Last week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services formally proposed a sweeping rewrite of the rules governing Head Start. HHS calls its proposal “Reducing Federal Burden for Head Start Programs” and says it would eliminate more than 1,400 regulatory provisions, save roughly $2.2 billion, and preserve or create as many as 236,000 Head Start slots.
Cut red tape and serve hundreds of thousands more poor children for the same amount of money? Sounds pretty good. Except there’s a catch. The administration proposes to accomplish those savings by making Head Start less like Head Start.
Head Start was never intended to be simply a federally subsidized childcare program. Its comprehensiveness was the point. Head Start was created in 1965 as part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Its architects understood that children growing up in poverty often arrive at school facing disadvantages that cannot be addressed by a few hours of adult supervision and play and interaction with peers.
The proposed rule would shift decisions about class size and staff-to-child ratios to states, which in many cases means defaulting to less demanding child-care standards. It would allow programs to operate for dramatically fewer hours and days. Federal requirements involving health and mental-health services and supports for children with disabilities would be weakened or eliminated. The longstanding requirement that a bus carrying Head Start children have a monitor in addition to the driver would disappear.
Then there’s another category of rules headed for the chopping block: detailed expectations about what children should actually learn. Current Head Start standards (the result of hard-fought improvements to the program in the decades following its creation) include specific school-readiness expectations in early literacy and mathematics. By age five, for example, children are expected to develop letter-sound knowledge and understand basic number concepts.
What’s striking about the criticism of the proposed rule is that it isn’t coming only from traditional defenders of Head Start. Consider Steve Barnett, who leads the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers. Barnett has argued for years that Head Start is over-regulated. He says its regulations “could be vastly reduced to good effect” and that he is “all in favor of the Trump Administration reducing micro-management of Head Start.” That’s hardly the position of someone trying to preserve the regulatory status quo.
But Barnett identifies several provisions in the Trump proposal that have little to do with freeing professionals from bureaucracy: larger child-care ratios, dramatically reduced instructional time, English-only instruction, and a 5 percent administrative cap. Research, Barnett notes, tells us that individualization, one-on-one and in small groups, is critical to producing stronger outcomes for young children. Larger classes and less instructional time make that harder.
He is equally critical of the English-only provision. The evidence doesn’t show that abandoning children’s home languages improves their acquisition of English and it can harm development of their other language. And Barnett questions whether a serious education organization can operate with administration limited to 5 percent of its budget. His bottom line: “the children Head Start serves will get less of what they need, not more.”
Then there’s Chester E. Finn Jr., president emeritus of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Finn has criticized Head Start for decades because he thinks it hasn’t been educational enough.
Just two years ago, Finn complained that Head Start “is not an education program” in practice. He criticized its shortage of qualified teachers, lack of strong curricula, and weak accountability for children’s cognitive gains. He has argued that Head Start should be fundamentally reconstituted around kindergarten readiness. Finn readily agrees that Head Start is “undoubtedly over-regulated,” comparing its accumulated rules to “barnacles encrusting the hull of an aging ship.”
But Finn argues that the Trump administration is targeting the wrong things, particularly educational expectations that were painstakingly incorporated into Head Start over decades. Finn concludes: “I sincerely believe that Head Start should be overhauled from top to bottom in service of preparing severely disadvantaged youngsters for success in school…But that’s not what the Trump administration is about with its Head Start plans. As usual, it’s more about destroying than building, ending rather than mending. Head Start needs deregulating, yes, but it also needs reconstituting.”
Finally, there’s Ruth Friedman, my former House Education and Labor Committee colleague, an early-childhood policy leader who was one of the key congressional staffers involved in writing the bipartisan 2007 Head Start reauthorization under then-Committee Chair George Miller (D-CA). “This is an effort to dismantle Head Start, not modernize it like [administration officials] claim,” Friedman argues, warning that the changes would be “terrible for children’s health, development, and learning.”
She contends that weakening class-size requirements, teacher qualifications, health and mental-health services, disability supports, and other elements of Head Start runs directly counter to what Democratic and Republican lawmakers, and President George W. Bush, intended in 2007 and, in her view, what the statute requires.
