The Club PUBlication 04/28/2025

​HEAD START UNDER THE BUDGET GUN

Trump administration’s planned spending cuts threaten to end 60-year-old program that provides care for 800,000 kids

Story by JENNY GOLD and KATE SEQUEIRA • Photos by ALLEN J. SCHABEN • The Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES - Since President Donald Trump took office in January, Head Start centers have been unnerved by an escalating series of threats, including, most recently, total annihilation.

An end to the historic federal early childhood program would leave about 800,000 low-income children across the U.S. without access to child care, medical screenings, and nutritious food.

First came the executive order to temporarily freeze all federal financial aid in January, when Head Start staff suddenly couldn't access the funds they had been promised. Although the memo was rescinded days later, dozens of centers reported that they couldn't access their funds for weeks; unable to meet payroll, some were forced to shutter for a few days.

On Feb. 14, scores of federal staffers were laid off at Health and Human Services' Office of Head Start in Washington, D.C. And on April 1, the administration announced that five of the 12 regional offices managing relationships with Head Start grantees would be closed immediately and all employees laid off.

Now the very existence of the program is imperiled: A leaked draft of the administration's budget proposal for the Department of Health and Human Services would defund Head Start and phase the program out by 2026, a move that would slash a critical safety net for families who otherwise could not afford child care and the other comprehensive services they receive.

In addition, the draft budget calls for terminating an array of HHS initiatives dedicated to helping families with newborns and young children. Programs slated for elimination include Healthy Start, which is dedicated to healthy pregnancies and births, newborn screenings for heritable disorders and hearing, infant and early childhood mental health, childhood lead poisoning, family planning and drowning prevention.

While the document does not represent a final decision, it will serve as a guidepost for Trump's 2026 budget, which must then be approved by Congress. The White House referred the Times to OMB for comment, where the communications director, Rachel Cauley, did not deny the contents of the memo. "No final funding decisions have been made," Cauley said.

The plan, if approved, would represent a fundamental retraction of the federal government's longtime role in helping families with young children have a healthy start in the critical early years of life, said Elisabeth Wright Burak, who studies child health policy at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy's Center for Children and Families.

"That's really unprecedented damage to the social safety net for families," said Burak. Alongside the proposed mass cuts to Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for low-income Americans, she said, "I would worry it would do irreparable damage."

The proposed actions are also antithetical to Trump's campaign promise to be pro-family, and Vice President JD Vance's pledge to shore up the nation's fragile and high-cost child-care industry, especially the proposal to eliminate Head Start, early childhood experts said.

"It's just terrifying on every level," said Stacey Scarborough, who runs the Early Head Start program at Venice Family Clinic, which serves 376 pregnant women, infants and toddlers, and was the past president of the Head Start California Association. "It's terrifying for the community, it's terrifying for the staff, it's terrifying for the families, and it's just terrifying for the future."

An existential threat
Head Start was founded in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson's "War on Poverty," and has served more than 40 million children over the past six decades. The program — which is celebrating its 60th birthday this year — was set to receive more than $12 billion in funding for the current year.

The program has came under attack several times over the decades, most recently during the presidential election last year, when Project 2025 called for the program to be terminated on the grounds that it is "fraught with scandal and abuse" and has "little or no longterm academic value for children."

Russell Vought, one of Project 2025's principal architects, now serves as the director of the Office of Management and Budget, which authored the budget draft.

"This elimination is consistent with the Administration's goals of returning education to the States and increasing parental choice," OMB wrote in the draft budget . "The Federal government should not be in the business of mandating curriculum, locations, and performance standards for any form of education."

The Head Start program, however, does not mandate a particular curriculum to centers, and it is one of several child-care programs offered to low income families.

Decades of research point to the positive impacts of Head Start on children, including improved cognitive and social-emotional development, though a federal study found that some of these effects fade out over time.

Bipartisan support wavers
Head Start has had longtime support from Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Last year, 33 House Republicans signed a letter urging the Appropriations committee "to fund Head Start at the highest level the Subcommittee deems possible." And many Republican members announce Head Start grants to their district as a point of pride.
"The effort right now is to give those bipartisan members — including many Republican members — the tools they need to push back," said Sarah Rittling, executive director of the nonpartisan First Five Years Fund, which lobbies Congress on early childhood education.

The stark political divide and vast appetite for cost reduction this year in Washington, however, mean it's unclear how many Republicans will be willing to pledge their support for Head Start.

Trump has targeted Head Start's funding before, albeit unsuccessfully. In his 2018 presidential budget, he proposed to cut funding to the Head Start program by $85 million and by $29 billion in 2019; neither proposal passed.

This time, the threats are far more serious.
The Head Start program has long been a target among conservative thinkers at the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute.

"The country is just too big and too diverse for bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., to really know what education should look like in random towns or cities around America," said Colleen Hroncich, an education policy analyst at Cato, who points to federal research that found the positive effects of the Head Start program fade out by third grade. Head Start should be phased out slowly, she said, to allow states and churches to fill the affordable child-care gap left behind.

Administrators of programs that are supposed to begin their next fiscal year May 1 say they have not received the next round of funding.
So far this year, there has been a nearly $1 billion shortfall in Head Start funding compared to the same period in 2024, according to an Associated Press report.

"What I worry about with this administration is it's like a game of whack-amole," said Katie Hamm, who served as the deputy assistant secretary for early childhood development during the Biden Administration. "There's a funding issue on Monday, and then some programs close, and then the funding starts to flow, and then there's another issue ... at some point, this death by 1,000 cuts will be effective."

"[Head Start cuts are] really unprecedented damage to the social safety net for families."

​
Elisabeth Wright Burak, who studies child health policy at the Georgetown University