Rather than gutting or upending Head Start, ‘We’re going to focus on outcomes, not inputs, and we’re going to trust local leaders.’
The Trump administration is getting grief for gutting and upending Head Start — to use verbs that have come up in coverage and commentary — because of a new proposed rule announced earlier this month. The administration calls it a “reinvestment,” expecting to save as much as $2.2 billion.
A report the Department of Health and Human Services is releasing today gives further context to the move: Previous rules during the Obama and Biden administrations knowingly increased costs and anticipated that fewer children would be served. Over the decade beginning in FY2015, funded enrollment fell by nearly 278,000 slots, without substantial improvement on the HHS Administration for Children and Families chosen measure of classroom quality. It was a gamble that failed — and now suggests the need to rethink the whole top-down approach, HHS Assistant Secretary Alex Adams, and administrator of ACF, told National Review in an exclusive interview.
“The previous approach to regulation increased cost, it reduced access, and it did not lead to substantial gains in quality,” Adams said. The logic was that higher costs and reduced access would produce substantially better quality “for the shrinking number who are able to access Head Start, and that will make up for it.” That didn’t happen. “Maybe if you get out the millimeter ruler, you could say the line goes up, but for the naked eye, it just looks flat,” Adams said.
A particularly steep recent decline came from FY2022 through FY2024, despite an 11 percent increase in the federal operating budget. During that period, “change in scope” requests submitted by local Head Start programs resulted in 97,625 fewer funded slots.
The earlier federal rules addressed genuine concerns arising within Head Start, including staffing and program quality, but responded to those concerns with added nationwide requirements. The current administration proposes letting local programs make more of those choices themselves instead.
There are approximately 1,600 Head Start programs nationwide. The proposed rule would give them more flexibility, with fewer federal prescriptions and reporting mandates, allowing resources to be redirected toward teacher compensation, additional enrollment, different operating hours, or other local needs.
The new proposed rule, “Reducing Federal Burden for Head Start Programs,” was announced on August 6 and is in its comment period through October 6.
“By getting rid of some of those ticky-tacky things — that’s where we’re projecting freeing up $2.2 billion that could be reinvested in higher-value things, such as teacher pay, additional spots, or additional services for children and families,” Adams said. “Many of these programs over time have become top-heavy, and we’ve proposed limiting administrative expenses from 15 percent down to 5, so that more money actually reaches teachers, children and families.”
Adams sees the federal role as monitoring outcomes and holding programs accountable. That preserves Head Start’s congressionally established mission of promoting school readiness among low-income children through comprehensive services and direct parental participation in local programs. That would be a change from how things are currently run — with Washington micromanagement of operational details, such as: “How many monitors must be on buses, how often committees must meet, how many square feet per child, how much mulch is enough mulch,” Adams said.
The question now, Adams said, is: “If we were starting from scratch today, is this the way we would build this?”
“Every mature administrative system — from Head Start to child support to foster care — follows the same pattern,” he noted. “It starts with an original statutory purpose, and then over time you just layer regulation on top of regulation, form on top of form, reporting requirement on top of reporting requirement.”
“Sometimes these things cannot be one-size-fits-all. You have to empower local programs, and you have to set outcomes, such as school-readiness goals, but you don’t prescribe every input on how 1,600 diverse programs will get there.”
Adams previously served as director of the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. “My best caseworkers were the ones just absolutely drowning in paperwork,” he recalled. “We were generating 18,000 pages a year. And all of that was time and energy directed from some of my best employees, from what could have been better deployed to the front line.”
“These are highly motivated, deeply passionate, mission-driven staff — teachers and teachers’ aides — and we want to fully unlock their potential and empower them to make the decisions that work for them,” he said.
Adams also pointed to “highly engaged parents who care deeply about their kids. They care more about their kids than any federal bureaucrat, frankly, ever will.”
“The family atmosphere” of many Head Start programs, he said, “the parental advice-and-consent components of it, have really stuck out to me as things that are models.”
Today’s report comes from the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) at HHS.
In announcing the new proposal earlier this month, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. noted that Head Start was founded by his uncle, Sargent Shriver, in 1965, under the Johnson administration.
“Head Start began as a bold commitment to the health, dignity, and potential of every child. My uncle . . . founded the program on a simple conviction: strong families, wholesome nutrition, and healthy childhood development can change the course of a child’s life,” Kennedy said. “Today, we are returning Head Start to those roots. We are removing unnecessary bureaucracy, strengthening nutrition and physical health, trusting parents and local communities, and opening Head Start to hundreds of thousands more children. That’s how we renew the promise of Head Start for the next generation.”
Rather than gutting or upending Head Start, Adams said, “We’re going to stop being prescriptive. We’re going to focus on outcomes, not inputs, and we’re going to trust local leaders.”