With the release of President Trump’s budget for FY 2026 on May 2, the president has put billionaires over families yet again—but America seems to have narrowly escaped one specific terrible Trump policy idea when it comes to the Head Start program.
Though the president has released unusually few details thus far for his FY 2026 budget request, he appears to have reversed course from a leaked proposal that called for the end of the Head Start program beginning October 1, 2025. The leaked proposal made no more economic sense than his tariff policy and was yet another effort to dismantle America’s public education system, so it’s a good thing someone changed his mind. But it remains deeply concerning this administration even entertained ending Head Start as that shameful proposal would have harmed the nearly 800,000 children and their families who benefit from the program each year and also would have had immediate, disastrous, and far-reaching economic impact on thousands of communities in every corner of the country.
Though the disastrous budget proposal has been withdrawn, the Trump administration has already taken steps to undercut the program and vigilance is critical. The administration first temporarily froze funding and then slow-walked routine funding to local programs, which has led to temporary closures and confusion around teacher layoffs. They also fired many federal staff administering the program and closed five regional federal offices. In March, the Trump administration told Head Start programs they couldn’t spend money on diversity, equity, and inclusion activities, even though this undefined Fox News soundbyte is in direct contradiction to federal law that requires Head Start programs to provide high-quality evidence-based programming to children with diverse backgrounds, provide inclusive and accessible services for children with disabilities, and consider diversity in the development of staff. The ACLU has filed litigation against the Trump administration arguing its actions reflect an illegal dismantling of the program.
What Head Start Does
Head Start is a federally funded, community-based program whose purpose is to improve the school readiness of young children from families with very low incomes by providing high-quality early learning programming to children and services to strengthen their families. Head Start’s standards have been bipartisanly crafted over decades to ensure each local program meets the lofty purpose of the program and includes the core components that research shows is important to child development and learning.
Federal funding for Head Start goes to about 1,600 local nonprofit organizations, school districts, faith-based organizations, local governments, Tribal councils, and for-profit organizations in every corner of our country to run programs that provide high-quality early education to about 800,000 children under age 5 each year. These programs also provide support services to the families of these children, connecting parents to employment, job training, and education opportunities, as well as connecting families to health, food, housing, and other social services when needed. Because of Head Start, more children start kindergarten each fall ready to succeed in school and beyond.
All Head Start programs follow important federal rules to ensure high-quality evidence-based programming and strong stewardship of taxpayer dollars; but Head Start is, at its core, a locally operated and designed and community-driven program.
All Head Start programs follow important federal rules to ensure high-quality evidence-based programming and strong stewardship of taxpayer dollars; but Head Start is, at its core, a locally operated and designed and community-driven program. Local programs must use their federal dollars to provide high-quality early childhood programming and nutritious meals during the program day; they must conduct screenings so any developmental delays can be detected and addressed early; there are important guardrails to make sure children with disabilities can access the program; and parents and community leaders must be involved in program design and implementation.
In each local Head Start program, skilled early educators help foster children’s early learning and development, boosting children’s early literacy and math skills, deepening children’s innate love of learning, helping children navigate emotions and frustrations that can temper learning, and helping them learn to navigate peer relationships. The program also ensures children’s health and nutrition needs are met because these are important to children’s development, learning, and continued academic success. Programs also must dedicate specialized staff to support parent employment and social service needs because research is unequivocal that parent well-being and fiscal stability are some of the strongest predictors of children’s learning and academic achievement. Consequently, Head Start programs make sure more children live in families with parents able to provide stable, nurturing homes that support children’s healthy development and learning and help set them on a path to success.
Head Start Also Acts as a Primary Child Care Arrangement for Families
In addition to putting the children and families it serves every year on stronger footing, it has other important impacts on local communities and economies, including playing a pivotal role in meeting family needs for child care. Though Head Start is first and foremost an early education program, its free daily services also act as affordable care arrangements for parents so they can work, seek job training, or attend school. Ending Head Start would have meant ending the care arrangements for these children and families and would seriously magnify America’s child care crisis, in which child care costs are a major strain on family budgets and hard to find because child care providers operate on razor-thin margins.
Child care is difficult to find and afford for most families across the income spectrum, but it can be particularly challenging for the poorest families; without assistance, child care costs can take up about one-third of family income. Private child care can be so prohibitively expensive for poor families that they forego employment or are forced to cobble together a myriad of informal arrangements that are neither stable nor reliable. Lack of stable child care reduces maternal labor force participation and family income. In addition, most families live in child care deserts, where the number of families needing care greatly outnumbers the available licensed child care slots. Head Start’s presence in communities is pivotal in expanding the supply of care for families. In rural communities in particular, Head Start is sometimes the main or only provider because low population density makes it particularly difficult for a child care business to operate.
