Remember that time Trump said he knew nothing about Project 2025, and then got elected and commenced trying to implement every single thing in it? Yeah.
Well, the Washington Post has gotten hold of a 64-page budget draft for the Department of Health and Human Services, and on top of the 20,000 jobs that the administration/DOGE has already (illegally, unconstitutionally) disappeared from HHS — including people who worked on programs to prevent drownings, gun violence, and STDs and to improve worker safety — it eliminates Head Start entirely, with the comment, “The federal government should not be in the business of mandating curriculum, locations, and performance standards for any form of education.”
You know, unless it’s a college with a Middle Eastern studies department, or Harvard University trying to study right-wing extremism, gun violence, or any subject at all that’s not approved by an overseer from the administration, the Naval Academy having books about the Holocaust in its library, or a kindergarten teacher with books on the shelf about how it’s okay to be different.
Congress could ignore the budget request and fund Head Start anyway, and, but, the administration seems to have simply (illegally, unconstitutionally) yanked the purse-power from them anyway, and given it to DOGE and its AI deletion squad instead.
It’s all just like on page 482 of the Project 2025 plan.
Head Start is (or was) pre-kindergarten for low-income children, and also provides a lot more: health, hearing and vision screenings, nutritional assistance, and social services to hundreds of thousands of children up to age 5, and their families. The program has served about 40 million children, currently about 750,000 a year, in 17,000 centers. And what do you know, one study found that 86 percent of rural communities are served by Head Start, and a full third of Head Start kids are in the South, many of them in “child care deserts,” areas where there is no other childcare option. Only 22 percent of centers are in urban communities. So, sounds like it will hurt Trump voters and their children the most.
Conservatives used to love Head Start, before the MAGA cult ate their brains. Though it started as a project under the Johnson administration in 1965, every president over the past 11 administrations has re-authorized it since. Even Reagan, the ketchup-as-a-school-lunch-vegetable guy, recognized it was one of the biggest financial buck-bangs around, saving taxpayers more than it costs, and in 1982 declared October “Head Start Awareness Month.” Get back to work, you lazy parents! Lift yourselves up by your tiny bootstraps, children, and eat your ketchup so you can grow up to be big and strong!
Head Start’s effectiveness has been studied exhaustively over the past 60 years of its existence. Kids who attended programs have been found to have better social-emotional, language, and cognitive development, and better physical health. They’re even more likely to graduate high school and go to college, and the program has been correlated with drops in teen pregnancy and crime, improving outcomes over generations.
And, but, back on January 28, DOGE, or whoever, (illegally, unconstitutionally) froze payments for reimbursements to Head Start programs. The administration claimed that oops it was a mistake, but since then the program has still distributed a little more than half of the funds authorized by Congress, $1.6 billion, versus $2.55 billion sent during the same period last year. That’s already caused childcare centers across the country to close, because they don’t have big cash reserves to keep paying workers in the hope that someday the government will maybe-or-maybe-not reimburse them.
And now, this month, at least five of the 12 regional offices for Head Start are closed, and programs that were supposed to hear in February the amount of their annual grants to operate a preschool have still been simply told nothing.
Did Elon Just Shut Down Head Start? SEEMS LIKE.
Why does Project 2025 dislike Head Start so much? The lies/context clues that they pack into their Mandate give away the game: They don’t want women working outside the home at all (unless it’s in the Trump administration, of course), and think all “child welfare funding [should] be used for marriage and relationship education.”
The Mandate falsely asserts that Head Start has “little or no long-term academic value for children” and is dangerous because between 2015 and 2020 there were 1,029 “incidents” of kids unsupervised, released to the wrong adult, or of abuse. The acceptable number of any of those things is zero, of course, however, the program served about 750,000 children a year, or more than four million children over five years, and children are literally more likely to be murdered at home than to be accidentally left on the playground in a Head Start program. But their feelings do not care about facts!
What will happen next? Another self-inflicted financial catastrophe on top of the other self-inflicted catastrophes! This will cost billions in lost productivity and wages. And like all things MAGA, this hurts the most vulnerable people, and hundreds of thousands of parents who can’t afford five-figure costs for daycare, or don’t have a grandma they can dump their kids on for her free labor the way LARPing Joe Sixpack JD Vance and his wife did. Or they will be forced to resort to whatever care they can find, like unlicensed centers. Maybe Mark Robinson will get back in the daycare business!
Hillbilly Effigy: JD Vance Burns Strawman To Prove Universal Childcare ‘Lifestyle’ Bad For America
JD Vance Going With ‘Just Have A Rich Relative Pay For It’ Plan To Lower Daycare Costs For Working Class
Kids will start kindergarten with fewer skills and will be more vulnerable to abuse, neglect, hunger, and undiagnosed vision and hearing issues. The elimination of Migrant and Seasonal Head Start (MSHS) will mean fewer migrant workers, and/or kids brought to the fields with their parents to sit in the heat and a cloud of pesticides instead of learning how to read. Generational damage, in other words.
Let us hope this draft budget proposal is another example of the administration floating a trial balloon to see what the reaction is, and that the outcry is loud! Maybe Trump voters and MAGA congresspeople will realize that the leopards will be eating their own constituent toddlers’ faces, instead of those urban toddlers, who are probably lazy and deserve it.
But I wouldn’t bet the bank on that.
[Washington Post archive link]
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