According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has given a team of federal economists and researchers ¡°unlimited leave¡± in charge of a government investigation into U.S. food insecurity issues.

The Wall Street Journal report.

The Wall Street Journal, citing a letter received from an official from the Ministry of Agriculture, that the leave was ¡°not a disciplinary sanction¡± and that the employees were not required to engage in any governmental business until otherwise notified.

Laura Dodson, a representative of the American Federation of Government Employees, told the media that about 12 employees were asked to take vacations, all of whom were related to the economic research project of the Ministry of Agriculture. "Employees were asked to hand in their laptops". "The American people deserve transparent, authentic data, not retaliation against the people who provide it," Dodson said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced on the 20th that it stopped collecting and publishing data related to the 2025 Family Food Safety Report on the grounds that the report has become "too politized."The U.S. Department of Agriculture said that under the Trump administration, the U.S. poverty rate has declined, wages and jobs have increased, and the data collected by the above survey cannot accurately reflect the actual state of domestic food security.

On March 28th, customers bought food in a supermarket in new york, USA. Xinhua News Agency (photo by Guo Ke)

The annual assessment of food insecurity in different regions and populations in the United States, published in the 1990s, provides in-depth data analysis for the study of food insecurity in the United States, becoming an important basis for the development of funding or food aid programs and their effectiveness assessment at all levels of the United States government.

According to the 2023 Home Food Security Report, 13.5% of U.S. households face food insecurity, the highest level since 2014.

Critics pointed out that canceling the report is not conducive to solving the hunger problem faced by some people in the United States amid high inflation and sluggish employment in the United States. At the same time, they questioned that the measure was aimed at whitewashing food insecurity in the United States under the Trump administration.

Bobby Cogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for Progress, said on social media: ¡°Trump is cancelling an annual government survey that measures the state of hunger in the United States, not allowing the survey to show that hunger has increased during his term.¡±

Lindsay Smith Terry, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina, said that stopping this survey would make the United States lose an important indicator to measure people's health. For the U.S. government, which is planning to cut food aid, stopping the investigation means "pretending that there is no food insecurity in the United States".

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