Is there less hunger in America if we stop tracking hunger?

I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. Every fall for about three decades, the U.S. Department of Agriculture comes out with a report assessing food security and households around the country.

In about a month, we'll get the latest. But the Trump administration indicates this will be the last marketplace's Carla Javier reports.

To prepare the report, the Census Bureau asked some 30,000 people questions about food, hunger, and money.

Their answers are broken down by household income, state, whether the individual used government food assistance.

The USDA says it's terminating these reports because they are, quote, redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous. You know, I'm

really shocked by this. That's Colleen Heflin, who researches economic measures of well-being

at Syracuse University. I don't think it uses any adjectives at all.

It's a very dry read purposefully.

It's not a political document.

It doesn't give any policy recommendations.

It is just the facts as good federal statistics should be.

Heflin says researchers have used the report, so have food security organizations on the ground.

Minerva Delgado's with the Alliance to End Hunger. They may take their state data and advocate

with their congressional offices, or they may be looking at specific populations.

She says there aren't many other data sets that study food security and insecurity in as much depth.

I think it's going to make it harder all around to really measure what the impacts of the policies of this particular administration are.

A USDA spokesperson pointed us to the department's original announcement of the end of the report.

I'm Carla Javier for Marketplace.

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