Trump’s Barbarity Goes On: Now It’s Poor Children in the Crosshairs

They are unremarkable little sentences that are supposed to disappear. That one caregiver may look after no more than 4 children under the age of 3 at the same time. That a snack must provide part of what a child needs in a day. That a facility provides screenings and helps the parents of a child with disabilities get the proper care. That research-backed learning programs are used and caregivers have training in early childhood education. That home visits take place and children’s health is checked. More than 100 pages of rules like these currently govern Head Start, the federal early education program for poor children that also helps provide their food and health care. On Thursday, the Trump administration announced that it plans to scrap most of them.

What sounds like cutting clutter is the demolition of a foundation. Instead of uniform federal standards, the roughly 1,600 providers, including schools and nonprofits, would have to follow state and local rules. Those rules vary widely and are often far weaker. Head Start has raised standards for early childhood education across the board, says Melissa Boteach of the organization Zero to Three. Now, she says, the plan is to dramatically lower them in a way that damages both quality and access.

The administration calls it efficiency. Lower child-to-caregiver ratios would reduce the cost per child, the notice says, but what that means will now depend on where a child lives, because states have different rules for group sizes and staff qualifications. Diane Schilder of the Urban Institute puts it plainly. If states are given more power, the chances increase that children in one state will receive lower-quality help than children in another. Teachers’ salaries already vary widely. A child in a poor state with weaker rules could then receive less than a child next door, simply because of a line on a map.

And the benefits are proven. Head Start and Early Head Start, which serves children from birth through age three, have been shown to improve childhood development. They are tied to nutrition programs, and participation is highest where hunger is most severe. Studies link the program to healthier weight and better eating habits, as well as stronger social and emotional development. The program does not just help children, it also helps their parents, connecting families with SNAP food assistance and Medicaid health coverage and, when necessary, arranging transportation to medical appointments. If that requirement disappears, Schilder warns, the services could disappear with it, because a program under financial pressure will cut first what it is no longer required to provide. A 2009 study Schilder helped conduct found exactly that: Where the standards did not apply, facilities did not provide the same comprehensive services.

The responsible agency, the Administration for Children and Families, considers the existing rules overly detailed and promises more flexibility, less bureaucracy, the elimination of duplicate requirements, and more power for states, along with federal oversight focused on the main duties required by law. Much of it, the agency says, is already covered by the Head Start Act. In the language of government bureaucracy, the retreat sounds like a public service. The administration says it wants to save more than $2 billion and create 200,000 additional spots. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said something on a press call that turns the whole thing on its head. This program works, he said, while boasting that it survived the draconian cuts of Trump’s first year, even as he is now the one stripping it down.

Going after Head Start is nothing new. Although the program has long enjoyed bipartisan support, Trump allies targeted it, including budget director Russell Vought. The first budget proposal for 2026 called for eliminating its funding entirely. The congressional watchdog found that the administration had illegally withheld $12 million from the program, and the government shutdown in November temporarily closed facilities and threw families into chaos. Gutting the standards quietly finishes what the open attempt to take away the money failed to accomplish.

This attack does not stand alone. Last year, Congress made major cuts to Medicaid and SNAP food assistance. The tougher work requirements do exempt households with children under 14, but more of the burden is being pushed onto the states, and further cuts are likely to follow. Since July, according to one think tank’s count, more than 1 million children in 19 states have lost food assistance. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office expects 3 million children to lose Medicaid between 2026 and 2036, mainly because of the 2025 law. The public now has 60 days to object to the Head Start overhaul before it takes effect. Nothing has changed yet, but the direction is clear. When you hit the weakest families, you hit them again and again, through their food, their children’s health, and the care that gave them stability.

The National Head Start Association plans to review every page. Fewer rules cannot mean fewer results, says its executive director, Yasmina Vinci. Head Start makes families a promise that their children will be safe, healthy, and ready for school, whether they live in rural Montana or Baltimore, and the association will judge whether that promise is being kept or quietly abandoned.

What this does to the youngest children can be measured. A Zero to Three survey found that by the end of 2025, more than half of parents of babies and toddlers were struggling to pay for basic necessities, food and rent. A small child, Boteach says, does not understand rising prices, but that child absolutely feels the parents’ anxiety. Between birth and age three, the brain grows faster than it ever will again, and how it grows depends on the people surrounding that child. When you take away security during those years, you are not interfering with a household, you are interfering with a life that has only just begun. What is missing during those years cannot be made up later by some course. A country shows what it is not by how it treats the strong, but by what it does to the smallest children, the ones who cannot vote and who later will not remember who abandoned them. There is an old word for that. Barbarity. And this time it does not arrive loudly, it arrives as a regulation.