End of federal hunger tracker shrouds Mississippi food crisis as food banks and families grapple with SNAP freeze

Adverse Supreme Court ruling and administration’s rollback of food programs escalate problems for lower income residents

The legal saga over November’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program payments recently took two new turns, starting with the federal government warning states to “immediately undo” any attempts to pay the benefit, following a Nov. 7, 2025, Supreme Court ruling that temporarily allowed the Trump administration to withhold payments to 42 million low-income Americans.

Then, on Sunday, a lower court ruling offered a possible reprieve for people who receive assistance through SNAP. The New York Times reported that a federal appeals court late that day denied another attempt by the Trump administration to withhold full federal funding for food stamps.

The second ruling, the Times reported, was handed down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and preserved another judge’s recent order that had required the Trump administration to provide full aid for the roughly 42 million people who depend on federal benefits to purchase groceries. The court’s decision may not take effect until late Tuesday, under the instructions previously issued by the Supreme Court.

The rulings come amid an escalating hunger emergency fueled by a cascade of federal actions that have stripped billions of dollars from SNAP and other nutrition programs, gutted food bank funding and dismantled the only system that once showed where hunger was rising and how to respond: the federal food insecurity tracker. The result is a nationwide crisis in which anti-hunger organizations are being overwhelmed by unprecedented demand from families suddenly left without aid.

In Mississippi, already the nation’s poorest and hungriest state, the fallout is far-reaching, though precise metrics are now difficult to come by due to the elimination of the hunger tracker.

“We’re in a crisis situation,” said Jason Martin, executive director of the Hunger Coalition, a United Way–run initiative in northeast Mississippi. “We’re already purchasing a lot more food than usual, stretching our reduced budget beyond belief. Then you add the stressors of the shutdown and the needs of new SNAP clients and existing clients who are struggling more than normal. It’s a near-perfect storm scenario.”

Shrouding America’s hunger crisis

What makes the hunger crisis uniquely opaque is that the full scale of the consequences will likely never be known.

In September, the Trump administration ended the federal government’s food insecurity tracker, a data system used since 1995 to track where hunger was rising and how to respond. It enabled researchers, policymakers and nonprofits to compare data over time, across regions, and between populations. The latest data, collected during the Biden administration, was set to be released in October. It was never published.

Based on 2023 data, Mississippi had among the nation’s highest rate of hunger. More than 571,000 people lacked food security that year—approximately 19.4 percent of the population, compared with 12.1 percent nationally.

Mississippi is one of seven states with food insecurity rates far above the national average and its Delta region is among the most food insecure in the country. Nearly one in four children in Mississippi don’t have reliable access to food. Nationally, it’s one in seven. This is unsurprising given that the state’s childhood poverty rate sits at 28 percent, the highest in the United States.

That data is known because of the food tracker, officially recognized as Household Food Security Supplement, which was released annually by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Census Bureau. The database was created using a monthly survey of roughly 60,000 households which asked families whether they had enough to eat, skipped meals or went hungry due to lack of money. The dataset became the nation’s gold standard for tracking hunger, poverty and the effectiveness of federal programs such as SNAP, WIC and child feeding assistance.

“The loss of the food security tracker means nonprofit groups and government organizations will struggle to direct aid to places it’s needed,” said Dr. Carol Connell, who spent nearly three decades at the University of Southern Mississippi researching human nutrition and food insecurity in the Mississippi Delta. “It also makes it difficult to know if the programs are actually working.”

Because the program used the same survey each year, it was the only dataset capable of showing how major events like recessions, pandemics or major policy changes directly affected hunger rates throughout the nation. It also provided a guide for how lawmakers could best respond.

For example, during and after the Great Recession, which lasted from 2007 to 2009, the tracker showed food insecurity rates rapidly increasing nationwide, jumping from 11.1 percent in 2007 to 14.7 percent two years later, according to USDA data. This massive increase added more than four million people to the SNAP rolls. Using this data as justification, Congress approved the expansion of SNAP benefits and the 2009 stimulus. Food insecurity began to steadily decrease during the next decade, falling below the pre-recession figures in 2019.

While food insecurity rose overall during the COVID-19 pandemic, which lasted from 2020–2022, the tracker allowed lawmakers to deploy emergency SNAP increases and child tax credits to reduce food insecurity among children to near-record lows, according to USDA stats. Since those programs ended, which coincided with a significant rise in inflation, food insecurity has risen among all households, especially those with children.