Ending Head Start would have required about 800,000 more families be absorbed into the child care sector and state pre-K systems that already fail to provide services to the families who want and need them. State or local pre-K may be available for some families with 3- and 4- year olds who would otherwise be served by Head Start, but in most states, children shifting from Head Start to these other programs would have the ripple effect of either shifting new costs to states, or—because most state pre-K is limited and prioritized by family income—bumping families with slightly higher incomes to waitlists. Meanwhile, the federal child care program that provides subsidies to help working Americans with lower incomes afford child care—the Child Care Development Fund—is so underfunded it only helps one in seven federally eligible families so it can’t address the child care needs of families Head Start would typically serve without first displacing the families who receive CCDF subsidy.
Head Start Also Supports Job Placement and Basic Needs for Parents
One of the unique and important aspects of the Head Start program is that it works closely with a child’s family to help parents get on stronger economic footing by supporting efforts to become stably employed and working with families to address barriers to stable employment and improve their health and mental health. Programs also help make sure families’ basic needs are being met, helping them find affordable housing, food assistance, and connecting them with health services where needed. This focus on strengthening families is critical to children’s development and life trajectory, as research clearly shows that poverty can be particularly difficult and impactful when children are young. So the original call to end Head Start would have resulted in job loss, underemployment, and more entrenched poverty for families with young children nationwide. Local economies also would have been hit by job losses of Head Start staff, which includes people employed as early educators, cooks, janitors, bus drivers, and other community functions that help programs run.
Looking Ahead
A robustly funded and supported Head Start program benefits communities across the country and America simply can’t afford the Trump administration undermining this program. To do so would mean fewer children start kindergarten ready to succeed, and it would setback families, spur job loss, make child care and pre-K less available, and strain state budgets.
America must reject all attempts by the Trump administration to deconstruct Head Start and instead embrace true pro-family early care and learning policies that robustly fund and support Head Start, lower child care costs, and make high-quality child care more available for parents.
America Narrowly Escapes a Terrible Trump Head Start Policy Idea (for Now)
With the release of President Trump’s budget for FY 2026 on May 2, the president has put billionaires over families yet again—but America seems to have narrowly escaped one specific terrible Trump policy idea when it comes to the Head Start program.
Though the president has released unusually few details thus far for his FY 2026 budget request, he appears to have reversed course from a leaked proposal that called for the end of the Head Start program beginning October 1, 2025. The leaked proposal made no more economic sense than his tariff policy and was yet another effort to dismantle America’s public education system, so it’s a good thing someone changed his mind. But it remains deeply concerning this administration even entertained ending Head Start as that shameful proposal would have harmed the nearly 800,000 children and their families who benefit from the program each year and also would have had immediate, disastrous, and far-reaching economic impact on thousands of communities in every corner of the country.1
Though the disastrous budget proposal has been withdrawn, the Trump administration has already taken steps to undercut the program and vigilance is critical. The administration first temporarily froze funding and then slow-walked routine funding to local programs, which has led to temporary closures and confusion around teacher layoffs. They also fired many federal staff administering the program and closed five regional federal offices. In March, the Trump administration told Head Start programs they couldn’t spend money on diversity, equity, and inclusion activities, even though this undefined Fox News soundbyte is in direct contradiction to federal law that requires Head Start programs to provide high-quality evidence-based programming to children with diverse backgrounds, provide inclusive and accessible services for children with disabilities, and consider diversity in the development of staff. The ACLU has filed litigation against the Trump administration arguing its actions reflect an illegal dismantling of the program.
What Head Start Does
Head Start is a federally funded, community-based program whose purpose is to improve the school readiness of young children from families with very low incomes by providing high-quality early learning programming to children and services to strengthen their families. Head Start’s standards have been bipartisanly crafted over decades to ensure each local program meets the lofty purpose of the program and includes the core components that research shows is important to child development and learning.
Federal funding for Head Start goes to about 1,600 local nonprofit organizations, school districts, faith-based organizations, local governments, Tribal councils, and for-profit organizations in every corner of our country to run programs that provide high-quality early education to about 800,000 children under age 5 each year. These programs also provide support services to the families of these children, connecting parents to employment, job training, and education opportunities, as well as connecting families to health, food, housing, and other social services when needed. Because of Head Start, more children start kindergarten each fall ready to succeed in school and beyond.
