in the U.S.,” she explained. “Now we are facing a reality where some states are not measuring food insecurity at all, states that are measuring it will use different methodologies, and everything could be upended again in the future.”

More information about the work of the Rudd Center is available at www.uconnruddcenter.org