About 50 people turned up at Greenfield Community College in August to hear two Democrats pitch themselves for a state-house seat in rural Massachusetts. Audit questions, healthcare, farm policy, school funding: the usual primary-forum lineup. Then someone in the crowd asked what the candidates would actually do about the loneliness epidemic.
Both had an answer ready and reached for the same idea: people need places to meet. The Greenfield Recorder’s report on the 20 August forum has no statistics in it, only candidates replying to a voter, and that is what makes it a useful snapshot. Loneliness used to be treated as a private feeling. Here it sat between the audit and the school budget like any other item on the list.
So how did a health warning become a campaign question, and what has anyone done about it so far? There are bills in Congress, a resolution in Utah and a run of research tying loneliness to voting behaviour. There is very little money, and no evidence yet that any of it works. Let’s find out what the bills, the research, and the funding gap show.
Quick answer
The loneliness epidemic reached the government in 2018, when the UK named the first Minister for Loneliness. Japan created its own post in 2021, the US Surgeon General issued an epidemic advisory in 2023, and the World Health Assembly adopted a resolution in 2025. Three US bills are now pending, and the only one with sponsors from both parties deals with measurement.
Eight years from private feeling to government portfolio
Until 2018, no country had a Minister for Loneliness. Eight years later, the idea has travelled from London to Tokyo, the World Health Assembly and the US Senate.
The UK moved first. In January 2018, Theresa May appointed Tracey Crouch as the world’s first loneliness minister. Japan followed in February 2021. The Asian powerhouse created an Office for Measures to Combat Loneliness and Isolation and appointed its own minister, which made it the second country to do so. Two governments, two ministers and one shared premise: loneliness is a matter for public policy, not only for families and friends.
The United States came at the problem from the public health side. In May 2023, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory declaring an epidemic of loneliness and isolation and calling for a National Strategy to Advance Social Connection. Japan passed its Act on the Advancement of Measures to Address Loneliness and Isolation the same year, and the law took effect in April 2024, requiring local governments to act.
The pace picked up in 2025. Utah adopted its resolution in March. Two months later, the World Health Assembly adopted its first resolution on social connection, and in June, the WHO Commission on Social Connection published its report on the scale of the problem. Fast forward to June 2026, Sen. Chris Murphy reintroduced two bills in the Senate, and by August, the topic had reached a primary forum in rural Massachusetts.
The pattern is worth noticing. Each step built on the one before it: first a minister, then a second one, then a public health warning, then laws, resolutions and bills. Every step came from recognising the problem, and none arose from having a fix that was known to work.
Infographic 1: Loneliness became a government portfolio in eight years
Lonely people vote differently — and the effect is not small
Why is loneliness a political issue and not just a health one? Mostly because of a finding that hasn’t made it into much mainstream loneliness politics coverage: it seems to shift how people vote.
That comes from a paper published in Social Science & Medicine in January 2025, which set out to test whether lonelier people lean toward the populist radical right. The authors ran the numbers 25 different ways, across four population samples totaling 40,852 people in nine countries. Dutch data alone supplied 15 of those tests, going back to 2008. Germany contributed two more samples, and Austria, Croatia, Denmark, France, Hungary, Sweden and Switzerland were each tested once, all using 2017 data.
In the Netherlands, the direction held across every single test: lonelier people were more likely to back the populist radical right in all 15. Eleven of those hit statistical significance, with odds ratios running from 1.1 up to 1.38. Denmark cleared the bar too, at 1.2 (90% CI 1.01–1.42). The other seven countries didn’t reach significance on their own, and the authors say plainly that those tests were underpowered. So treating this as a nine-country finding oversells what nine countries actually showed.
One comparison from the paper is worth noting: the authors say these effect sizes are roughly on par with loneliness’s known links to high blood pressure, heart disease and depression. In other words, loneliness predicts a person’s vote about as well as it predicts their blood pressure, which, for a legislator, is a modest claim more than a dramatic one. It’s not describing some identifiable bloc of swing voters, but indicating isolation shows up in electoral data at roughly the size health researchers already take seriously.
Loneliness and political extremism deserve some care as a phrase. Odds ratios of 1.1 to 1.38 aren’t large. They describe a slight tilt spread across entire populations, not a profile that fits any one person, and nothing about this research suggests lonely people pose a danger.
