There is a particular kind of magic trick we perform in American politics with language. We take something people generally agree is good, give it an ugly bureaucratic name, and suddenly destroying it sounds like reform. A teacher becomes a personnel expense. A medical screening becomes a compliance burden. A safety standard becomes red tape. And if you are clever enough with the vocabulary, eventually providing less to poor children can be described as efficiency.
That is more or less the debate now unfolding around Head Start.
I found the story through Ground News, which I use every day because it lets me see not only what happened, but how different outlets are choosing to tell me what happened. That distinction matters enormously here. Reading across the coverage, I found versions of the same Head Start proposal that seemed to be describing almost entirely different events. That is precisely why I partnered with Ground News. Subscribe today and get 40% off the Vantage Plan at groundnews.com/dtd.
Now let’s talk about what is actually happening.
The Trump administration is proposing one of the most significant changes to Head Start since the program was created as part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. The Department of Health and Human Services wants to eliminate roughly 1,400 regulatory provisions governing the program, replacing many federal requirements with state and local childcare standards. HHS argues that doing so will give local providers greater flexibility, reduce administrative burdens and save more than $2 billion, money officials say could then be reinvested to create more than 200,000 additional Head Start slots.
There is an argument there worth taking seriously.
Government accumulates rules. Rules accumulate paperwork. Paperwork consumes time and money. Regulations written decades ago can become redundant, obsolete or absurd. I do not believe that because a regulation was written with good intentions it deserves eternal life. Government should be capable of looking at its own machinery occasionally and asking whether every gear still needs to be turning.
But there is a fairly important difference between removing bureaucracy from a program and removing pieces of the program itself.
And that distinction gets awfully blurry here.
One of the pieces I encountered through Ground News came from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Its treatment of the proposal is overwhelmingly celebratory. Heritage Foundation scholars are described approvingly as having identified the absurdities embedded in Head Start’s regulatory structure, and the regulations themselves are presented in a way that makes them sound like archaeological artifacts from the Great Society.
Among the examples is a Head Start requirement concerning outdoor play areas: 75 square feet per child.
Read that sentence without context and it sounds wonderfully ridiculous.
You can practically picture some Johnson administration bureaucrat standing on a playground in 1967 with a tape measure while frightened preschoolers wait for federal permission to use the swing set.
Except then you look up contemporary childcare regulations.
And something funny happens.
Seventy-five square feet per child is not some bizarre fossil from the Age of Aquarius. Versions of that standard remain commonplace in modern childcare regulations around the country. States often calculate it according to the number of children using an outdoor space at one time, sometimes explicitly allowing groups to rotate through the playground. The underlying idea is remarkably mundane: if twenty small children are running around outside, they ought to have enough room to do it safely.
Suddenly the absurdity becomes considerably less absurd.
That does not automatically prove the federal regulation should remain. Perhaps states should regulate playground space. Perhaps federal and state requirements are duplicative. Perhaps the language can be simplified. Those are reasonable questions.
But notice what happened.
The framing changed before the facts did.
This is one of the things I appreciate about using Ground News. It encourages me to stop after the headline, or after the first compelling argument, and ask another question. The Fordham piece made the regulatory regime look absurd. Other coverage made the administration’s proposal look potentially devastating. Ground News lets me put those perspectives beside one another, see where they diverge, and then go looking for the thing underneath both of them: the actual policy.
And when you do that here, the argument becomes much more complicated.
Head Start is not simply a federally subsidized preschool.
That misunderstanding is essential to the deregulatory argument because, if Head Start were merely daycare, many of its regulations really would look excessive.
Why does a preschool need federal requirements involving medical screenings? Dental care? Developmental assessments? Family engagement?
Because Head Start was designed as an antipoverty program.
Poverty does not politely restrict itself to one category of a child’s life. A child does not leave hunger at the classroom door. Untreated dental problems do not disappear during story time. Developmental delays do not wait until kindergarten. Housing instability, parental unemployment, disability, nutrition and access to healthcare all walk into the classroom with a child.
Head Start was designed around that reality.
Its current federal standards therefore address staff-to-child ratios, research-backed curriculum, medical and dental screenings, developmental needs, family engagement and other services aimed at the particular circumstances facing poor children. The administration’s proposal would eliminate or loosen many of those federal requirements and defer instead to state and local childcare standards, which are generally focused more narrowly on basic health and safety.
That is not necessarily deregulating the same Head Start.
At some point, it is redefining what Head Start is.
And this brings us to the $2.2 billion.
HHS says deregulation could save more than $2 billion and that the money could be reinvested to create more than 200,000 additional enrollment slots. That sounds fantastic. More children receiving Head Start services for the same amount of money is precisely the kind of government efficiency we should celebrate.
But you have to ask where the savings come from.
According to the administration’s own explanation reported by the Associated Press, part of those savings would come from cutting staff, including teachers, and allowing class sizes to increase.
Well.
That is certainly one way to make preschool cheaper.
But words matter.
If a school has twenty children and two teachers, and I eliminate one teacher, I have reduced the cost of educating those children. That is mathematically indisputable.
What I have not done is make their education more efficient.
Efficiency means achieving an objective using fewer resources.
Simply using fewer resources is called spending less.
Those things are not synonymous.
If I eliminate paperwork while maintaining services, I have found an efficiency.
If I eliminate unnecessary reporting requirements while maintaining safety standards, I have found an efficiency.
If I discover that federal and state agencies are performing precisely the same inspection and eliminate one of them, I may very well have found an efficiency.
But if I save money because fewer teachers are responsible for more children, that is not merely administrative reform. I have changed the service.
The same problem appears elsewhere in the proposal.
Medical and dental screenings cost money.
