Food insecurity among households with children slightly rose between 2023 and 2024, according to recently released data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The annual USDA report on household food security released in late December could likely be the last — unless Congress intervenes — as the federal agency announced in September that it will no longer produce future studies. In that announcement, the USDA said "these redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies do nothing more than fear monger.”
The USDA added that food insecurity trends “have remained virtually unchanged” despite an over 87% increase in spending for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program between 2019 and 2023.
Food-insecure households are defined by the USDA as those that have experienced difficulty at some point during the year to provide “enough food for all their members because of a lack of resources.”
Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research & Action Center, said in a Dec. 31 statement that these annual USDA reports over the last three decades have been “the gold standard for understanding the struggle that millions of families face to put food on the table.” Without the studies gauging household food insecurity, she said, it will be difficult to track how cuts to SNAP under Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” budget law will impact families.
The USDA report also helps inform policy decisions for children who are fed through the School Breakfast Program and National School Lunch Program as well as afterschool, child care and summer meals, FitzSimons said.
Free school meals have become increasingly available to students through expanded participation in the federal Community Eligibility Provision among high-poverty schools and districts. But it’s likely that fewer schools will be eligible for that universal meal program as fewer students will be directly certified through SNAP once cuts from the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” go into effect.
As the state of policies to gauge and address student hunger remains in flux, here are some key USDA figures on children’s food insecurity.