There’s also the direction-of-causation problem: maybe lonely people gravitate toward parties that promise belonging, or certain political leanings pull people away from friends and family in the first place, leaving them lonelier. A 2025 review in Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences is upfront about this. It calls establishing causality “problematic” and says better long-term data are needed. Anything claiming loneliness causes radicalisation is overstating what’s been shown.
Syracuse political scientist Shana Gadarian has floated a possible mechanism: face-to-face contact reinforces the norms of civil political behaviour, she argues, and makes it harder to demonise someone you disagree with once you’ve talked to them. That’s a theory, not a finding, but it’s part of why this keeps coming up in political circles.
The finding that cuts both ways: they also don’t vote at all
The same 2025 review in Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences adds a detail that speeches tend to skip. Chronic loneliness is linked to radical-right populist voting and abstention. Disengagement is the other outcome.
For loneliness and democracy, the two outcomes matter in different ways. One describes a person who votes with more anger and less trust. The other describes a person who doesn’t vote at all. A democratic system loses something in both cases, since it depends on people feeling they belong to something larger than their own household.
The abstention finding also complicates a story both parties find convenient. Each side can take the radical-right result as evidence that the other side’s voters are struggling. Abstention favours neither camp. It suggests that loneliness reduces participation across the whole electorate.
The review’s caution applies here too, since it says the causal question is open and calls for better long-term data. Still, the pattern echoes an argument civic thinkers have made for decades. In Bowling Alone, published in 2000, Robert Putnam argued that as clubs, leagues and congregations thinned out, so did the habits of trust and participation that democracy relies on. The new research does not prove him right. It does put numbers on part of what he described.
Neither outcome has a simple fix at the ballot box. Both point back to the conditions in which people live, work and meet, which is where the candidates in Greenfield went looking for answers.
Three bills, and the bipartisan one spends nothing
What is the government doing about loneliness in the US? More than it did a few years ago, though almost none of it is law.
The trigger was a loneliness epidemic Surgeon General advisory. In May 2023, Vivek Murthy declared an epidemic of loneliness and isolation and called for a National Strategy to Advance Social Connection. The advisory came with no funding.
Three bills are now before Congress. Anyone searching for the Chris Murphy loneliness bill will find two, both reintroduced by the Connecticut Democrat on 17 June 2026. The National Strategy for Social Connection Act would create a permanent Office of Social Connection Policy inside the White House. The office would advise the president on how loneliness relates to the economy, public health, national security and civic engagement. It would form an advisory council spanning transportation, housing, health, education and labor, and issue national social-connection guidelines similar to those for sleep, nutrition and physical activity.
The second bill, the Addressing Social Isolation and Loneliness in Older Adults (SILO) Act, carries the funding. It’s worth noticing the split between the two: the strategy bill builds structure and guidance, while the SILO Act is the one that would send money to local organisations. It provides $62.5 million a year to area agencies on aging and community organisations, plus $5 million a year to the CDC for research on loneliness and social connection from 2026 to 2031.
The Foundation for Social Connection Action Network has endorsed it. Murphy describes social isolation as a problem running through deaths of despair, teen social anxiety and political polarisation, and says the crisis “transcends traditional political boundaries.”
Improving Measurements for Loneliness and Isolation Act of 2025 (S.3431) is the third bill. It was introduced by Nebraska Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts and New Hampshire Democrat Sen. Maggie Hassan, with a House companion, H.R.1305. It’s the only one of the three with sponsors from both parties, and it doesn’t fund anything. It directs the Department of Health and Human Services to convene a working group to standardise how loneliness and isolation are defined and measured.
Table 1 — What’s actually on the table in Congress
| Bill | Sponsors | What it does | Money |
| National Strategy for Social Connection Act | Murphy (D-CT) | White House Office of Social Connection Policy; advisory council; national guidelines | CDC research funding, unspecified |
| Addressing SILO Act | Murphy (D-CT), previously with Casey | Grants to area agencies on aging | $62.5m/yr; $5m/yr CDC, 2026–31 |
| Improving Measurements for Loneliness and Isolation Act (S.3431 / H.R.1305) | Ricketts (R-NE) + Hassan (D-NH) | HHS working group to standardise definitions and measurement | None specified |
The only bipartisan bill is the one about measurement.
