Head Start is the poster child for public spending. The 60-year-old program and its newer offshoot, Early Head Start, currently provide preschool and child care for roughly 800,000 children in low-income families. Studies find that the programs boost kids’ health and school readiness, increase their earnings in adulthood and their chances to attend college and reduce their likelihood of crime. These programs are so popular that many centers have long waitlists, and they’re so successful that Head Start’s $12 billion-a-year budget effectively pays for itself.
So why does the White House have Head Start and Early Head Start on the chopping block? Especially given that The New York Times reports that “advocates of boosting the birthrate have been meeting with White House aides,” according to four sources.
Unlike other anti-poverty programs, like welfare and food stamps, Head Start recipients aren’t burdened with counterproductive work requirements.
The “problem” with Head Start is that its success counters the administration’s narrative of “waste, fraud and abuse” in government spending and disrupts its efforts to create a highly precarious class of people to exploit. The gutting of Head Start would force vulnerable people to labor in more difficult or demeaning conditions for the benefit of big corporations, billionaires and other privileged people.
Consider, for example, what eliminating Head Start would do to mothers. Without Head Start, hundreds of thousands of these women would likely have to settle for less-than-ideal partners, less-than-ideal child care or less-than-ideal jobs.
Unlike other anti-poverty programs, like welfare and food stamps, Head Start recipients aren’t burdened with counterproductive work requirements. So, rather than have to take the first low-paying, entry-level jobs they can find, mothers often use their children’s enrollment in Head Start as opportunities to develop their parenting skills and get more involved in their communities. Many even go back to school themselves, gaining the knowledge and credentials they need to set themselves up for better jobs long term.
Head Start also connects mothers with other government services, facilitating enrollment in programs like welfare, food stamps and Medicaid. This helps to ensure that families receive all the assistance for which they qualify, lessens the stigma around government support and reduces pressure on mothers to find ways to make ends meet financially or to find partners who can provide that financial support.
To understand the consequences of eliminating Head Start, it’s useful to examine what happens under the current system to families who need but can’t access Head Start services, whether because they live far from the available Head Start centers, they get stuck on waitlists that prioritize households facing even more hardship or they make just a little bit too much money to qualify.
Take, for example, a mom I interviewed in my research for my recent book. For privacy reasons, I’ll call her Tara. Tara, who grew up in a rural community in Indiana, got pregnant in high school in 2013. Her white, evangelical Christian family persuaded her to have the baby and marry her high school boyfriend, rather than finish her degree. Tara and her husband both found full-time jobs at a manufacturing facility, and their combined income was roughly $40,000 a year.
Precarity limits people’s choices, and limited choices make people easier to exploit. That income wasn’t high enough to afford market rates for child care, but it was too high to qualify for Early Head Start. Though, even if Tara qualified, the nearest Early Head Start Center was more than 15 miles away, and in the opposite direction from work. Ultimately, then, Tara asked her mother to care for her daughter, paying her what money she could. That choice, though, came with its own complications, because Tara’s mom struggled with drug addiction and alcohol abuse. Those struggles eventually led to a falling-out between Tara and her mother when Tara learned that her mother had sold her dog for money for drugs. Tara decided that she could no longer trust her mom to provide child care and opted to leave the workforce and stay home full time, instead. That transition, plus the stress of living on one income, took a toll on Tara’s relationship with her husband. They divorced in 2019, just before Tara gave birth to their third child. The following year, though, Tara’s ex-husband lost his job at the manufacturing facility during the Covid-19 pandemic. He ended up moving back into Tara’s 500-square-foot mobile home—and, like many men, leaning heavily on her for emotional support. All of this has exacted a cost on Tara’s mental health. She told me that she frequently suffers from panic attacks but that she hasn’t sought treatment, because she’s worried about paying the out-of-pocket costs. Instead, she tries to find a quiet place to hide for a minute — not an easy feat in the mobile home’s tight quarters — and use breathing techniques to calm herself down so she can be patient with her ex-husband and their kids. Eliminating Head Start and Early Head Start risks pushing more families into this kind of precarity. And, arguably, that kind of precarity is the point. Because precarity limits people’s choices, and limited choices make people easier to exploit. Sadly, it seems this White House may be just fine with that.
Jessica Calarco
Dr. Jessica Calarco is a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and the author of "Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net." 
