"Millions of women and children are at risk of losing food benefits during the shutdown. The USDA just killed the long-running survey that would track the fallout."
"The federal government shutdown is stretching into a second week with no end in sight. As Democrats and Republicans in Congress face a politically charged funding impasse, nutrition experts warn that women and children reliant on federal food assistance funding are particularly vulnerable to imminently losing their grocery benefits.
In the midst of it all, America’s ability to track the real-world impacts of the shutdown on hunger is disappearing. Shortly before the shutdown, the Department of Agriculture moved to scrap the Household Food Security Report, the nation’s primary tool for tracking food insecurity, and in doing so, stripped away the very infrastructure needed to remedy rising hunger in America.
“If you want a functioning country where people are food-secure, this is the survey that gives you an indication of how food-secure people are. And that data shows us that food insecurity has gone up,” says Zia Mehrabi, a data scientist researching climate change and food insecurity at the University of Colorado Boulder. “So, actually, as a country, the government response to that should be, ‘How do we fix that?’ rather than say, ‘Oh … let’s cut the whole survey altogether.’”
If the shutdown continues into next week, the lapse in government funding could directly affect the nearly 7 million American pregnant women, new mothers, infants, and young children that rely on WIC, or the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children. The National WIC Association has warned that the program is days away from running out of money. The USDA told state agencies last week that they will not receive their quarterly allocation of money for WIC because of the lapse in federal funding, CNN reported."
Ayurella Horn-Muller reports for Grist October 10, 2025.
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