From Hunger

A task-force report draws fire

Rarely had a conclusion been so inconclusive. After a four-month, $320,000 probe into the extent of hunger in the U.S., the 13-member President's Task Force on Food Assistance produced a report last week that wound up by saying, "We have not been able to substantiate allegations of rampant hunger." Though the study acknowledged that some were going hungry, it insisted there was no way to determine who and how many.

A host of politicians, antipoverty groups and religious organizations swiftly denounced the findings. Their reaction blighted White House hopes that the investigation would be accepted as the "no-holds-barred study" President Reagan had requested. He created the commission last August amid a welter of complaints that the deep cuts in federal food programs had contributed to an alarming rise in hunger.

The task force came back with the finding that although some hunger does exist in the U.S., the President's budget cuts have not reduced the availability of food for the poor. To opponents of the Administration, that assertion was about on a par with Presidential Counsellor Edwin Meese's comment in October that reports of widespread hunger were merely "anecdotal." Critics pointed to a study by the Centers for Disease Central in Atlanta suggesting that as many as 500,000 poor children under the age of six are suffering from malnutrition. Senator Edward Kennedy, who made his own investigation of hunger in five states last year, declared that the report "is a transparent cover-up of the serious and worsening problem of hunger in America."

Headed by J. Clayburn La Force Jr., the dean of U.C.L.A.'s Graduate School of Management, the panel was overwhelmingly conservative and Republican. Several members have been architects of the President's cuts in food programs. As an associate director of the Office of Management and Budget, Kenneth Clarkson, for example, helped devise the budgets that made 1 million people ineligible for food stamps, lowered food-stamp benefits for an additional 20 million and took 2.6 million children out of the school lunch program.

The task force's report had something to displease everyone. Though it advocated a net increase of about $200 million in federal spending for food for the poor, Reagan is currently calling for further cuts in food-assistance programs totaling $636 million for fiscal 1985. "We'd like to sweep the report under the rug," said one White House aide. "It's widely considered that it was a big mistake."