It’s there in black and white in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership: “Eliminate the Head Start program.” During his campaign, candidate Donald Trump tried to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation’s political playbook after it became increasingly unpopular the more people learned about it. But since his inauguration, Trump and his administration have followed the conservative blueprint closely as they hack away at the U.S. government. Head Start, the federal preschool program for low-income families, could be next to go.
We recently looked at the administration’s assault on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees Head Start. Meanwhile, five of Head Start’s 12 regional offices have been abruptly shuttered, and shortly after that, the entire program was targeted. The White House is considering a budget proposal that would eliminate Head Start altogether, as USA Today reported. (The budget will have to win congressional approval to be adopted).
Head Start was created as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 War on Poverty agenda. The program expanded in 1995 to include earlier care through Early Head Start, which provides for expectant mothers and infants from birth through age three. Throughout its history, Head Start has enjoyed bipartisan support.
Research over the last several decades has demonstrated the importance of early care and education in brain development, and there is abundant evidence that it boosts educational attainment and provides lifelong benefits. Head Start, which serves over 800,000 infants, toddlers and children a year, is a key part of the nation’s early care landscape, serving low-income families in particular.
Philanthropy, of course, plays an important part in backing early childhood care and education. But as Shannon Rudisill, the executive director of the Early Childhood Funders Collaborative, pointed out, private funders’ role has been to build on the government’s foundational investment in programs like Head Start — not replace them.
If anything, the U.S. needs more early care options and more government support for early education, not less. The pandemic laid bare and exacerbated the nation’s child care crisis — not only is quality child care hard to find, it is also increasingly difficult for families to afford. And as early care centers face rising costs, wages for early care educators remain unsustainable, which leaves many centers struggling to find teachers. The Center for American Progress has estimated that close to 51% of Americans live in child care deserts; that is, mostly rural and disadvantaged communities where it is close to impossible to find care — including many areas where voters favor Trump. Eliminating Head Start in the face of this crisis will make matters far, far worse.
The Trump administration’s attacks on Head Start have set off alarm bells among early childhood education advocates — including funders who make early childhood a priority. Philanthropy’s commitment in this area has grown in recent years, but it is still far smaller than the need demands.
Pointing to the many U.S. families that rely on Head Start, Rudisill said this: ”My message is that this is an all-hands-on-deck moment for everyone who cares about the health and wellbeing of children living in poverty — for everyone who cares about children.”
Head Start’s many benefits
Head Start programs not only promote healthy child development and kindergarten readiness; they provide health screenings and flag developmental and other issues that may warrant early intervention. In addition, Head Start provides parenting resources and support for families, while making it possible for parents to work. In rural regions and for some Native American tribes, Head Start is often the only provider available.
Rudisill, who previously worked in the Administration for Children and Families at HHS, said that Head Start and Early Head Start have been centers of innovation, developing models that have informed other early care programs. She pointed to the Ideal Head Start Network, created by the Trust for Learning, which brings Head Start providers together in a community of practice to ensure that children in the programs receive high-quality early learning experiences.
Head Start programs provide many additional benefits, as well, including vital support for families. “During the pandemic, Head Start pivoted to become a lifeline,” Rudisill said. “Head Start holds a philosophy that they are not there to just be a preschool; they support children no matter what’s needed. So during COVID, they drove out to deliver diapers, they delivered groceries, and they stood outside the door to offer families advice and support — they did this for months.”
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Head Start offices shuttered, staff fired, programs threatened
The administration’s decision to close five Head Start regional offices earlier this month has already created confusion and gaps in services. The closures were immediate and out of the blue, according to Katie Hamm, who was deputy assistant secretary for early childhood development at the Administration for Children and Families during the Biden administration. Hamm, now a visiting professor at the Erickson Institute, has been in close touch with many Head Start employees who lost their jobs.
“On a Tuesday, employees went to work and their badges didn’t work, and most of them couldn’t get in the building,” she said. “There was no warning, and within hours, they lost access to all their files and their email. So there was no opportunity for them to transfer work, to do a warm handoff and make sure there was follow-through on the projects they were working on.”
Hamm explained that Head Start’s regional office staff work closely with the providers in their regions, overseeing funding, making sure providers get training and technical assistance, and ensuring quality. “The regional staff play a pretty unique role, because it’s a federal-to-local program,” she said. “So now, more than half the country is in a place where they simply don’t have a regional office because there was no transition plan. There was no followup to explain what was going on. They’re just totally in the dark.”
Even if Head Start isn’t eliminated altogether, Hamm is concerned about what the administration’s actions to date will mean for children and families, as well as those running childcare centers under the Head Start program. She also lamented the loss of talent, given the many years of experience of those who lost their jobs.
“It’s heartbreaking because people in early childhood are cut from a different cloth, in my biased opinion,” she said. “People generally take salaries that are lower than what they can earn in other industries or other sectors. They make that trade-off and they work more than 40 hours a week to get the job done, so to see them treated like this — it’s humiliating and it’s disrespectful and it doesn’t honor their work. Many of them are going to struggle to pay their rent or their mortgage, and they have kids in college and student loans. But they’re not talking about that. To a person, people have told me, ‘I just want my job back. I just want to be able to do the work I care about.’”
For early childhood educators, the cuts — and threats of more cuts — from the Trump administration have created deep uncertainty and fear, as the Trust for Learning found when it sent a survey to its Head Start partners around the country. “I am pretty anxious about the current climate, job security, lack of empathy about others,” a Head Start provider from Oklahoma responded. A Kentucky-based Head Start provider wrote, “There is so much good work to do that gets interrupted with every EO [Executive Order] or rumor that comes out.”
Just yesterday, parent advocacy groups and a coalition of Head Start providers sued HHS, “challenging the Trump administration’s coordinated and unlawful efforts to dismantle the Head Start program,” according to the ACLU.
“Philanthropy cannot fill the gaps if that public investment isn’t there”
Eliminating Head Start makes no sense, given its many benefits for children and families and the fact that it makes up just 0.18% of the federal budget. Over the long run, it’s clear that scrapping the program will cost far more than it saves.
Shannon Rudisill’s organization, the Early Childhood Funders Collaborative, is encouraging members to participate in advocacy and to invest in family advocacy programs to educate parents about what the cuts will mean. “This is a time for funders to stay in touch with grantees and the nonprofit community to figure out what the needs are,” she said.
ECFC’s members include a long list of major funders, but even collectively, Rudisill said they can’t fill the need that eliminating Head Start would leave in its wake. Moreover, as service providers and advocates have argued across a range of issue areas that have felt Trump’s cuts, it’s not just about dollars alone. Especially in cases like Head Start, where a program has been in place for a while, even if private funders could muster the financial resources to fill the gap, other things like program infrastructure, personnel and expertise will take a lot longer to replace. Meanwhile, as with cuts to USAID, medical research, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — the list goes on — countless people will suffer, now and into the future.
“That has always been the bedrock for us; philanthropy cannot fill the gaps if that public investment isn’t there,” Rudisill said. “Our members are a diverse group and we don’t agree on everything, but what brings us together is our care for young children. And one thing we hold in common is the belief that early care and education is a public good, and that there has to be public investment.”