Why agreeing on a definition is the hard part
Is loneliness a public health issue if nobody agrees on how to count it? The Ricketts–Hassan bill exists because of that problem. It puts two definitions into statute: isolation is “the objective lack of social relationships,” and loneliness is “a subjective feeling of being isolated.” The first can be measured by asking who someone sees. The second can only be asked about.
The difference matters for loneliness public health policy because thresholds change the answer. In one Japanese dataset, the share counted as lonely is 4.5% or 37.7%, depending on where the line falls. Japan reports 5% and Canada 14% on identical wording, and it is still hard to say how much of that gap is real. Without an agreed measure, a government struggles to decide what to fund or to tell whether it is making progress.
That may be why the measurement bill is the one both parties signed. Accepting that the problem exists is the easy part. Deciding what to spend on it comes later, and that is where the disagreement is likely to start.
Utah named loneliness a priority and appropriated $0
Statehouses have started to act, too, and state loneliness legislation shows the same pattern on a smaller scale. Utah adopted Senate Concurrent Resolution 4 (SCR 4) in March 2025, during that year’s General Session. Republicans Brady Brammer in the Senate and Steve Eliason in the House sponsored it. The resolution recognizes loneliness and social isolation as critical public health priorities. It urges individuals to build relationships, establishes the Utah Community Health Day, and cites the 2023 Surgeon General advisory as its authority.
The summary printed with the bill includes one line that says a great deal about where policy stands: “Money Appropriated in this Bill: None.”
So a Republican-sponsored resolution in a conservative state formally names loneliness a public health priority and attaches no dollars to it. The text says priorities rather than emergency, but the gap between recognition and resources is the same either way.
It helps to be exact about what Utah passed. SCR 4 is a concurrent resolution, not a law. A resolution states what a legislature thinks. It doesn’t create a program or spend money, so describing Utah as having passed a loneliness law gets it wrong, and that difference is the point.
Utah is a fair sample of American loneliness policy so far: acknowledgement, a citation to the Surgeon General, and no budget line. Murphy’s SILO Act at least names a figure, though it has not passed. The cross-party support is real in both cases, with a Republican-led resolution in Utah and a Republican–Democrat measurement bill in Washington. Until a bill with money attached passes, the country is mostly at the stage of agreeing that the problem is real.
The countries with ministers report the least loneliness. Careful.
Compare government loneliness policy across countries, and a pattern shows up. Among the four countries that ask about loneliness in identical wording (OECD, 2023–24), the two with a national loneliness office report the lowest shares of people feeling lonely “often or always.” Japan is at 5% and England 7%, against 12% in the US and 14% in Canada.
Table 2 — Policy status against prevalence
| Country | Lonely “often or always” | National loneliness office |
| Japan | 5% | Yes, since 2021 |
| England | 7% | Yes, since 2018 |
| United States | 12% | No — proposed |
| Canada | 14% | No |
Sources: OECD (2025) for prevalence; government sources for policy.
Association only: no study establishes that policy caused the difference, and both ministries were created after the problem was identified.
For anyone following the UK minister for loneliness history, it starts with the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness, set up in memory of the MP Jo Cox. In January 2018, Theresa May appointed Tracey Crouch as the world’s first loneliness minister, calling the problem “the sad reality of modern life.” Japan followed in February 2021 with an Office for Measures to Combat Loneliness and Isolation and its own minister. A law passed in 2023 took effect in April 2024 and requires local governments to act.
Does the US have a minister for loneliness? No. The nearest equivalent is the White House office that Murphy’s bill would create.
There is a catch. Canada’s rate is 2.8× Japan’s, which makes it tempting to credit the ministries. The data can’t support that. Both offices were created after the problem had been identified, so the arrow may run the other way: countries that build a social isolation policy apparatus may already have stronger social ties or better data.
Japan’s own five-wave national survey shows loneliness flat since 2021, after the minister and the law. The comparison also rests on shaky measurement, since these four are the only countries asking the question identically and, as the Ricketts–Hassan bill shows, definitions are still unsettled. No study establishes that policy caused the gap, which is why the graphic below carries a printed caveat.
Infographic 2: The two countries with a loneliness minister report the lowest rates
What candidates actually propose: third places, transit, walkability
Back in Greenfield, the answers were practical rather than statistical. “We’ve lost the public square where we connect with our neighbors,” Lora Wondolowski told the forum, adding that people have gotten so wary of offending each other that they’ve stopped engaging at all.
