The government has decided to stop counting hunger. Late last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it would cancel the country’s annual food security survey — a statistical snapshot that, for three decades, has told us how many families struggle to put food on the table. Early Sunday morning, Eric Mitchell, the president of the Alliance to End Hunger, distilled the implications in a single line: “Hunger will not disappear simply because it is no longer tracked.”
The department’s justification was blunt, casting the survey as “redundant, costly, politicized and extraneous,” saying that the report had “failed to present anything more than subjective, liberal fodder.” Officials promised instead to rely on a “bevy of more timely and accurate data sets,” though none were specified.
The timing, though, tells its own story.
Earlier this summer, Republicans pushed through a sweeping package of budget cuts in the form of “One Big Beautiful Bill,” among them reductions to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the nation’s largest anti-hunger program. Tariffs imposed by the Trump administration have already lifted the cost of basic groceries; one analysis this spring projected an additional $4,900 in annual expenses for the average household. Hunger was climbing even before these changes — food insecurity ticked up in 2022 and again in 2023, according to the USDA’s own reports.
To stop counting, critics argue, is to stop acknowledging the consequences.
“The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s decision to discontinue its annual survey tracking food security data is deeply troubling,” Mitchell said in his Sunday statement. “By cancelling the survey, USDA is sending a signal that tracking and battling hunger is no longer a priority.”
He continued: “For decades, the annual survey has served as a barometer of the effectiveness of our nation’s policies and programs supporting lower-income people and families. With continuing worries about food inflation, as well as significant cuts to America’s largest food assistance program — SNAP — this move is a blow to policymakers and advocates who rely on the data to improve the lives of our food insecure neighbors.”
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Mitchell’s critique points to a broader truth: data makes systemic problems visible. Without it, hunger vanishes from headlines, policy debates and even funding formulas. It is not the first time the federal government has rendered suffering invisible. From HIV to environmental toxins to police misconduct, the story is familiar: what goes uncounted is more easily ignored.
The disappearance of data also makes it easier to shift responsibility from systems to individuals. Without a clear record of how hunger spreads and persists, politicians can fall back on the familiar script: bad budgeting, poor choices, individual responsibility. Yet hunger rarely works that way. As Feeding America has noted, “food insecurity is a systemic issue that can happen to anyone, not a personal failure.” In its 2025 “Elevating Voices” report, many respondents said their circumstances had barely changed since 2022 — high costs still stretched household budgets to the breaking point. Hunger intersects with nearly every facet of life: wages, geography, transportation, the trade-offs between buying groceries and paying for health care.
To erase the data is to erase that complexity, replacing it with a story in which hunger is simply the fault of the hungry. And while some argue that data is neutral (a claim that often glosses over how it is gathered), the way it is distributed and framed — especially by governments and corporations — is anything but.
Numbers decide what is visible, what is urgent, what earns a headline or a budget line. They can turn private struggle into public fact. When suffering is measured, it becomes harder to dismiss; when it is left uncounted, it drifts back into the realm of anecdote, where policymakers can insist the problem is exaggerated, isolated or even imaginary.
That alchemy — the shift from experience to evidence — is what makes statistics both dry and radical. To track hunger each year was to acknowledge its persistence, to admit that the richest nation in the world has never managed to feed all of its citizens. Ending the survey allows the government to preserve a different story, one in which scarcity is aberrant and prosperity is the norm, and any evidence to the contrary can be written off as exceptional.
After all, it is hard to pretend America is being made great again when hunger is on the rise, especially when those in power would rather look away.
