Food Insecurity & Data Transparency Amid the Federal Shutdown
On Monday, October 20th, The Children’s Agenda and our partners at VOCAL NY hosted a press conference at St. Peter’s Kitchen to call on the Trump Administration to reverse harmful cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and to reinstate the USDA’s annual Household Food Security report immediately. Below are CEO Larry Marx’s remarks from the event.
At The Children’s Agenda, our mission is to improve the health, education and lifelong success of our community’s children, through effective, equitable public policies, especially for families most impacted by poverty, racism, health inequities and trauma.
The health of our community depends on truth and accountability. Escalating federal attacks are erasing federal data and eliminating collection. We need to not just replace what’s being lost but restore what’s being broken.
At The Children’s Agenda, we believe that:
- Policy decisions should rely on more than intuition or politics
- Getting to the root causes of problems requires good data
- Improving the health, education, and success of children should be a nonpartisan issue.
All of that common sense goes against this recent federal action to turn the lights out on the country’s understanding of food insecurity and hunger.
H.R. 1 passed in July and puts more than 300,000 New York households at risk of losing food assistance.
It will shift $2.1 billion in SNAP costs to the state, which will result in the state limiting SNAP benefits or cutting other crucial benefits.
Closer to home, 34% of children in this congressional district – 1 out of every 3 – relies on SNAP to eat, and some 20,000 people in our area’s households with school-age children are at risk of losing some amount of SNAP financial assistance for food.
So what is the Trump Administration doing in response? Turning out the lights — ending more than 30 years of federal reports documenting the need for food assistance. The motto of the Administration should be “See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil,” trying to make us all deaf, all of us dumb and all of us blind to the evil being done to our neighbors and their children by these cuts to food assistance.
But we stand here to say we SEE what you’re doing, we’re not DUMB, and we will NOT BE SILENT.
SNAP participation helps reduce instances of food insecurity by as much as 30 percent.
The USDA claims that we don’t have to document food insecurity anymore because the numbers never change. That’s just false. The facts are that food insecurity actually fell to its lowest rate in decades in 2021 thanks to the economic stimulus provided to families in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, including temporary expansions to SNAP. The most common household expenditures of the extra money received from the expanded federal tax credit during COVID were for basic necessities: housing, food and transportation.
The data clearly show that policy intervention is measurable and important in people’s lives. Two years later, in 2023, food insecurity rose to levels not seen since 2014 as the temporary assistance expired and inflation rose. The historic cuts to SNAP enacted under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will push food insecurity even higher.
The evidence is clear — these new work requirements don’t do anything to raise employment rates. But they do result in many people losing food benefits they need, deepening poverty and increasing hardship. Research also shows that many people who lose SNAP are working or should have qualified for an exemption, but the bureaucratic red tape made documenting their employment or proving their exemption too difficult.
So what do they do about red tape? Eliminate the evidence.
What do they do about the food insecurity and hunger growing among us? Refuse to see the problem.
What do they do about children going to bed hungry each night? End 30 years of documentation and reporting.
We call on our United States Senators and Congresspeople to each personally reach out to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins to reinstate the USDA’s annual Household Food Security reporting immediately.
To view press coverage of the event, please visit:
Advocates warn losing SNAP benefits will add to food insecurity across N.Y. – The Children’s Agenda
Advocates call for Trump administration to reverse SNAP cuts – The Children’s Agenda
Larry Marx is CEO at The Children’s Agenda.
