The Associated Press reported this week that Head Start centers across the country have received “nearly $1 billion less in federal money compared with this time last year,” and it has reached the point at which some preschool classrooms for low-income children have had to close their doors.
If the White House has its way, the Head Start program won’t just have to worry about cuts to its funding, it will have to worry about the elimination of its funding.
The Washington Post reported this week on a budget draft, known as a “passback,” prepared by Donald Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services, which showed “the first full look at the health and social service priorities of President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget as it prepares to send his 2026 fiscal year budget request to Congress.”
The 64-page document, which hasn’t been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, points to a wide variety of brutal and potentially dangerous budget priorities, and it included a reference to Head Start that deserves to be taken seriously:
Money for the Head Start program, which provides early child care and education for low-income families and is funded by HHS’s Administration for Children and Families, would be eliminated. ‘The federal government should not be in the business of mandating curriculum, locations and performance standards for any form of education,’ the document says.
To be sure, this doesn’t necessarily mean that federal funding for Head Start will disappear altogether. It will be up to Congress to make the final call on appropriations. But if the Post’s report is accurate, this draft budget plan suggests Trump and his team want federal funding for Head Start to disappear altogether — just as the Project 2025 blueprint directed them to do.
American voters who backed the Republican ticket last year might not have realized that this is what they were voting for last fall, but here we are.
Throughout his lengthy career, Joe Biden has said, “Show me your budget; I’ll tell you what you value.” Evidently, the Trump administration doesn’t value Head Start.
Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee and a senior member and former chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, said in a written statement, “While families feel the crunch with a worsening child care crisis and much higher daily costs thanks to Trump’s tariffs, President Trump wants to eliminate Head Start and kick hundreds of thousands of kids out of the classroom, fire teachers, and make child care and early learning more expensive and less safe.
“This administration believes we cannot afford to help families get preschool or help kids get basic health services, but we can afford trillions of dollars more in tax breaks for billionaires. It’s offensive and just plain wrong.”
Tommy Sheridan, deputy director of the National Head Start Association, came to a similar conclusion, telling the Post, in reference to the White House’s apparent plan, “It would be catastrophic. More than a million parents wouldn’t be able to go to work from all those children, or they would have to scramble to find some other type of option. In a lot of communities, Head Start is the only early childhood provider in the community — especially rural America.”