All Head Start programs follow important federal rules to ensure high-quality evidence-based programming and strong stewardship of taxpayer dollars; but Head Start is, at its core, a locally operated and designed and community-driven program. Local programs must use their federal dollars to provide high-quality early childhood programming and nutritious meals during the program day; they must conduct screenings so any developmental delays can be detected and addressed early; there are important guardrails to make sure children with disabilities can access the program; and parents and community leaders must be involved in program design and implementation.
In each local Head Start program, skilled early educators help foster children’s early learning and development, boosting children’s early literacy and math skills, deepening children’s innate love of learning, helping children navigate emotions and frustrations that can temper learning, and helping them learn to navigate peer relationships. The program also ensures children’s health and nutrition needs are met because these are important to children’s development, learning, and continued academic success. Programs also must dedicate specialized staff to support parent employment and social service needs because research is unequivocal that parent well-being and fiscal stability are some of the strongest predictors of children’s learning and academic achievement. Consequently, Head Start programs make sure more children live in families with parents able to provide stable, nurturing homes that support children’s healthy development and learning and help set them on a path to success.
Head Start Also Acts as a Primary Child Care Arrangement for Families
In addition to putting the children and families it serves every year on stronger footing, it has other important impacts on local communities and economies, including playing a pivotal role in meeting family needs for child care. Though Head Start is first and foremost an early education program, its free daily services also act as affordable care arrangements for parents so they can work, seek job training, or attend school. Ending Head Start would have meant ending the care arrangements for these children and families and would seriously magnify America’s child care crisis, in which child care costs are a major strain on family budgets and hard to find because child care providers operate on razor-thin margins.
Child care is difficult to find and afford for most families across the income spectrum, but it can be particularly challenging for the poorest families; without assistance, child care costs can take up about one-third of family income. Private child care can be so prohibitively expensive for poor families that they forego employment or are forced to cobble together a myriad of informal arrangements that are neither stable nor reliable. Lack of stable child care reduces maternal labor force participation and family income. In addition, most families live in child care deserts, where the number of families needing care greatly outnumbers the available licensed child care slots. Head Start’s presence in communities is pivotal in expanding the supply of care for families. In rural communities in particular, Head Start is sometimes the main or only provider because low population density makes it particularly difficult for a child care business to operate.
Ending Head Start would have required about 800,000 more families be absorbed into the child care sector and state pre-K systems that already fail to provide services to the families who want and need them. State or local pre-K may be available for some families with 3- and 4- year olds who would otherwise be served by Head Start, but in most states, children shifting from Head Start to these other programs would have the ripple effect of either shifting new costs to states, or—because most state pre-K is limited and prioritized by family income—bumping families with slightly higher incomes to waitlists. Meanwhile, the federal child care program that provides subsidies to help working Americans with lower incomes afford child care—the Child Care Development Fund—is so underfunded it only helps one in seven federally eligible families so it can’t address the child care needs of families Head Start would typically serve without first displacing the families who receive CCDF subsidy.
Head Start Also Supports Job Placement and Basic Needs for Parents
One of the unique and important aspects of the Head Start program is that it works closely with a child’s family to help parents get on stronger economic footing by supporting efforts to become stably employed and working with families to address barriers to stable employment and improve their health and mental health. Programs also help make sure families’ basic needs are being met, helping them find affordable housing, food assistance, and connecting them with health services where needed. This focus on strengthening families is critical to children’s development and life trajectory, as research clearly shows that poverty can be particularly difficult and impactful when children are young. So the original call to end Head Start would have resulted in job loss, underemployment, and more entrenched poverty for families with young children nationwide. Local economies also would have been hit by job losses of Head Start staff, which includes people employed as early educators, cooks, janitors, bus drivers, and other community functions that help programs run.
Looking Ahead
A robustly funded and supported Head Start program benefits communities across the country and America simply can’t afford the Trump administration undermining this program. To do so would mean fewer children start kindergarten ready to succeed, and it would setback families, spur job loss, make child care and pre-K less available, and strain state budgets.
America must reject all attempts by the Trump administration to deconstruct Head Start and instead embrace true pro-family early care and learning policies that robustly fund and support Head Start, lower child care costs, and make high-quality child care more available for parents.
Notes