advocacy, federal policy

Why the Household Food Security Report Matters: Understanding and Tracking Hunger in America

By Rachel Lord, Advocacy and Policy Director, AFPC

On September 20, 2025, the USDA announced that they would be terminating future Household Food Security Reports. What exactly is the Household Food Security Report, where did it come from, and why should we care about it?

The data behind the Household Food Security Report come from the Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement (CPS-FSS). The CPS-FSS is not just another federal survey. In fact, it is the foundation upon which nearly all other food security data collection in the country is built. It’s what allows researchers, policymakers, and advocates to compare data over time, across regions, and between populations with confidence that they’re speaking the same language.

Some History

The measurement of food security in the United States was motivated by the long-standing challenge of hunger, and the inability of existing data sources to measure it directly. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan established a Task Force on Food Assistance which found that there was a lack of data to estimate the extent of hunger and poverty in America.

The lack of consistent and reliable data on nutrition and poverty was further asserted under President H.W. Bush with the bipartisan passage of the National Nutrition Monitoring and Related Research Act of 1990. The Act directed the federal government to develop a plan to assess the nutritional status of Americans, which led to the Food Security Measurement Project at USDA in 1992. This collaboration between USDA, the U.S. Census Bureau, researchers, and others resulted in the creation of the baseline data collection tool we have used since it was established from these efforts in 1995 – the Current Population Survey (CPS). (Learn more in Food Insecurity and Hunger in the United States: An Assessment of the Measure, Chapter 2 History of the Development of Food Insecurity and Hunger Measures (2006) National Academies Press).

Under President George W. Bush, the USDA requested an external panel review of these developed measurement methods from 2003-2006. Convened by the Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) of the National Academies, the panel concluded with recommendations that USDA continue with the household survey, they affirmed the general methodology, and provided several recommendations for refinement – resulting in the removal of the term “hunger” and instead focusing on levels of “food insecurity”.

From all of these efforts, since 1995 the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has released the Household Food Security Report, the nation’s most trusted and comprehensive look at food security and the official measure of hunger in America. The report has offered policymakers, researchers, and communities a clear, consistent measure of how families across the country are faring when it comes to putting food on the table.

A Consistent Measure in a Changing Landscape

Food insecurity is a complex and shifting issue, influenced by economic trends, policy changes, and local conditions. To understand these dynamics and contemplate actions to address hunger effectively, data must be both reliable and comparable.

A randomized sample of approximately 60,000 civilian households across the country participate each year in the Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement (CPS-FSS), making it one of the largest and most robust sources of food security data available.

The survey uses standardized questions to ask households to reflect on the previous 12 months: Did they worry about food running out? Cutting meal sizes? Going hungry because there wasn’t enough money for food? Responses are used to classify each household as food secure, food insecure, or experiencing very low food security.

Because these same standardized questions have been used for nearly three decades, the CPS-FSS provides an unbroken line of data. It is a continuous, consistent measure of food insecurity that serves as the benchmark for every other study in the field.

Figure from the 2023 USDA Household Food Security Report, published September 2024

Beyond the Annual Report

What makes the CPS-FSS so valuable isn’t just the data it produces each year, but the measurement framework it established.

The U.S. Household Food Security Survey Module, developed and validated through the CPS-FSS, is the national standard for measuring food insecurity. Other major federal surveys now use these same modules or shortened versions of them. Outside of the federal government, organizations like Feeding America have used the CPS-FSS data as foundational input for their annual Map the Meal Gap reports.

The consistency of this measurement tool used across surveys means that data collected by different agencies and for different purposes can be compared directly – apples to apples.

For example:

When the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) studies links between diet and food insecurity, it uses the same food security questions from the CPS-FSS.
When the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) looks at how disability affects food access, it relies on the same standardized measures.
When the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) examines health costs among food-insecure households, those results can be aligned with CPS-based national statistics.

This integration across federal surveys allows researchers to connect the dots between food access, health, housing, income, and education, creating a more complete picture of complex drivers of food insecurity and its impacts.

Why It Matters

For three decades, the Household Food Security Report has anchored our understanding of hunger in facts, not assumptions. Without it, decision-makers will be forced to navigate blind — risking policies built on guesswork rather than evidence. AFPC calls on USDA to continue this essential work. The loss of this report would not streamline government; it would set back our collective ability to measure progress, target need, and hold ourselves accountable to the goal that every family in America can put food on the table.