For 30 years the U.S. government tracked how many hungry kids were in American households. They stopped in September. The Trump administration says that surveys used to measure child hunger and inform food stamp policy are nothing more than “subjective, liberal fodder” and that they “fear monger.” Yes, “liberal fodder” is in a USDA press release. The survey that was defunded is called the Household Food Security Report. It ran for 30 years under both Republican and Democratic presidents, contained no policy recommendations and is considered the “gold standard” for tracking food insecurity by Harvard researchers.
So why stop counting hungry kids?
Imagine data as the thermometer for gauging the health of the U.S. When there's a problem like child hunger, the thermometer tells us exactly how many kids are without food on their plates. When the government gets rid of the data, they break the thermometer. But breaking the thermometer doesn’t fill empty plates and kids still go to bed hungry. The difference is, when the thermometer is broken, the government can say whatever they want about the health of the U.S. and nobody can check the temperature. Deleting data makes it easier for the government to lie to us.
The Trump administration isn’t the first to delete data. In the 1930s, Soviet Union Premier Joseph Stalin starved millions of Ukrainians. Soon after, he repressed the 1937 census results by arresting and murdering the census administrators so nobody could say definitively how many Ukrainians died.
In modern times, instead of arresting and murdering census administrators, the administration deletes webpages. The New York Times reported that the administration has deleted over 8,000 already. Information on vaccine guidelines, police violence and LGBTQ+ suicide rates have disappeared.
When nobody can document the truth, the administration can spin the facts in deceiving ways. In late April, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins celebrated moving 4.3 million off food stamps, attributing the drop to “a lot of fraud” and “people who shouldn’t be on the program.” Rollins said that the economy is doing so well that “people don’t need food stamps.” However, experts such as Cornell professor Roger Figueroa say the decrease in participation is because getting on food stamps is harder. Even more, the fraud that Rollins mentions is often hungry people underreporting their income because if they didn’t they would starve.
But if you want to check the number of hungry kids after Rollins took 4.3 million people off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and see if there was an impact, you can’t. The Household Food Security Report doesn’t run anymore.
Food is just the beginning. The federal government has repeated the same method with maternal death rates. The U.S. has more than double, sometimes triple the maternal and infant mortality rate compared to other high-income nations. The Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, collects information from mothers over the course of pregnancy to make better policy decisions and help mothers. In 2025, the team conducting PRAMS was put on leave and on April 30, 2026, the CDC’s grants to states running their own surveys were depleted. The most recent data released is from 2022. Now, when the Department of Health and Human Services claims they are “focused on improving maternal outcomes,” there is no way to disprove them.
Mothers and food are just two examples. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health has been discontinued. There's no way to check trends in substance abuse. The Environmental Protection Agency took down EJScreen. There’s no way to check the amount of pollution in your area. I found these deletions while researching for a company I’m starting that works with public information. At first, I thought the administration hated data.
In reality, they love data, just not the type that increases government transparency for ordinary Americans. They love data so much that in 2025 they doubled their contracts with Palantir — a company that helps the government understand its messy data and track people — to $1 billion. In 2026, they’ve signed almost $900 million in government contracts, and we aren’t even halfway through the year. Clearly, the administration knows the importance of data. Unfortunately, they are spending internally while closing off the public from knowing how the country is really doing.
I hope you are furious that the government signed over a billion dollars in contracts with Palantir while it stops counting hungry kids on purpose. Right now, the administration is betting that nobody will notice that they broke the thermometer and that they can lie to us with no consequences. Your responsibility is to notice and help the people around you notice as well. Because if enough people notice, their bet stops working.
Mihir Steingard '28 is an Opinion Columnist studying Industrial and Labor Relations. The name of his column, Common Matters, is a play on words and aims to show why common matters in politics, on campus and in society should matter to us, the common people. He argues against being apolitical or apathetic and instead advocates vehemently for empathy and understanding. He can be reached at msteingard@cornellsun.com.
