Head Start is a vital support for parents like Javona Brownlee, whose three children all attended Head Start programs. Javona’s two youngest children attended preschool through Head Start while the family lived in a homeless shelter after escaping from an abusive partner. Participating in Head Start allowed them to receive the developmental and academic support they needed and enabled Javona to get back on her feet and start her own cleaning business. She shared, “Those doors were able to open for me because my children had access to Head Start; it had a huge impact on my family and allowed me to become self-sufficient.”
To date, Head Start has served nearly 40 million children, including Javona’s. In fiscal year 2023, the program was funded to serve more than 833,000 children and pregnant people living in poverty in centers and home-based settings in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and six territories. Head Start plays a critical role in supporting the healthy development of children living in poverty and in helping parents seek employment and educational opportunities that afford them a better shot at gaining a foothold in America’s middle class.
Despite strong evidence that the program has helped boost educational attainment and fight intergenerational poverty, Project 2025—a far-right authoritarian playbook that would upend the 250-year-old system of checks and balances on which American government is built—proposes eliminating Head Start in its entirety. Enacting Project 2025’s plan to eliminate Head Start would vastly restrict the number of available child care slots, dramatically increase child care costs for families living in poverty, and undermine economic growth, and exacerbate inequality.
Increasing the number of Americans living in child care deserts
At a time when a majority of Americans already live in child care deserts, the sector cannot afford to lose hundreds of thousands of child care slots and the critical infrastructure provided by Head Start. That is especially true in rural communities, where people are more likely to live in child care deserts and therefore would suffer disproportionately from the elimination of Head Start.
A previous 2018 analysis from the Center for American Progress found that Head Start provides a critical supply of rural child care. In the 10 states surveyed, rural Head Start programs represented 22 percent of the overall child care supply. For instance, in Georgia, Head Start made up more than one-quarter of the center-based child care programs in rural counties and nearly half of the center-based programs in frontier counties. And in Michigan, Head Start made up more than one-third of the center-based child care programs and more than 40 percent of the center-based programs in frontier counties. Without Head Start, the percentage of the population living in child care deserts would increase.
Forcing Head Start families to spend almost $12,000 more a year on child care
Eliminating Head Start would also strip the comprehensive services that the hundreds of thousands of low-income families enrolled in Head Start currently receive. While reflecting on how Head Start helped her family, Javona said, “[Without it] I never would have been able to work.” Eliminating Head Start would deprive families of opportunities to pursue entrepreneurial endeavors, develop professionally, and obtain additional educational certifications and degrees. Moreover, children would lose access to the emotional, social, health, nutritional, and educational supports necessary to succeed once they enter kindergarten.
Amid the rising cost of child care in the private market, low-income families dependent on the free services offered by Head Start wouldn’t be able to afford child care without the program, rendering them unable to work or forced to find potentially unsafe, poor-quality child care arrangements. New data from Child Care Aware of America found that the national average price for child care in 2023 was $11,582. That price tag is unattainable for families who qualify for Head Start and is unaffordable for most American families. For families at the poverty level, which is the income eligibility threshold for Head Start, $11,582 represents 38.6 percent of their income in 2023. That financial burden is more than five times greater than the threshold the government has said is affordable for families to pay for child care.
Although there is another federal program available to help low-income families access child care services, the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), that program does not have the capacity to absorb the families who would lose access to Head Start services. The strain on the system caused by the elimination of Head Start would not only affect families currently relying on the program but could also increase waitlists for families seeking CCDBG subsidies and affect all families with young children seeking child care services from a limited supply of slots.
Undermining economic growth and exacerbating inequality
Significantly cutting child care supply will have ripple effects across the entire economy. Roughly 68 percent of children under age 6 in the United States have all available parents in the workforce, meaning access to child care is both critical for child well-being and the economy. Lack of access to reliable and affordable infant and toddler care currently costs the U.S. economy $122 billion every year due to lost earnings, productivity, and tax revenue. This would only increase with the elimination of the Head Start program.
Additionally, eliminating Head Start would upend the progress states and localities have made on universal pre-K. The District of Columbia, Florida, Iowa, Oklahoma, and West Virginia—top states in pre-K access for 4-year-olds—each have integrated Head Start programs into their state pre-K programs. For instance, in West Virginia, where pre-K is available for all 4-year-olds, 68 percent of the state’s preschool classrooms were in Head Start programs in the 2020 school year. Without Head Start, states would have to take on a larger share of funding to reach universal pre-K access.
From an equity standpoint, eliminating Head Start would be particularly harmful to Latino communities, who are more likely to be in child care deserts; to the Tribal communities being served by American Indian and Alaska Native Head Start programs; and to the agricultural communities dependent on Migrant and Seasonal Head Start. It would also affect the children in foster care and those experiencing homelessness, who are categorically eligible for Head Start, as well as children with disabilities, who must fill at least 10 percent of enrollment slots in Head Start programs. These represent some of the most vulnerable children in the country; we must not deprive them and their parents of the opportunities to nurture their healthy development.
Conclusion
Proposals to eliminate or cut funding for federal early care and learning programs are both detrimental to the country’s economy and unpopular with the American public. Investing in federal early care and learning programs has broad support across the political spectrum. A poll from the First Five Years Fund found that 86 percent of voters believe improving the quality of child care and early learning programs and making them more affordable for families is a good investment of taxpayer money. Moreover, 78 percent of business owners agree that their businesses would be more stable if employees had improved access to affordable, high-quality child care.
As Javona said, access to Head Start was a critical lifeline for her family: “It’s not a want; it’s a necessity for my well-being and my children’s.” Policymakers should be looking to expand on the investments in federal programs such as Head Start and CCDBG, not eliminate these critical investments, to ensure all families have access to high-quality, affordable early care and learning. Both the country’s current economy for parents in the workforce and the future economy today’s young children will eventually lead is dependent on a high-quality and accessible early care and learning system.
This article was published by the Center for American Progress.
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