In early April, Head Start child-care centers began receiving an e-mail from the address defendthespend@hhs.gov. The message explained that, before providers could access their latest funding, they were required to supply the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, with additional information and await its approval, and it signed off with “God bless America.”
Head Start, a War on Poverty program established by an act of Congress in 1965, provides comprehensive child-care and preschool services to some eight hundred thousand children across the U.S., most of whom are at or below the federal poverty level. (For a family of four, that’s an income of roughly thirty-two thousand dollars a year.) Individual Head Start programs aren’t allowed to hold on to more than three days of their annual operating funds at a time, and they frequently log on to a payment system to cover day-to-day basics. To secure this flow of funds, providers must submit to a five-year grant-application process, a separate annual approval process, consistent monitoring of their spending, and fiscal audits. These providers are also in regular contact with regional Head Start program specialists who advise on their decision-making.
It was unclear why these many layers of approval and accountability did not meet the standards of Elon Musk’s efficiency experts. “Defend the spend,” for some providers, was a nightmare flashback to late January, shortly after Donald Trump’s Inauguration, when a freeze on federal funding compelled dozens of Head Start centers to close down temporarily or, in a few cases, indefinitely. Although the freeze lifted within weeks, the continued slow-walking of funds has had an enormous cumulative effect. During the first quarter of 2025, Head Start received nearly a billion fewer dollars from its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, than it did last year during the same time period—a drop of about thirty-seven per cent.
The provenance of “Defend the spend” was also murky. “Programs thought maybe it was a phishing e-mail,” Lauri Morrison-Frichtl, the executive director of the Illinois Head Start Association, told me. (Frichtl’s organization is one of fifty-one state-specific Head Start member groups.) Ordinarily, an Illinois provider in receipt of a shady-looking e-mail could call Head Start’s Chicago regional office to get advice. But DOGE had just shut down the Chicago office, along with its counterparts in Boston, New York City, San Francisco, and Seattle, and had placed all of the program specialists from these offices on administrative leave. The closures left providers in twenty-two states—including the nation’s three largest cities—without a Head Start point of contact. It escaped no one’s attention that the five regional offices that shut down were all in blue states, or that four of the five surviving offices were in red states. (As a program specialist on administrative leave in New York City told me, “Trump said he’d have revenge on the people who didn’t vote for him. He did what he said he would do.”)
Without a regional contact to turn to, providers instead reached out to H.H.S., which replied that the DOGE e-mail was indeed a phishing scam and warned not to click on the link enclosed in it. But then, a few hours later, the Office of Head Start, in Washington, D.C., confirmed that the message was legit, and that compliance was required. This added step meant that some centers waited an extra day or two for their money. Others waited longer.
“If it takes an extra week or two weeks to draw down funds because of these nonsense justification processes, it could result in a provider not making rent or payroll, even if the funds do eventually come through,” Michelle Haimowitz, of the Massachusetts Head Start Association, said. The constant precarity, Haimowitz went on, “impacts our workforce, who are nervous about losing their jobs, and it impacts families and their belief in the stability of Head Start.”
When a provider has to close down, even briefly, many families suffer immediate material harm. A program specialist who is now on administrative leave from a Head Start regional office in a swing state, whom I will call Michael, said, “We have a lot of parents in hourly, lower-paying jobs—cashier jobs, food service, some migrant and seasonal workers doing agricultural labor. Suddenly, all of these parents have to call out of work, and they lose those wages, and some of those parents have lost their jobs.”
This vignette of administrative chaos exacerbated by mass layoffs will be familiar to any federal employee or contractor whose agency has been felled of late by the whimsical machete of DOGE. But the whiplash that Head Start has sustained in recent weeks has been perhaps especially severe. In late April, reports emerged that President Trump’s 2026 budget could seek to abolish Head Start entirely, as recommended in Project 2025, the policy blueprint for the second Trump term. But then, on May 2nd, the White House released its final budget proposal, which didn’t mention Head Start at all.
Joel Ryan, of Washington State’s Head Start association, told me that the Trump Administration may realize “that they’ll have a hard time with a proposal just getting rid of Head Start,” owing both to its congressional mandate and its popularity across party lines. What Trump is attempting instead, Ryan went on, is a “slow degradation of Head Start.” This is the essential argument made in a complaint filed in federal court on April 28th, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of a group of Head Start state associations and community nonprofits. “We see this series of attacks as part of a violation of separation of powers,” Jennesa Calvo-Friedman, the lead counsel in the lawsuit, said. But, in the short term, she went on, “our fear is about what they’re doing behind the scenes before we even get to have that fight, through the constant instability of the program.”
Some Head Start providers, uncertain about their future, are feeling ambivalent about encouraging families to enroll for the upcoming school year. Parents have reason to wonder if their children’s preschools will stay open. Teachers have been leaving for what they perceive as more secure jobs. Advocates worry, in short, that a toxic cloud of doubt and disarray is gathering around the program—and all despite the robust bipartisan consensus on Head Start that held for some sixty years, or so it seemed.
A few months after Richard Nixon yoinked the U.S. from the gold standard, and a few months before he presented Mao Zedong with a porcelain sculpture titled “Bird of Peace, Mute Swans,” he vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971, which would have established a national child-care system. The bill, Nixon wrote in his veto message, was marked by “fiscal irresponsibility, administrative unworkability, and family-weakening implications.” (John Birch types used words such as “Sovietization” to describe the bill.)
Yet, in the same veto message, Nixon praised Head Start—which had begun under his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson—as “valuable” and “tried and tested.” In fact, the Comprehensive Child Development Act aimed to expand a version of Head Start to the middle and working classes. Nixon’s veto, the political scientist Kimberly Morgan has written, “slammed shut a window of opportunity for universal day-care legislation, effectively making public services a ghetto only for children from the poorest families.”
This policy of containment has persisted ever since, whereby politicians of the right and center-right could at once embrace Head Start and reject the communist temptations of comprehensive child care—and also reject a more generous social safety net over all. Ronald Reagan slashed welfare funding at the same time that he supported indirect cash assistance to welfare recipients in the form of Head Start. Bill Clinton, who pledged during his 1992 Presidential campaign to “end welfare as we know it,” presided over the expansion of Head Start to include infants and toddlers. Even during Trump’s first term, Congress approved increases in Head Start’s budgets, despite the President’s decades-long hostility toward government aid to the needy.
