Abstract

Since 1996, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has published an annual report on household food insecurity in the United States, which policymakers, program administrators, the media, and researchers closely follow. This report is based on data collected through the Food Security Supplement, which the US Census Bureau had included every December in its Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly household survey. In 2025, the USDA stopped including the Food Security Supplement on the CPS, essentially ending a consistent source of nationally representative household food-insecurity data. In this report, we provide one perspective on the implications of losing this measure, concerns we have regarding some of the food-insecurity rhetoric in the US, and a call for more attention to very low food security rather than the broader measure of food insecurity.