Historically, this is usually when Congress acts. Instead, lawmakers cut $186 billion from SNAP under the Big Beautiful Bill, while narrowing who can access the benefit.

It is not known what non-governmental groups are willing or even have the resources to measure hunger moving forward. While some nonprofits already publish their own food insecurity data, Connell said the underlying data nearly always comes from the federal government.

“The main source of the data for food insecurity still comes from the USDA,” Connell noted. “If other groups are tracking, they would be doing it on a local level and probably still using federal data to supplement their own.”

Two other federal government surveys that ask about food insecurity currently exist but are miniscule compared to the USDA’s tracker.

The disappearance of the tracker comes at a pivotal time. The Supreme Court’s temporary ruling allowing the Trump administration to freeze SNAP payments for 42 million low-income people follows months of cuts and funding shortfalls across the nation’s food assistance programs and also healthcare.

Though the scale of the SNAP crisis and the pressure it places on food banks may be difficult to quantify, Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, CEO of the nation’s largest hunger relief network, Feeding America, said that for every meal provided by food banks, nine are provided by SNAP.

“When you take SNAP away, the implications are cataclysmic,” Babineaux-Fontenot told PBS in late October. “I assume people are thinking somebody’s going to stop it before it gets too bad. Well, it’s already too bad. And it’s getting worse.”

Some SNAP recipients in Mississippi will not have received any food assistance funds since Oct. 4, 2025, while others have seen money flow into their accounts as recently as Oct. 21, according to the state’s SNAP benefit issuance schedule.

The extent of the national food crisis goes beyond low-income people and families to include those Martin described as “middle income folks.”

An increasing number of the 700,000 furloughed federal workers have joined the ranks of Americans now turning to food banks, further compounding the strain on already gutted nonprofits.

“We’ve had several contacts from individuals who are federally furloughed employees, people who’ve never been in the position of needing assistance because they had good jobs,” Martin told The Mississippi Independent. “One lady I spoke to is an 18-year federal employee. Her husband also has a good job, but it takes two incomes to make ends meet. When she was furloughed without pay, his paycheck went entirely to bills, leaving nothing left to buy food with.”

The USDA says it still plans to issue partial November SNAP payments, reflecting a 35 percent reduction of the typical benefit. The money will come from a $5 billion contingency fund, but the White House has said that it could take weeks to months for the payments to be administered.

Around 38 states have provided stopgap food bank aid or direct cash assistance to residents in need. Some states, based on a federal judge’s ruling for the government to fully fund SNAP, began sending out the full payments. In some cases, the money was made up of federal and state funds. On Nov. 8, the federal government ordered them to stop and claw back the money, though it remains unclear whether that order applies to state money as well.

Most states ignored the ruling and threatened legal action. Mississippi did not.

Compounding the crisis

In addition to halting food insecurity tracking, the Trump administration has slashed multiple federal food assistance programs that served as lifelines for millions.

It cut $500 million from the Emergency Food Assistance Program, which supplies surplus farm goods to state food banks, costing Mississippi about $23 million. It also eliminated the $660 million Local Food for Schools program and ended the $420 million Local Food Purchase Assistance agreement, together stripping Mississippi of nearly $14.5 million in support for local farmers and pantries. Meanwhile, for the second year in a row, Mississippi declined to join the $40 million Summer Child Feeding Program, forfeiting an estimated $70 million in overall economic benefit.

Gov. Tate Reeves has said he did not want to “expand the welfare state.”

While neighboring states Alabama and Tennessee have extended state aid or emergency food support, Mississippi has done nothing.

“I’ve actually seen the opposite,” Martin said. “We haven’t seen any help, only resistance to providing additional support. It’s quite frustrating that we’re sitting in this situation, and it’s almost as if it’s not happening. The lack of support is just disheartening. Don’t get me wrong, the community has stepped up. People here are generous and kind. But our legislators and governor haven’t done anything to help us.”

Reeves’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Once, the food insecurity tracker offered a map of where help was needed most. Now, the agencies and nonprofits left to feed the nation are effectively flying blind, without instruments, navigating by instinct and desperation.

Yet for Martin and others on the front lines, the work continues.

“An extraordinary number of people are reaching out for support,” Martin said. “It’s reminiscent of the experiences we had at the height and immediacy of COVID hitting in March 2020. This is a major crisis, and we don’t see an end in sight.”

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Image: Beneta Burt, president and CEO of the Mississippi Urban League, and UMMC project administrator Darryl Jefferson unload canned goods for shelving at the EversCare Pantry (courtesy University of Mississippi).