A massive tax package touted by President Donald Trump contains federal cuts to a program that provides nutrition and lifestyle education to families on Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
Last week, the House Committee on Agriculture passed $300 billion in cuts to SNAP as part of Trump’s tax and spending plan, making states shoulder a percentage of the cost. The bill is currently going through the House, and Trump and GOP allies are pushing to pass it before the Memorial Day weekend.
“We ensure that SNAP works the way Congress intended it to, by reinforcing work, rooting out waste, and instituting long-overdue accountability incentives to control costs and end executive and state overreach,” said Chairman Glenn “GT” Thompson, a Pennsylvania Republican.
These cuts would jeopardize federal funding for SNAP Education, or SNAP-Ed, said Ellyn Cochran, president and CEO of Quality Care for Children, a Georgia organization providing assistance with nutritional and educational care for young children.
“Food insecurity is prevalent throughout the country and here in Georgia, and we want to continue to see those resources that support families and their young children accessing healthy nutritious foods,” she said.
Without SNAP-Ed programming, Cochran added, people could lack information on healthy ways to spend their SNAP dollars.
“The impact then is families are really left on their own to navigate and understand how to make those dollars stretch, what resources are available to them through that,” Cochran said.
Georgia received $10.5 million in SNAP-Ed funding out of a total $536 million for FY 2025. In total, nearly 40,000 low-income Georgians received nutrition education through the program in 2024, according to the 2024 Georgia SNAP-Ed impact report, and more than 1.5 million qualify for the program.
Ben Goldey, communications director for the House Committee on Agriculture, wrote in an email that the Trump administration has proposed ending SNAP-Ed during Trump’s first term.
“The FY19 and FY21 Trump Administration budgets proposed eliminating SNAP-Ed due to these programs being duplicative and ineffective. The budgets stated that nutrition education is widely accessible through many public and non-profit government programs and highlighted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funds similar programming,” he wrote.
QCC is a grantee of SNAP-Ed funding and has used it to promote nutrition programming across the state. This includes educating children about locally-grown foods and helping build teaching gardens at Head Start programs.
“We share a lot of resources because, not only do we want to make sure that kids have access to healthy foods … but if the kids don’t want to eat that food, are they really any better off?” Cochran said. “So these educational programs really get kids excited about the food, about local food, about food grown in their communities.”
Nutritional education also helps mitigate health care costs later in life, Cochran said. According to a Virginia study cited by the official USDA SNAP-Ed website, every dollar spent implementing programs like SNAP-Ed results in up to $10.64 in health care cost savings.
“Not everyone is on SNAP forever, right? People sometimes need this support for a short period of time, and what we know is that the educational component is something that goes with them, even as they move off of that public benefit and it will impact their long-term health over the course of their lives and their children’s lives,” she said.