Family engagement costs money.
Developmental services cost money.
Teachers cost money.
Small classes cost money.
You can make virtually any social program cheaper if you are willing to remove enough of the things the program does.
The question is whether you have made the program more efficient or simply made it smaller while keeping its name.
This is where the coverage from the Mississippi Free Press and the Associated Press adds something the deregulatory framing largely misses. It asks what those regulations actually do. Instead of seeing a hundred-page rulebook and stopping at the thickness of the paper, it looks at the services encoded inside it. AP reports that the proposed changes reach staff-to-child ratios, health and developmental screenings, dental care, lead-exposure protections, curriculum and family engagement.
Suddenly “1,400 regulations” means something different.
Some may indeed be bureaucratic nonsense.
Some may be duplicative.
And some are the rules that say poor children get their teeth checked.
We ought to know which is which before celebrating the goddamn bonfire.
There is another reason the language surrounding this proposal deserves scrutiny.
The Heritage Foundation is one of the intellectual forces applauding this direction, and its position on Head Start is considerably less ambiguous than the administration’s public messaging.
Heritage published a report in June saying, plainly, that lawmakers should end Head Start. Its recommendations say the administration should continue deregulating the program while policymakers work toward sunsetting it. Heritage has advocated eliminating Head Start before as well, including a previous proposal to phase the federal program out over ten years.
That does not prove that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is secretly executing a Heritage plan to abolish Head Start.
Evidence matters, especially when motives are involved, and I will not manufacture certainty because certainty makes a better paragraph.
Kennedy has publicly praised Head Start. He has called it important for America’s poorest children and said it should be protected. HHS says this proposal is intended to strengthen the program, increase flexibility and expand access.
We should take that argument seriously.
But we should also take Heritage seriously when Heritage tells us what Heritage wants.
If the people applauding deregulation explicitly describe deregulation as an intermediate step toward eventually eliminating the program, it is not alarmist to mention that. It would be irresponsible not to.
It also makes the word reinvestment important.
HHS says the savings could be reinvested to expand enrollment.
Could.
I have not found a requirement in the proposal guaranteeing that every dollar theoretically saved by these changes will be converted into additional Head Start slots. And there is a difference between estimating that savings could support 200,000 additional children and requiring that those 200,000 children actually be served.
This administration’s history with Head Start gives us additional reason to ask for more than assurances. Funding disruptions earlier in Trump’s second administration temporarily affected Head Start operations, while the administration also cut federal personnel supporting the program and closed regional offices.
None of that proves what will happen next.
It does mean trust should not substitute for policy.
If HHS genuinely intends to save $2.2 billion and reinvest every reasonable dollar into serving more poor children, then make the reinvestment concrete. Show us the mechanism. Protect the money. Measure the additional enrollment. Demonstrate that the children being added are receiving Head Start rather than a cheaper program that happens to retain the Head Start sign over the door.
That would be reform worth discussing.
Because I am not opposed to deregulation.
I am opposed to using the word deregulation as a linguistic laundering machine.
Government should eliminate stupid rules.
Government should reduce redundant paperwork.
Government should give local people room to solve local problems.
And government should be particularly careful about regulations whose compliance costs consume money without improving outcomes.
But a teacher is not red tape.
A dental screening is not red tape.
A developmental assessment is not red tape.
Enough room for preschoolers to play safely is not red tape simply because somebody once wrote the dimensions into the Code of Federal Regulations.
This is why media literacy matters so much more than deciding which news organization agrees with us.
Had I read only the celebratory argument, I might have walked away thinking the administration had finally discovered a dusty warehouse containing 1,400 ridiculous rules written by bureaucrats who hated playgrounds.
Had I read only the most critical coverage, I might have concluded that every one of those 1,400 provisions was indispensable.
Neither conclusion requires very much thought.
The value of Ground News is that it makes avoiding that kind of intellectual laziness easier. You can see how outlets across the political spectrum cover the same story, identify the blind spots and differences in emphasis, and then investigate the claims for yourself.
That is how I use it every day.
Not to tell me what to believe.
To make it harder for me to believe something too quickly.
And on Head Start, looking across the coverage reveals a debate considerably more important than whether Donald Trump likes regulations.
It is a debate about what government owes a poor child.
Head Start was born from an idea that now seems almost radical in its simplicity: that poverty is not evidence that a child deserves less.
Not less education.
Not less healthcare.
Not less attention.
Not less opportunity.
The child did not choose the household income printed on the eligibility form. She did not choose whether her mother has dental insurance. He did not choose whether his father lost his job. They did not choose the neighborhood, the rent, the grocery bill or the circumstances waiting for them outside the classroom.
We chose what happened next.
That was the moral imagination behind Head Start.
We understood that equality of opportunity means precious little if one child arrives at kindergarten healthy, well-fed and developmentally prepared while another arrives carrying five years of disadvantages we had the ability to address and simply chose not to.
Maybe parts of Head Start need reforming.
Fine.
Reform them.
Find every useless form. Eliminate every redundant inspection. Modernize every outdated requirement. Give teachers more time with children instead of paperwork. Spend public money carefully because every dollar wasted on bureaucracy is a dollar unavailable to the people the program exists to serve.
But don’t fire the teacher and call her red tape.
Don’t eliminate the service and call it efficiency.
Don’t lower the standard and call it flexibility.
And don’t tell us that spending less on poor children automatically means government has gotten smarter.
Sometimes cheaper is better.
Sometimes cheaper is simply cheaper.
The measure of Head Start should never be how little we can spend while still legally calling it Head Start.
The measure should be whether the little boy walking through its doors has a better chance when he walks out.
Everything else is accounting.
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