No more ‘food insecurity’ — Dems’ doublespeak now falls flat

Last week President Donald Trump’s Agriculture Department canceled the government’s annual Household Food Security  survey — arguing the “nonstatutory report has become overpoliticized,” and amounts to “subjective, liberal fodder” that does “nothing more than fearmonger.”

Experts on the left predictably objected, but Trump can point to support from an unexpected place: The Democrat-aligned group Third Way.

In a recent memo, the center-left think tank confirmed that everyday Americans’ rightful distrust of concepts like “food insecurity” — which for most doesn’t mean actually going hungry, just worrying about going hungry — and other terms that have become central to progressives’ efforts to grow government welfare benefits.

Released in August, the Third Way memo (addressed to “All Who Wish to Stop Donald Trump and MAGA”) is a de facto blacklist of woke terms like “microaggression” and “chest feeding” that everyday Americans regard as “extreme, divisive, elitist.”

The group contends these terms “have alienated the many,” costing Democrats elections as a result.

Their blacklist includes “food insecurity” and “housing insecurity,” terms long brandished by liberals calling for more government benefits.

Those terms make it sound like Democrats “are hiding behind unfamiliar phrases to mask extreme intent,” Third Way explained, and recommended using “everyday language” like “the hungry” and “the homeless” to more effectively “fight for the poor.”

Third Way hit the nail on the head.

In recent decades, progressive policymakers have intentionally promoted neologisms like food or housing insecurity instead of pointing to genuine hunger or homelessness — which in America are much more rare.

Progressives’ logic was simple: Adopt and promote broad terms that suggest wider need, then argue for more government welfare benefits.

As Trump’s USDA notes, the food insecurity survey was “created by the Clinton administration as a means to support the increase” of food stamp eligibility and benefits.

That agenda is now embedded in official government data.

Federal statistics claim 18 million US households were food insecure in 2023.

But for many that doesn’t mean they had ever missed so much as a single meal — just that they had felt “uncertain of having” enough food.

Millions obtained enough by collecting federal food assistance, which has grown sharply. Food stamps alone served 22 million households in 2023.

Tellingly, my AEI colleagues Angela Rachidi and Thomas O’Rourke have reported that over one in five households listed as being food insecure also “have incomes that place them in the middle-to-upper end of the income distribution.”

Fortunately, the number of Americans who experience hunger is much smaller — but much harder to ascertain.

In the 1980s, a presidential task force found that, with the possible exception of the homeless, “there is no evidence that widespread undernutrition is a major health problem in the United States.”

Today, the federal government doesn’t even try to calculate the number of hungry people, but tracks food insecurity instead.

The closest current data come to identifying hunger is among those who report “very low” food security with “reduced food intake due to limited resources.”

That’s rare, affecting only about  1% of households with children each year.

Yet advocacy groups often simply conflate hunger with the much larger figures on food insecurity.

For example, the nonprofit Feeding America argues “hunger in America” affects every one of the over 13% of Americans who today “face food insecurity.”

Not so — but that rhetoric helps explain why food stamp caseloads and spending remain near all-time highs, years after the pandemic ended.

The same lessons apply to the use of the term “housing insecurity” instead of homelessness, as the Third Way memo highlights.

One researcher suggests that housing insecurity stretches well beyond homelessness — to include those with homes but “living in poor-quality housing conditions.”

In Washington, DC, that means over 82,000 residents may be “experiencing housing insecurity,” or over 16 times the roughly 5,000 who are actually homeless on any given night.

Naturally, those arguing for more government housing aid prefer to cite the larger figure — despite the fact that the vast majority of those people currently have a roof over their head.

Third Way could have similarly cited terms like “health insecurity,” “energy insecurity,” “transportation insecurity,” and even “diaper insecurity” as examples of the “tortured language” liberals deploy to grow government welfare in all directions.

There is plenty of need in our country, even as taxpayers provide generous assistance to help millions make ends meet.

For many leftists, it’s not enough because it’s never enough.

But as the Third Way report indicates, everyday Americans long ago got the figurative memo about questioning those liberal buzzwords — bolstering Trump’s  latest call for changes.

Matt Weidinger is a senior fellow and Rowe Scholar in opportunity and mobility studies at the American Enterprise Institute.