Nine staff members at the University of Rhode Island face the elimination of their positions at the end of September as another round of President Donald Trump’s budget cuts hit the university.
On July 4, President Trump signed the federal reconciliation bill, or the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a federally funded program assisting low-income families with food benefits, took the largest budget cut in the program’s history, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The budget cuts a United States Department of Agriculture grant that funds SNAP-ed, an educational program for those on food assistance, according to University of Rhode Island SNAP-ed Program Manager Kate Balestracci. The cut eliminates the positions of seven full time employees and two part-time employees on Sept. 30.
URI’s SNAP-ed program works with over 100 community partners to educate community participants on how to make healthy food more affordable, Balestracci said. The program also works in policy system and environment work, which aims to make healthy choices easier over time.
“We hear often anecdotes from people just saying that, you know, I never knew how to look at a food label before,” Heidi Hetzler, URI SNAP-ed program coordinator, said. “We get a lot of feedback from the community that our resources and education really helped them.”
In 2024, 1,887 Rhode Islanders attended SNAP-ed food and nutrition workshops, according to a SNAP-ed Impact Report.
“I’m worried that there’s going to be a lot of people and community partners that don’t have anybody to reach out to, you know, when they need this information,” Hetzler said.
As the end of September, and the end of the program’s federal funding approaches, SNAP-ed employees are doing their best to wind down activity responsibly, Balestracci said. In an attempt to continue offering resources, URI’s College of Health Sciences will be maintaining the SNAP-ed websites.
While a majority of SNAP-ed funding comes from the USDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Department of Health partner with the program under smaller grants, Hetzler said. Those grants finance projects related to the early childcare community, delivering boxes of fresh local produce to childcare sites in low-income areas.
SNAP-ed staff at URI are completely funded by the USDA grant, Hetzler said. When the One Big Beautiful Bill became a topic of national interest this summer, staff knew there was a chance cuts would be made.
“We did know pretty early on that it was potentially going to be an issue for us, although I don’t think anybody quite anticipated a full defunding,” Hetzler said.
The SNAP-ed program isn’t the first at URI to be defunded due to cuts from the Trump Administration. In March, 11 URI employees were fired after projects from the United States Agency for International Development were defunded.
Despite the university firings in March, SNAP-ed staff didn’t see the layoffs coming, according to Balestracci.
“It was starting to become increasingly worrisome as they started to defund other nutrition, like local food programs and local food access programs and things like that,” Balestracci said.
One SNAP-ed staff member was able to relocate to another small grant project part-time in the office, but the other eight are left unemployed by the university when funding ends on Sept. 30, Balestracci said.
URI Human Resources has tried to make affected employees aware of other jobs available at the university, but they don’t fit into their specialties, Hetzler said.
“I think a lot of us are at a crossroads of trying to figure out how do we stay in the field if we really want to, or do we have to pivot to something else for a bit?” Hetzler said.
On the national level, 100,000 SNAP-ed employees are being laid off, Balestracci said.
“There really isn’t much out there in the public health realm right now because so much of public health is grant funded, and so much of those grants are federal funded,” Balestracci said.
Both Balestracci and Hetzler have yet to line up employment opportunities for when funding runs out.
