It was a scene straight out of The Great Gatsby: glittering lights, champagne towers, and jazz-age glamour spilling across the manicured lawns of Mar-a-Lago. On the evening of October 31, 2025, President Donald Trump hosted a “Great Gatsby”-themed Halloween party, complete with a roaring twenties tagline borrowed from the 2013 film — “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody.”

But as the champagne flowed, millions of Americans were about to lose their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits at midnight on November 1. For many, it meant not knowing how they would buy groceries the next day.

The contrast was grotesque — and, in a way, perfectly fitting. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel was a study in moral blindness, in the self-indulgence of the wealthy amid the quiet suffering of the poor. Nearly a century later, the symbolism was impossible to miss.

Even as the president celebrated opulence, his administration was working to bury the truth about American hunger itself.

The Decision to Stop Counting Hunger

Just weeks earlier, on September 20, 2025, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) quietly announced it would discontinue the nation’s most comprehensive measure of food insecurity — the U.S. Household Food Security Survey, a dataset that for 30 years has helped the country understand who is struggling to eat and why.

In its official statement, the USDA offered a stunningly partisan rationale:

(Washington, D.C., September 20, 2025) — “The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the termination of future Household Food Security Reports. These redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies do nothing more than fear monger. For 30 years, this study—initially created by the Clinton administration as a means to support the increase of SNAP eligibility and benefit allotments—failed to present anything more than subjective, liberal fodder. Trends in the prevalence of food insecurity have remained virtually unchanged, regardless of an over 87% increase in SNAP spending between 2019–2023. USDA will continue to prioritize statutory requirements and, where necessary, use the bevy of more timely and accurate data sets available to it.”

In plainer terms: the administration doesn’t like what the numbers say — so it’s going to stop counting them.

Erasing the Evidence

The Household Food Security Report was far more than paperwork. For decades, it served as the backbone of America’s understanding of hunger — a dataset used by Congress, farmers, food banks, and researchers to track who is going hungry, why, and how federal programs like SNAP and WIC are working.

Now, that foundation has been demolished, just as the administration moves forward with $186 billion in SNAP cuts over the next decade — a reduction of nearly 20%.

Without those annual reports, it becomes far easier for officials to deny the consequences. As one anti-hunger advocate put it, “If you stop collecting the data, you can stop admitting there’s a problem.”

The Reality on the Ground

The data that remains paints a bleak picture. According to Feeding America, the largest hunger-relief network in the United States:

  • Over 47 million Americans — roughly 1 in 7 — are food insecure.

  • 1 in 5 children live in food-insecure households.

  • More than 50 million people have turned to food banks for help in the past year.

These are not abstract policy figures — they are the measure of a country where the grocery bill outpaces the paycheck, where parents skip meals so their kids can eat, and where one in five children faces hunger in a nation that prides itself on abundance.

By eliminating the USDA’s report, the government isn’t saving money; it’s erasing accountability.

A Political Play Disguised as Bureaucracy

The USDA claims the report is “redundant” and “politicized.” Yet no other dataset measures food insecurity with the same scope or rigor. Even Feeding America’s “Map the Meal Gap”, one of the most widely cited independent reports, depends on the USDA data the administration just terminated.

The USDA has vaguely promised to use “more timely and accurate data sets,” but none have been identified. Experts agree that such data doesn’t exist.

What the move accomplishes is clear: it silences a longstanding, nonpartisan measure that has inconveniently tracked the human impact of budget cuts and economic inequality.

History Repeats Itself

The last time Washington tried to erase hunger, the results were the same. During the Reagan years, as unemployment and poverty soared, the administration downplayed the hunger crisis — even as food banks and churches struggled to meet exploding demand. Outrage from advocates and journalists finally pushed Congress to start tracking hunger systematically, which led to the very food security survey now being dismantled.

It’s as if the administration has learned the lesson — and decided to reverse it.

The Consequences of Not Knowing

Ending the USDA’s food insecurity report won’t make fewer Americans hungry. It will just make their hunger harder to measure — and therefore easier to ignore. Without those numbers, policymakers and advocates will be forced back into the dark, relying on anecdotes and incomplete data while families quietly slip through the cracks.

Meanwhile, the optics speak louder than any statistic: a president throwing a Gatsby-themed gala as Americans lose their ability to afford food.

In Fitzgerald’s novel, the parties ended in ashes — glitter giving way to grief. The same moral rot hangs over Washington today.

A little party may not have killed anybody.
But a government that stops counting hunger surely will.