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President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act is set to not just add trillions to the national deficit, but also strip low-income communities of a longstanding nutritional program that advocates say will increase health risks with only minimal budget savings.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education, or SNAP-Ed, is on the chopping block in Trump’s tax and immigration bill after the House Agriculture Committee first proposed cutting the program last month, calling it “ineffective” and saying it hasn’t led to meaningful changes, but without sharing supporting evidence. The bill passed the House and last week the Senate released a similar version for consideration.
The 33-year-old program is designed to help SNAP users make their benefits ― formerly known as food stamps ― stretch, while also teaching them how to prepare healthy meals and lead physically active lifestyles in order to reduce nutrition-related chronic disease, such as obesity.
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Studies have shown a strong correlation between food insecurity and poor health outcomes.
“We’ve had a really large outpouring of people who are upset because this is something that people have grown to love and expect every year,” Kristin McCartney, the director of West Virginia’s SNAP-Ed program, told HuffPost of her community’s response.
Though news of the program’s potential elimination has been largely overlooked due to the billions in cuts proposed to the entire SNAP program, McCartney said it will have sweeping effects.
Annually, she said her state’s program, which costs about $2.31 per participant, reaches around 11,000 children and 1,100 adults through direct education in school settings.
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The “Grow This” program, which is a statewide campaign to help people learn how to garden, has separately reached 11,000 households, totaling around 90,000 people directly, she said.
A third program called “Kids Market,” which teaches children how to make healthy food choices at the grocery store, saw 7,000 participants last year.
“In the conversations we’ve had with staffers, they really aren’t familiar with the program.”
– Kristin McCartney, director of West Virginia’s SNAP-Ed program
“Not only are we directly in the schools and working with people in the communities — teaching them nutrition, life skills, anything from cooking to budgeting to growing their own food — we actually are serving a vital role in building a food system that focuses on farmers and local economies,” she said. “It’s not just enough to throw a vegetable or fruit in front of a child. They really need a lot of support to develop those food preferences, and that’s not only for the child but the parent.”
It’s not clear that the lawmakers pushing for its elimination actually understand what the program does, said McCartney.
“In the conversations we’ve had with staffers, they really aren’t familiar with the program,” she said, while pointing to the committee’s use of “old data” to justify the cut.
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The House committee cited a 2019 study by the Government Accountability Office in language supporting the program’s elimination. That study did not conclude that the program is ineffective, as the committee said, only that more information should be gathered to ensure that the program was meeting its goals.
A committee spokesperson when reached by HuffPost about the discrepancy, pointed to two older studies, published in 2013 and 2012, which also did not make such conclusions. Instead, both studies reported “significant” improvement in SNAP-Ed participants’ food choices. They did not provide any additional data when asked.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has meanwhile touted SNAP-Ed as strengthening SNAP’s public health impact using evidence-based programming. It reaches 1.7 million people annually, according to Cornell University, and accounted for just .04% of SNAP’s total budget in 2021, according to a study published last year in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior (JNEB).
The JNEB study also concluded that the SNAP-Ed program has proven itself to be “a critical pillar in the nation’s public health infrastructure.”
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“Every dollar counts when you’re doing a budget, but to look at it in terms of what the impact is, and what the outreach is for the cost, it really pales in comparison to other cuts that are being made,” said McCartney.
A representative with New York state’s SNAP-Ed program, which reached over 2.2 million individuals last year through its various services and activities, similarly called it “essential.”
“As with other related cuts and cost shifts proposed by Congressional Republicans, cutting funding for nutrition education does nothing to help Americans and only increases the risk of New Yorkers in need experiencing food insecurity and economic hardship,” the representative said in a statement.
Republicans have pushed for massive cuts to the overall SNAP program by arguing that its expenses have unjustifiably ballooned in recent years, despite enrollment only minimally rising.
SNAP expenses have nearly doubled from $60 billion to $110 billion since 2019. Despite that spending surge, enrollment has only grown by 14% — from 36 million to 42 million, the House committee said.
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“Meanwhile, states that administer the program collectively make close to $13 billion per year in erroneous payments ― both overpayments and underpayments ― to participants in the SNAP program. This number has nearly doubled since 2019,” House Committee on Agriculture Chairman Glenn “GT” Thompson said last month while making the case for the cuts.
A USDA spokesperson, reached for comment about the program’s potential slashing, said USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins supports Trump’s agenda and that if SNAP-Ed is eliminated, low-income families can fall back on the USDA’s separate Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program (EFNEP).
This program is similar to the SNAP-Ed program in that it offers nutrition education, but specifically to low-income families, children, adult caregivers, and pregnant women or teenagers, regardless of SNAP enrollment. It assists far fewer people than the SNAP-Ed program, according to figures posted online.
EFNEP reaches roughly 650,000 adults and youth annually, according to its website, while SNAP-Ed reaches roughly 1.7 million directly and millions more through other approaches, according to a comparison by Cornell University.
CORRECTION: This story has been amended to clarify who qualifies for EFNEP.