By Leah Douglas and Nathan Frandino
WASHINGTON/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -On a warm September day in the courtyard of a San Francisco senior living community, a dozen residents shake their hips and throw their hands in the air to the beat of, fittingly, Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September.”
Their hour-long dance class is hosted by Leah’s Pantry, a nonprofit that has run nutrition and health programs around the city since 2006. For Kengsoi Chou Lei, a 72-year-old retiree who came to the U.S. from Macau in 1995, attending the weekly class has taught her that “exercise makes you healthier, more relaxed and happier overall,” she said in Cantonese through an interpreter.
The organization’s class schedule will soon shrink as Leah’s Pantry faces a 90% funding loss from federal cuts passed in July as part of President Donald Trump’s tax-cut and spending bill.
Schools, food banks and other organizations are rushing to wind down nutrition and health programming once funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education, known as SNAP-Ed, according to eight state officials and nonprofit organizations interviewed by Reuters.
The program was eliminated by Trump’s spending bill, effective September 30.
“It’s definitely like a catastrophic situation for public health nutrition,” said Leah’s Pantry founder and executive director Adrienne Markworth.
The cuts represent the first wave of reductions from the bill to federal nutrition programs, which also hiked work requirements for aid recipients and will eventually force significant nutrition spending onto states.
Republican lawmakers that passed the bill argued SNAP-Ed is ineffective and redundant, claims program supporters reject.
The USDA did not respond to a request for comment.
CUT PROGRAM SUPPORTED MAHA GOALS
Since 1992, the USDA has spent more than $9 billion on SNAP-Ed, agency data shows. Land-grant universities and public health departments typically funnel the federal dollars to organizations serving low-income communities with programs like cooking classes and school gardens.
SNAP-Ed sessions drew more than 1.8 million people in 2022, according to the USDA.
Grantees say the program supported the goals of the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again Commission, led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which Trump charged with addressing childhood chronic disease.
Lisa Kingery, CEO of the Milwaukee nonprofit organization FoodRight, which is primarily funded by SNAP-Ed, said her classes have taught more than 1,200 public school students annually to identify and cook fresh foods, which in turn has led to better family diets.
“When we cut SNAP-Ed, we’re cutting kids off from the skills they need to be healthy,” Kingery said.
The Department of Health and Human Services referred Reuters to the USDA for questions about whether cutting SNAP-Ed contradicts the administration’s MAHA goals.
Some states will end all SNAP-Ed programs after September 30. Others will stretch funds and use leftover money from 2025 to maintain a reduced schedule for the next few months while they wind down operations, state officials and organizations said.
The House Agriculture Committee in its May proposal to cut SNAP-Ed as part of the tax-cut bill pointed to a 2019 Government Accountability Office report that found gaps in how the USDA coordinated and assessed its nutrition program.
But the USDA addressed many of those concerns in recent years, said Chris Mornick, SNAP-Ed Program Manager with the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services and a leader of the Association of SNAP Nutrition Education Administrators.
It is also by far the biggest federal nutrition education program, said Cindy Long, national adviser at professional services firm Manatt and former deputy undersecretary for nutrition programs at the USDA.
“SNAP-Ed efforts were evidence-based,” Long said, “and the idea that they were duplicative doesn’t really hold up.”
(Reporting by Leah Douglas in Washington and Nathan Frandino in San Francisco; Editing by Rich Valdmanis and Bill Berkrot)
