Federal legislation signed in July 2025 eliminated funding for SNAP-Ed, the largest public-sector nutrition and physical activity education and promotion program in the US. A new research brief from the Nutrition Policy Institute details how California local health departments, or LHDs, worked to wind-down their SNAP-Ed programs, which operated in settings such as schools, early care and education sites, and food pantries, and reached over 2.5 million Californians with education and policy, systems, and environmental change efforts.
Nearly all LHDs reported engaging in one or more activities to sustain or transition their nutrition and physical activity programming, most commonly offering train-the-trainer sessions to partner organizations (74% of LHDs), providing written guidance to partners (68%), and identifying or applying for new funding (46%).
Even with these transition efforts, most local health departments expect only limited continuity of their programming. Nearly three-quarters of LHDs (73%) anticipate that less than half or none of the programming previously supported by SNAP-Ed will continue after the funding ends. As one local health department representative shared, “While efforts have been made to sustain select initiatives through partnerships and integration into other programs, maintaining the same level of reach and impact will be a challenge without dedicated funding and infrastructure.”
These findings illustrate the monumental impacts of the loss of SNAP-Ed funding on health promotion infrastructure in California.
The research brief was created by Carolyn Rider, Janice Kao, and Miranda Westfall Brown from the Nutrition Policy Institute. This work was conducted as part of a contract with the California Department of Public Health with funding from the United States Department of Agriculture Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.