The Trump administration has eliminated funding for SNAP-Ed, a nutrition education program meant to help low-income families in Connecticut eat healthier and prevent obesity.
SNAP-Ed funds organizations like the Hispanic Health Council, which provide nutrition workshops, cooking classes and healthy food education to schools and communities.
“The goal was to empower people who receive SNAP or the food assistance to be able to shop for and eat healthier diets,” said Valerie Duffy, a dietitian with the University of Connecticut. “Because it's challenging for anyone to eat a healthy diet, but especially if you have a limited food budget.”
She said that, in general, people don't eat healthy across the United States. Only a little more than half of all Americans meet the baseline for healthy eating.
“And individuals with lower incomes have less healthy diets because healthy food costs more,” Duffy said. “People gravitate to processed foods or ultra-processed foods because they're cheaper. It costs more to eat healthy.”
Connecticut was supposed to receive $4.6 million for SNAP-Ed in 2025, but that funding will expire on Oct. 1.
Duffy said the Trump administration justified the cuts by eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse because they didn’t prevent obesity, as the transcript from the House Appropriations Committee for Agriculture referred to. But she disagrees.
“Obesity is a chronic condition, meaning there are many causes and many things that contribute to obesity,” she said. “The idea that a simple program that's intended to help people eat healthier would be the only way you could cure obesity is ridiculous. And it’s insulting to those who actually work very hard in any kind of capacity to empower people to eat healthier.”
Duffy said that without these services, families will have less support in accessing healthy food, and food insecurity is expected to rise.
“I think it's counterintuitive to say that we want to improve the health of the United States or ‘make America healthy again’ and say that the reason why we're not healthy is because we eat too much processed food, or because there are dyes in food, or something," Duffy said. "And here is a program that actually tries to empower people to eat healthy by giving them the knowledge and the skills to be able to shop and prepare to read food labels, to know what foods they need to, and improve their health, especially if they have certain health needs.”
Advocates say dozens of staff members, including nutritionists and outreach workers, may lose their jobs. The cuts also impact the broader economy, hurting local farms, grocery stores and food suppliers.
And they say fewer people will be able to afford or learn about healthy eating, which could hurt public health.
Jennifer McGarry, a professor in educational leadership at UConn, said she could see this coming.
“We knew that federal grants were being targeted across all different institutions,” McGarry said. “The SNAP-Ed grant originates from the US Department of Agriculture. So, when the House of Representatives Agriculture Committee shared some of their agenda and talking points around the big bill, SNAP-Ed was specifically named as something that was unnecessary, ineffective, and a waste of taxpayers' dollars.”
But McGarry said they’re pursuing every possible option to get money elsewhere.
“This is a lot of money,” she said. “So, realistically, there's not one source where the state of Connecticut is going to come up with $4.7 million to keep all these programs running.”
She also said that this grant goes to every state and territory in the United States, so Connecticut is not alone.
“There are also some larger national advocacy groups in Washington fighting to reinstate the funds,” she said. “But in the meantime, we have to try and figure out if there are other places we can find funding to try and keep some of our work going, to keep some of our partnerships intact in the event that other money comes to us, whether it's through other grants or fundraising or some kind of reinstatement of the federal funds, but there's no one clear path to try and recoup that amount of money.”
