Business titan and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg popularized the phrase: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” That phrase applies to every major institution in  American society, including  corporations, government agencies and nonprofit organizations.

We all need clear, verifiable data to make informed determinations about what’s working and what’s not, guiding us as to which efforts should be continued or expanded, or alternatively, diminished or ended. Hard facts should play determinative roles in every manner of decisions, including budgets, staffing levels and product and program designs.

That’s why it’s so dangerous and economically counterproductive that the Trump administration is systematically politicizing — and even dismantling — long-trusted government data collection and dissemination efforts. In August, President Trump fired Dr. Erika McEntarfer from her role as the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after the Bureau reported a national jobs slow-down.

Journalists recently uncovered the news that the Trump administration was unilaterally ending the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 27-year practice of collecting and publishing nationwide and state-by-state statistics on how many U.S. households suffered from food insecurity, meaning they can’t always afford sufficient food.  

The department plans to issue one last such report, for 2024, indicating the state of U.S. hunger under then-President Joe Biden, but will not collect or release any subsequent data on food hardships under Trump.

If that wasn’t bad enough, USDA placed 12 employees on paid leave in order to conduct a witch hunt to determine who was the whistleblower who leaked to the media the news about the study cancellation.

After this story became public, USDA issued a press release providing the administration’s reasons for ending the annual study. The release claimed the household food security data is “redundant” and “extraneous” and that the department has a  “bevy of more timely and accurate data sets available.” 

But the department never indicated what those other data sets supposedly were and they never specified what other data they possessed that made the food security report redundant. Contrary to the press release’s vague assertions, the USDA household food security data is now the only remaining federal mechanism for measuring and reporting on hunger and food hardship.

USDA also called its own methodology “costly.” While costly is a subjective term, and there is no specific line item in the federal budget that funds this function distinct from other data collection and analysis functions, federal spending on this food insecurity measure is relatively minimal.

The government uses existing Census Bureau surveys to collect this extra data, and only a small handful of employees of the USDA Economic Research Service work on compiling, analyzing and releasing the annual report.

The press release also misleads in its claim that the measure was “initially created by the Clinton administration as a means to support the increase of SNAP eligibility and benefit allotments.” 

This research was originally authorized by an act passed by Congress in 1990, and signed into law by Republican President George H.W. Bush. When Vice President Al Gore announced the first domestic food insecurity statistics in 1997, the Clinton administration’s top public focus then was on helping charities recover wasted food, not particularly on increasing participation in the Food Stamp Program.

The Trump administration also claimed that the annual food insecurity reports “failed to present anything more than subjective, liberal fodder.” In truth, the data was always collected, analyzed and reported by career civil servants who worked across presidential administrations of both parties. 

According to USDA, the 2023 report included responses from “30,863 households, which comprised a representative sample of the U.S. civilian population of about 133 million households.” That kind of hard data is the opposite of “subjective.” 

These annual findings are widely cited by members of congress, state and local government leaders, academics, private foundations and corporations, and charitable food service providers (many of whom are faith-based organizations) that span the full ideological spectrum. There is nothing inherently “liberal” about citing the number of Americans who face food hardship.

Given that all the administration’s public explanations for ending the annual USDA hunger report are spurious, one can only wonder if  the administration aims to cover up evidence of growing hunger and food hardship tied to high inflation and massive cuts to domestic nutrition assistance (the reconciliation bill cut $186 billion from SNAP).

But pretending problems don’t exist won’t make them go away. The ostrich approach is no way to solve U.S. hunger or any other problem. 

Joel Berg is CEO of Hunger Free America, a nationwide, nonpartisan direct service and advocacy nonprofit organization. He previously served in senior positions at the U.S.  Department of Agriculture.

, 2025-10-11 17:00:00, , TheHill.com Just In, %%https://thehill.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/cropped-favicon-512px-1.png?w=32, https://thehill.com/homenews/feed/, Joel Berg, opinion contributor