Friedman is hardly alone. Civil-rights and disability organizations have opposed the proposal, as have the National Women’s Law Center, ZERO TO THREE, the Center for Law and Social Policy, and the National Association for the Education of Young Children.
Friedman, Barnett, and Finn don’t 100% agree on what the ideal Head Start should look like. Finn wants a much stronger educational and school-readiness focus. Barnett wants to liberate local professionals from federal micromanagement while preserving the conditions research says produce better outcomes. Friedman, in comparison, puts greater emphasis on protecting the comprehensive health, developmental, disability, and family supports embedded in the bipartisan statute.
Nevertheless, all three want a better Head Start program. All are skeptical, to say the least, of the Trump Administration’s motives.1 And all reject the false equivalence between less regulation and better policy.
There’s a longer political history worth remembering here.
Republican skepticism of Head Start didn’t begin with Donald Trump or with arguments over whether preschool works.
Part of the conservative discomfort with Head Start has always been structural.
Head Start was born in 1965 as part of the War on Poverty and grew out of the same community-action philosophy that sought to bypass established state and local political structures and send federal resources directly into poor communities. To its architects, that was a feature. In many places, particularly in the segregated South, state and local governments could hardly be counted upon to aggressively serve poor Black families.
To some conservatives, however, the community-action model looked like Washington using federal money to create a network of locally based organizations that were not accountable to governors, school districts, or other traditional political institutions. Head Start became entwined with a broader conservative suspicion that War on Poverty programs weren’t simply providing services; they were subsidizing a permanent infrastructure of community activists and advocacy organizations.
That history helps explain why proposals to “deregulate Head Start” and/or “return Head Start to the states” have surfaced repeatedly.
During the George W. Bush administration, congressional Republicans pushed a plan that would have allowed participating states to take control of their federal Head Start allocations and integrate the program with state preschool systems. The Republican-controlled House approved legislation in 2003 establishing a demonstration program under which as many as eight states could administer Head Start funding rather than having Washington continue to fund local Head Start grantees directly. The Senate’s bipartisan alternative conspicuously omitted the state demonstration.
There are some who argue that there is a respectable policy argument behind the Republican proposal, whatever its origins. Head Start really was, and remains, something of an island. When Sargent Shriver and the architects of the War on Poverty created it, state-funded preschool barely existed. Today, states spend billions on pre-K, and operating a completely separate federal early-childhood system can create duplication, fragmentation, and bureaucratic headaches.
Chester Finn makes essentially that point today., that Head Start should be better aligned with state preschool programs, that sixty years after its creation, there’s no reason to assume its original governance structure remains optimal simply because it’s original. Although I would argue that Head Start’s comprehensive focus is something most state pre-K programs lack and that those are particularly important for children from disadvantaged groups.
But the history also helps explain why today’s debate can’t be understood entirely as an argument about regulatory efficiency.
There has long been a faction on the right that would prefer Head Start either substantially devolved to the states or eliminated altogether. Project 2025 explicitly recommended eliminating the program. The current administration initially flirted with eliminating its funding before retreating in the face of Head Start’s political popularity.
Now comes a different strategy: preserve the appropriation but dramatically reduce the federal requirements defining what grantees must provide. But there’s an enormous difference between modernizing the way a program operates and hollowing out the characteristics that make it the program Congress authorized.
That distinction is particularly important because the Republican Party itself has wrestled with it before.
The ultimate result of the Bush-era debate wasn’t the wholesale devolution of Head Start to the states. It was the bipartisan 2007 reauthorization signed by President George W. Bush: a law that strengthened Head Start’s school-readiness mission, incrased teacher-qualification expectations, aligned Head Start more closely with state early-learning standards, and strengthened monitoring and accountability.
In other words, Republicans and Democrats ultimately found common ground not by abandoning Head Start’s federal role, but by trying to make the program better. That’s the precedent the Trump administration ought to follow now. But don’t hold your breath.