A leaked draft of the Trump administration’s budget proposal for the Department of Health and Human services shows they want to slash overall spending by a third, and completely eliminate Head Start, a program which provides children from low-income families with education and health services:
The 64-page document calls not only for cuts, but also a major shuffling and restructuring of health and human service agencies.
Agencies are allowed to appeal to HHS for changes but have been told they cannot change the bottom line, according to a federal health official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations.
[…]
Money for the Head Start program, which provides early child care and education for low-income families and is funded by HHS’s Administration for Children and Families, would be eliminated. “The federal government should not be in the business of mandating curriculum, locations and performance standards for any form of education,” the document says.
As they noted, it’s not clear whether Congress will go along with the proposal. I’m not optimistic given the fact that they’ve refused to rein him in with all of the destruction he’s already allowed the DOGE crew to unleash on the country. Here’s more from the WaPo article on the proposal:
But those who depend on this funding said the cuts would pose an existential threat to some programs.
“It would be catastrophic,” said Tommy Sheridan, deputy director of the National Head Start Association. “More than a million parents wouldn’t be able to go to work from all those children, or they would have to scramble to find some other type of option. In a lot of communities, Head Start is the only early childhood provider in the community — especially rural America.”
Alan Morgan, chief executive of the National Rural Health Association, said rural residents would suffer if the health initiatives proposed for elimination were cut.
“Those are essential to ensuring access to care for rural Americans and critical to keeping rural hospitals open,” he said. “If that would come to fruition it would be absolute shocking news, because these programs have had such bipartisan support,” he added, noting Kennedy himself had expressed support for the importance of rural hospitals.
Trump sure doesn’t seem to care how much damage he does to his base these days. I wonder if these people that voted for Trump who gets screwed by this are ever going to admit that Trump knew exactly what Project 2025 was?
