In his January 1964 State of the Union address, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an “unconditional war on poverty in America,” which began with the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act. A year later, his newly established Office of Economic Opportunity launched an eight-week summer school program to prepare low-income children for elementary school, dubbed Project Head Start. The eight-week program soon expanded into a year-round initiative and later included bilingual and bicultural programming for children across the country. As of January 2025, Head Start has served over 30 million children, creating demonstrable benefits for its recipients and lessening socio-economic disparities in educational achievement.
Project 2025, a political agenda developed by the influential conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, demands the elimination of the Head Start program. Its 922-page Mandate For Leadership: The Conservative Promise outlines the Heritage Foundation’s goals in full and is considered by many to be the accepted agenda for President Trump’s second term. The document provides two distinct justifications for the shuttering of the Head Start program: alleged inefficiencies within Head Start programs and a prioritization of mother-child relationships through home-based childcare.
The first argument, which can be summarized as “waste, fraud, and abuse,” claims that Head Start programs have been unsuccessful in supporting the needs of low-income families and children despite the $11 billion budget in fiscal year 2022. The Mandate for Leadership cites a September 2022 report from the US Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General, which found that “approximately one in four Head Start grant recipients received an adverse finding from [the Administration for Children and Families] for child abuse, lack of supervision, or unauthorized release between October 2015 and May 2020.” While the HHS Inspector General report merely recommended that ACF implement reforms to bolster transparency within Head Start programs, Project 2025 argues that the report’s findings indicate that Head Start programs are irreparably rife with “scandal and abuse.”
In addition to highlighting the safety and conduct violations in Head Start programs, Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership claims that “[r]esearch has demonstrated that federal Head Start centers…have little or no long-term academic value for children.” This claim, for which the Mandate for Leadership cites no evidence, explicitly contradicts existing research. A 2021 study published in the American Economic Review by researchers from UCLA, The World Bank, and the University of Nebraska found that Head Start programs yielded significant long-term increases in “adult human capital and economic self sufficiency.” Notably, the study found positive effects on later educational success, including “a 0.65-year increase in schooling, a 2.7 percent increase in high-school completion, an 8.5 percent increase in college enrollment, and a 39 percent increase in college completion,” as well as increases in wage earnings and paid employment. These findings speak to the effectiveness of Head Start programs, which have been shown to increase economic opportunities and reduce poverty for children from low-income families. The study presents one more striking figure — “[u]sing only savings on public assistance expenditures and increases in tax revenue due to higher wage earnings, we find that the public internal rate of return of putting one child through Head Start ranges from 5.4 to 9.1 percent.” The federal government’s investment in Head Start programs more than pays for itself, negating the concerns raised by Project 2025 proponents that the Head Start program is draining federal funds.
The second argument against Head Start is not directly listed under the “Office of Head Start” headline, but is found in the arguments for other family-building initiatives. The Heritage Foundation emphasizes the importance of traditional gender roles and the nuclear family model, arguing that federal policy should be used to promote the conservative Christian family ideal. As it relates to early childhood education, Project 2025 calls for the prioritization of home-based childcare over universal day care. They cite statistics from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) on the unsatisfactory development of US preschoolers (“only about half of US preschoolers are on-track with their development and ready for school”) and argue that children would benefit more from in-home childcare. The Heritage Foundation has a clear vision of which parent should be responsible for this in-home childcare, arguing that HRSA should “provide resources and information on the importance of the mother-child relationship in child well-being.” The implication of the statement is clear: The federal government should strip funding for childcare and early childhood education programs to incentivize families to adopt the stay-at-home mother, working father lifestyle.
However, this family model is simply unfeasible for the families eligible for Head Start. While there are no nationwide statistics on the proportion of single parent Head Start families, the internal data released by a few programs across the country paints a compelling picture: the Sacramento Employment and Training Agency Head Start program reports that 48 percent of families it serves are one parent families, while the Action for Boston Community Development Head Start program reports that 68 percent of its families it serves are one parent families. For these families, in-home childcare is not a realistic option, even with significant subsidies from the government. The average cost of childcare in the United States is nearly $12,000 a year, which could force families with two working parents to rely on one income and single parents to quit their jobs to care for their children. This cruelly and unnecessarily plunges families deeper into poverty, presenting an insurmountable burden towards economic mobility for purely ideological purposes.
In addition to financial challenges, eliminating Head Start could place both children and their mothers at risk for child abuse, neglect, and intimate partner violence. Studies have shown that women, especially low-income women and women of color, are more likely to experience domestic violence and financial abuse. Increased economic independence, meanwhile, can decrease a woman’s chances of experiencing intimate partner violence. A study published in the Children and Youth Services Review found that childcare subsidies and Head Start programs reduce family violence or its risk factors. The study proposed a model to explain the effects of childcare policies, determining that childcare policies can mitigate child mistreatment by improving parenting knowledge, increasing access to basic needs, and reducing parental stress. Additionally, childcare policies can mitigate intimate partner violence by reducing parental stress and increasing independence. Without affordable childcare, the stay-at-home parent (often the mother) could become more financially dependent on their working partners (often the father), thus placing the stay-at-home parent at greater risk for intimate partner violence.
This suffering caused by the elimination of Head Start would be unevenly distributed, even within class lines. Due to the existing systemic oppression in the United States, Black and Hispanic/Latino families are significantly more likely to experience poverty, and Hispanic and Latino communities are also disproportionately likely to reside in areas without adequate access to childcare—a study by the Center for American Progress found that nearly 60 percent of Hispanic/Latino families across 22 states are living in areas with an “undersupply of licensed child care.”
Additionally, the study found that 3 in 5 rural communities lack adequate child care supply, and rural families rely heavily on Head Start programs. In South Dakota, for example, 59 percent of child care centers in rural counties are Head Start programs, while 69 percent of those in frontier counties, which CAP describes as “a subset of rural counties that can be understood at the most remote rural counties,” are Head Start programs. In Texas, Head Start programs make up 32 percent of child care centers in rural counties and 46 percent in frontier counties, and in Kentucky, they account for 42 percent of rural child care centers and 54 percent of those in frontier counties. With the elimination of Head Start, child care supply in these areas would be reduced by nearly half their current quantity, devastating the already vulnerable communities.
Statistical evidence shows that eliminating the Head Start programs is neither fiscally responsible nor beneficial to low-income children and families. The Heritage Foundation’s proposal, which is likely to be implemented by the Trump Administration, will callously punish families who do not fit the conservative Christian model of the nuclear family, offering no alternative solutions.
The Trump administration and the Heritage Foundation would gleefully take away these lifelines for families, especially racially marginalized families and single-parent households, despite the demonstrably devastating consequences. If the Head Start program is eliminated, more women will be trapped in abusive relationships, more children will be neglected and will remain in poverty, and more families will be unable to provide for their own needs—that would be an immense tragedy born out of the government’s unconscionable cruelty.
Though the invocation of bipartisanship often seems to be a relic of a bygone era, it is important to note that the elimination of federal Head Start funding would have grave consequences for both Democratic and Republican constituencies. For both Republican and Democratic lawmakers, abdicating responsibility for the imminent crisis that families will face upon the elimination of Head Start is reprehensible and unforgivable. If Republican lawmakers for rural, deep-red districts are to act in the best interest of their own constituents, they must defy Project 2025’s mandate and act swiftly to protect Head Start. Democratic lawmakers, especially those operating at the state level, should view protecting Head Start from attacks by the Trump administration as an obvious “kitchen table” priority, yet we have not seen any urgency with respect to this matter. Prominent Democratic governors such as Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer may feel that their larger political ambitions can be better served by showmanship and podcast microphones, but they too have tens of thousands of vulnerable constituents who require rapid and pragmatic action in the face of cruel federal legislation.