Exclusive: Trump Preparing a New Attack on Head Start
The administration is considering a proposal to gut the program’s instructional standards while adding new restrictions tied to immigration.
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION is contemplating radical and potentially destructive changes to one of America’s most famous anti-poverty programs, according to several people familiar with internal administration deliberations and one with direct knowledge of them.
The program is Head Start, which provides free, specially enhanced childcare to more than 700,000 low-income preschoolers, toddlers, and infants. It operates through the Department of Health and Human Services—where, sources have told me, officials have drafted a regulation that would eliminate most of the rules for how individual Head Start providers operate. Under this draft regulation, HHS would then introduce new rules designed to align Head Start with MAGA priorities and the right’s crusade to shrink government.
One of the most important changes under consideration, the sources said, would be a new prohibition on enrolling children if they don’t have at least one parent who is either a U.S. citizen, a U.S. national, or a “qualifying” immigrant. Notably, that prohibition would apply to all children, regardless of their own immigration status, meaning the rule could—and almost surely would—deny public benefits to some children who are full citizens. Blocking full citizens from getting public benefits in this way would be unprecedented, according to legal experts I consulted.1
Many of the other changes under consideration would affect the program’s quality and safety standards in equally dramatic ways, the sources told me. One example: