Cecilia Lynch/USDA
Food donations at the Des Moines Area Religious Council Food Pantry Network, January 2024.
In late September, the Trump Administration announced that it will stop collecting data on hunger at the state and national levels. Shortly after, it suspended approximately a dozen U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) employees, including top officials in the department’s Economic Research Service. Joel Berg, CEO of a New York City-based national nonprofit called Hunger Free America, immediately denounced Trump’s actions:
“Attempts by government to whitewash away hard facts are the hallmark of dictatorships, not democracies,” he wrote in a press statement. “A North Korean-style attempted cover-up of reality won’t hide the reality of soaring hunger nationwide.”
The USDA’s Household Food Security Report, released annually since 1997, was the only federal mechanism to measure and document food insecurity throughout the United States. The most recent study, released in September 2024, found that 47 million people—or 13.5 percent of the population—couldn’t afford enough food for their families at some point during the preceding twelve months. The Trump Administration seemed unfazed by this finding when it canceled the annual report, calling the research “redundant, costly, [and] politicized.”
Berg disagrees. He tells The Progressive that anti-hunger advocates have long used the annual report to push for programs that combat hunger and poverty, including support for increased spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and universal school meals.
To make matters worse, the research cancellation comes on the heels of $186 billion in cuts to federal food assistance programs—a change that will cause millions of SNAP recipients to lose all or some of their benefits as Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill goes into effect.
Berg spoke to The Progressive in mid-October about the current administration’s attack on hunger initiatives and the work Hunger Free America is doing to fill the gaps. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: The current political outlook for those doing anti-hunger and anti-poverty work looks grim, but I know that Hunger Free America has successfully beaten back several attempts to cut its government funding. Let’s start there, with something positive.
Joel Berg: We’ve fought two attempts by the Trump Administration to defund our programs. Since 2014, we’ve run the National Hunger Clearinghouse, which is a phone line that has helped tens of thousands of people learn where to go to apply for SNAP or WIC [Women, Infants, and Children] benefits or access food from a local pantry or soup kitchen. Shortly after the administration took office, we reached out to the USDA and requested to talk with them about our work, but they refused to speak to us.
Then, in May, we got word that they were defunding the Clearinghouse. Attorneys at Public Citizen sued on our behalf and forced the government to admit that, by law, the hotline has to be run by a nonprofit organization. This pushed the USDA to issue a new Request for Proposals. We submitted our proposal again, and got the green light to continue running the program in September.
A second proposed cut would have decimated our VISTA/AmeriCorps projects. We run one of the largest VISTA programs in the US, and thanks to New York Attorney General Letitia James and other state attorneys general, we were able to get the funding restored. These VISTA/Americorps programs provide year-long, full-time national service staff who help food-insecure households obtain government benefits and access community resources. They also work to connect people to healthy food through farmers’ markets and neighborhood gardens, among other things.
That said, I want to stress that, much more important than the challenges faced by our organization, is the reality that the people we represent are going through ghastly times, and things have gone from bad to worse, and from worse to worser. And yes, worser is a word!
Q: How did you get involved in this work?
Berg: I’ve been a political activist since I was young. I got involved in political campaigns and even ran, unsuccessfully, for office in 1986, when I was twenty-one years old. After college, from 1989 to 1991, I worked at a think tank called the Progressive Policy Institute.
When Bill Clinton ran for President, I began working on his campaign in the issues office and eventually became the campaign’s Kansas state press secretary. Much to my happy shock, Clinton won nationwide, and I was appointed Acting Director of Public Affairs and Press Secretary at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Over time, I realized that the agency and its food programs connected many of the issues I was most passionate about, including racial and economic justice and food insecurity, so once I got there, I hunkered down and stayed for eight years, for the entire Clinton presidency.
I only did press work for a few months before moving on to run the USDA’s AmeriCorps programs. These programs provided staff to the national forests, staffed visitor centers, and repaired trails. We worked with private landowners to keep cattle waste out of streams and waterways. We planted natural sea grass to protect coastal areas from floods and erosion. And we helped poor people with housing issues. We also brought running water to people living on the Texas-Mexico border and in the Mississippi Delta and helped people access donated food and apply for SNAP and WIC benefits.
Q: Did the federal government begin the annual Food Security Survey while you were at the USDA?
Berg: Yes. The legislation authorizing the study was passed in 1990 under George H.W. Bush, but the first national survey was not released until 1997, and the first state-by-state survey was not released until 1999, under President Bill Clinton.
We highlighted the fact that the states with the highest levels of poverty had the highest levels of food insecurity. This was no surprise, but after the USDA revealed the findings, some zeroed in on Texas and New Mexico. Both had a lot of hungry people within their borders. Congressman Joe Skeen, a conservative [Republican] from New Mexico, who headed the very powerful House Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee, became very upset, and saw the report as a political attack intended to make his state look bad.
I’m telling you this because it highlights that attacks on the report are not new. In fact, the right wing has been obsessed with discrediting it for years. But no matter how they spin it, the bottom line has always been clear: The United States has higher rates of hunger and poverty than other industrialized nations. The right wants to bury this fact. Worse, the Republican Party has twisted reality to argue that anti-poverty programs keep people poor. They seem to think that ending these programs will liberate people and somehow make them economically self-sufficient. It’s nonsense.
Q: Tell me more about the Food Security Report. Has it been well used by government agencies, activists and advocates?
Berg: Some states have denied its findings, and some have utilized it as a benchmark of progress, or lack thereof. At Hunger Free America, we make sure to include the statistics about hunger in virtually every grant application we submit. We also use its findings in our testimony and educational work. The stats are also our jumping-off point when we do our own research on food insecurity among specific populations, for example, seniors, school-aged children, or those workers whose wages are so low that they have to supplement them with public benefits.
Our work adds to the foundation created by the report. We’ve studied New York City borough by borough. We’ve done other location-specific research as well.
Q: Will Hunger Free America expand its research work to fill in the gaps created by the research cancellation?
Berg: Later this month, the USDA is supposed to release the 2024 report. No one knows if they will. Either way, we plan to do an alternative survey and are now finalizing plans to interview 1,800 people nationwide, in New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Maryland, about food insecurity. We also intend to survey soup kitchens and food pantries in every state about whether they’re seeing increased demand, and, if so, by how much.
Q: What do you hope will happen as a result?
Berg: We certainly hope that philanthropy will step up donations, but no one should be deluded into thinking that donations can fill the gaps. Up until recently, the federal government provided seventeen times the dollar amount that charity groups provide to address hunger, so no one should be bamboozled into thinking that philanthropy alone will rescue us.
At the same time, safety net programs alone are also not a solution to poverty. Of course, we need universal healthcare, universal school meals, and universal childcare and after-school programs. People need to be paid a livable wage. But we also need more programs that focus on long-term social mobility and that foster property ownership as a means of acquiring wealth. We need programs that help people buy homes and save for their retirement, but these things should run hand-in-hand with an increase in benefits.
Q: What would you like to say to the Trump Administration about the cancellation of the report and the staff layoffs?
Berg: First, the chutzpah of this administration in claiming that cutting billions of dollars in safety net support is beneficial to the poor is mind-boggling. Second, when Trump calls the survey redundant, I have to ask: redundant to what?
Finally, putting twelve USDA employees on paid leave—paying government employees not to work—is the least conservative idea I’ve ever heard.