The Trump administration is on the verge of releasing a proposed rule that would eliminate crucial quality standards at the nation’s preschool program for low-income children.
Teachers Deimy Labrador, top, and Emily Ledesma read with children in an Early Head Start class supporting kids with developmental delays, in Miami. (Rebecca Blackwell / AP Photo)
The Trump administration is on the verge of publishing a proposed rule that, if finalized, will gut most of the crucial standards that ensure uniform quality of Head Start programs across the country while adding new requirements aimed at shutting out immigrants for the first time in the program’s history, according to two people with direct knowledge of the draft regulation. Head Start, the federal program that provides free preschool education and services to low-income families, was created in 1965 and currently serves more than 700,000 children, with an annual budget of $12.4 billion. In a leaked 2025 budget draft that called for eliminating Head Start entirely, President Trump said, “The federal government should not be in the business of mandating curriculum, locations, and performance standards for any form of education.”
The administration’s proposed rule, which has been drafted by the Department of Health and Human Services and sent to the Office of Management and Budget for review, would rescind the entire 133-page set of “performance standards” that currently spell out how Head Start laws must be implemented by states, counties, and programs, they said. While the Head Start Act includes some specific requirements, most standards in the program have been delineated by this set of rules. Instead, a much shorter set of standards would take its place, leaving it up to states and local governments to implement their own standards if they so choose.
“What it does is transform a program that has high quality,” one of the people said, “and create a generic early-childhood funding stream that doesn’t look like Head Start.” The Administration for Children and Families, which oversees Head Start, did not respond to a request for comment.
Currently, the Head Start guidelines place limits on class sizes and specify how many adult staff are required to supervise certain numbers of children. The new regulations would eliminate those class size and ratio requirements; instead, they would require programs to adhere to state and local laws. Some states have strict childcare ratio requirements, but others are much looser, permitting higher ratios of children to teachers than Head Start currently allows. Head Start teachers work with some of the nation’s most vulnerable children and report that since the pandemic children have presented with such significant needs that they struggle to serve children under the program’s existing ratios, the first source said. The proposed rule also nixes specific requirements that mandate the curriculum standards programs must adhere to.
The proposed rule removes guidance around the circumstances in which children can be suspended and expelled. The existing standards prohibit corporal punishment, a prohibition that will disappear in the proposed rule. It gets rid of required developmental screenings for all children and detailed regulations governing how children with disabilities must be given access to services and included in classroom instruction. Gone are guidelines around how homeless families and children in foster care should be accommodated so that they can enroll.
“If it’s not explicitly stated in [the Head Start] statute, it won’t seem to exist after this proposed rule is finalized,” the second person said. That statute was last revised nearly 20 years ago under President George W. Bush, and at that time Congress directed the Office of Head Start to keep issuing regulations to continuously improve the program. “It really turns over its authority to states and localities on how to handle almost everything.”
What the proposed rule adds is just as troubling as what is disappearing. If the rule is finalized, it will only allow children who are citizens, United States nationals, or “qualified aliens,” and with at least one parent with that status, to enroll. That will shut out a number of immigrants, and potentially children who are American citizens, for the first time ever. As of 2022, about 4.4 million American children lived with at least one undocumented parent. (Jonathan Cohn previously reported the proposal rule’s changes to immigration eligibility and to the class size ratios at The Bulwark.) The rule would also put the onus of verifying children’s immigration eligibility on Head Start programs, which will require extra administrative resources. All families, meanwhile, will face an added paperwork burden of proving their citizenship status.
The rule states that all teaching must be done in English, except for in Native American tribes, and says that if a child’s native language isn’t English, programs must prioritize teaching them in English anyway.
The rule creates a new requirement that staff must maintain records proving a family’s income, immigration, and other eligibility for a certain amount of time and provide them to HHS upon request. It says that programs have to report staff who violate eligibility requirements to HHS. The combination will create a massive increase in paperwork and the possibility that staff members will be penalized for clerical errors. “They’ve made it very high stakes,” the first person said. It’s “a very dangerous proposition to be having coworkers question their colleagues’ work at this level,” the second person added.
The current standards say programs must establish parent committees that weigh in on the program’s policies and services; the proposed rule would make those optional.
While the proposed rule would not affect Head Start’s budget, it nevertheless changes regulations that will force programs to tighten their belts. Under current regulations, programs are permitted to spend up to 15 percent of their grant funding on administration and overhead, which was already a difficult threshold for programs to meet. But the proposed rule reduces that to just 5 percent. “That’s going to be a pretty significant burden for programs,” the second person said.
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The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that removing government regulations makes public programs easier to operate. However, losing so many specific regulations may instead put a greater burden on Head Start programs, as well as the states a`nd counties that must now regulate them. Requirements will end up varying significantly from state to state or even county to county, which “gets into a really complex and confusing patchwork that just places a more significant burden on every grantee,” the second person said, while leaving parents with program quality that varies depending on where they live. Some states may fail to do anything to maintain standards at all. Many programs, meanwhile, are motivated to provide high quality, but with fewer requirements some may find it cheaper and easier to do less. “The standards are supposed to be the floor so everybody gets the same thing in Head Start,” the first person said. But “there are financial realities in these programs.” The first person also worries that the reduction in rules and regulations will open the doors for corporate behemoths to get into the space. “This is a $12.5 billion investment that comes with strings right now,” they said. “There’s a danger to exploit that if it comes with no strings.”
“What we’re looking at is very much the wild, Wild West of an early childhood patchwork of programs and regulations and statutes across the country,” the second person said.
The proposed rule could change before it’s made public and may change before being finalized. Even if it is finalized in its current form, it is likely to be subject to litigation; a number of its provisions appear to contradict the Head Start statute and a 2007 reauthorization that mandates that the standards don’t eliminate or reduce quality.
But the details fit squarely with the administration’s agenda. Project 2025, the document crafted by conservative Trump allies during the Biden administration to guide the next Republican president, called for eliminating Head Start entirely. Trump’s first budget after being reelected nearly proposed doing just that: A leaked draft called for zeroing out the program’s funding. The administration has closed a number of regional Head Start offices, leaving programs with nowhere to turn to get answers, and despite Congress fully funding Head Start, last year the Trump administration sat on some of the money, refusing to dole it out, while implementing a new “defend the spend” process that held up grant disbursement. Late last year, it attempted to block certain immigrants from enrolling in Head Start, only to have the effort blocked by a federal judge. Then in May, the administration proposed rolling back the higher wage and benefit levels for Head Start teachers set by the Biden administration. “It’s one attack after the other on the very core of the program,” the second person said.
The proposed rule, then, seems to be a new way of attempting to gut the program. “This is another run at it,” the first person said.
It’s part of a “consistent approach that Head Start is not a priority for them,” the second person added. “If you can’t eliminate something, shrink it to the smallest possible degree and make it difficult to operate.” Then, when the program struggles to continue operating and providing high-quality education, it will likely be used as justification to further reduce it. “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” the second person said.
Bryce CovertTwitterBryce Covert is a contributing writer at The Nation and was a 2023 Reporter in Residence at Omidyar Network.