Corinne Coryat took a more concrete angle: walkable downtown housing, regional transit. Notably, the Recorder describes both candidates answering fluently, without missing a beat, which is its own small data point. This question doesn’t catch anyone off guard anymore.
Both were essentially describing what sociologist Ray Oldenburg named the “third place”. Somewhere that isn’t home or work, where people bump into each other without planning to, like a café, library, or a park bench.
Third places are the reason walkability keeps coming up whenever loneliness is discussed. Richard Weissbourd and colleagues at Harvard’s Making Caring Common have framed loneliness as one symptom of weaker community ties in general, which is the reasoning behind place-based fixes.
The time-use data support the sense that something has thinned out. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey, released in June 2026, shows Americans spent 35 minutes a day socialising in 2025, down from 41 in 2015. Meanwhile, the share of those who socialize at all on a given day fell from 38% to 30%. The American Psychiatric Association’s Healthy Minds Poll, fielded 10–12 January 2024 with 2,200 US adults, found 30% are lonely at least weekly and 10% daily.
The consensus may not last. Loneliness policy is unusual in currently being non-partisan, yet third places, walkability, transit and public libraries are all contested spending categories, and the Greenfield candidates reached for precisely those. Everyone can agree on the problem at no cost. Whether it survives contact with appropriations is the open question.
Nobody has shown any of it works
What would a loneliness policy that works look like? Nobody has shown yet, and that is the biggest hole in the field.
Scale isn’t really the question. The WHO Commission on Social Connection settled that on 30 June 2025, putting the number at 1 in 6 people affected worldwide, with 871,000 deaths a year associated with loneliness and isolation. A modelled estimate rather than a body count, hence the wording “associated with.”
What’s missing is proof that any of the fixes work. The UK has had a minister since 2018, Japan since 2021, and no rigorous population-level evaluation has shown that either one moved the needle. A UK Government evaluation of the 2018 loneliness strategy was searched for specifically while researching this piece and never turned up. Japan’s five-wave national survey, as noted above, shows loneliness flat since 2021.
The WHO has called for a Social Connection Index, partly because the measurement is not in place yet, which brings the discussion back to the Ricketts–Hassan working group. It is hard to evaluate a policy against a number nobody has agreed on.
The picture, then, is a strong case that loneliness is common and linked to worse outcomes, a growing number of offices, bills and resolutions, and very little evidence about what reduces it. Without an evaluation, a grant for older adults, a walkable downtown and a national guideline are all bets. They may be good ones, but they’re untested. Pilots with evaluation built in would help, and so would settling on measurement first. The political question follows: Will today’s agreement hold when someone has to write the budget?
Questions people ask
Which countries have a Minister for Loneliness?
The UK appointed the first Minister for Loneliness in January 2018. Japan followed in February 2021, later backing the post with a law that took effect in April 2024. Based on the sources reviewed, no other country has a dedicated minister. The World Health Assembly’s May 2025 resolution on social connection sets a global direction but does not create a ministerial post anywhere.
Does loneliness affect how people vote?
Research suggests a modest link. Across 40,852 people in nine countries, lonelier respondents leaned toward populist radical-right parties, and the Dutch data showed it most clearly. Nothing establishes cause, and a 2025 review also ties chronic loneliness to not voting at all.
What is the US doing?
Apparently, nothing has become law yet at the federal level. Sen. Chris Murphy has reintroduced two bills, and a bipartisan measurement bill is pending. Surprisingly, the 2023 Surgeon General advisory carried no funding.
Is loneliness a partisan issue?
Not at present. A Republican-sponsored Utah resolution and the Ricketts–Hassan bill both show agreement across parties that the problem is real. Disagreement is more likely once money is involved, because transit, walkability and libraries are already argued over in budgets.
Can policy actually reduce loneliness?
No rigorous evaluation shows a national strategy lowering loneliness at a population scale, and Japan’s survey has stayed flat since 2021. The WHO wants a Social Connection Index partly because current measurement is too patchy to judge what works.
Editorial note: This piece touches on radicalization and, at its edges, political violence, so it sticks to measured associations and makes no causal claims about any group. The research describes small differences in susceptibility across entire populations. None of it should be read as saying that lonely people are dangerous.