Head Start funding freeze: The panic was the point

Yahoo

07-02-2025

Children at The Playing Field, a Madison child care center that participates in the federal Head Start program. (Courtesy of The Playing Field)
On Jan. 27, the Trump administration called for federal agencies to implement a sweeping freeze on large amounts of grants, loans and other assistance, creating widespread panic across the country — particularly for families dependent on Head Start for child care. More than a week into the freeze, many of Wisconsin's Head Start programs still can't access the funds they need to stay open.
Head Start provides funding to local organizations to run free, comprehensive preschool and early learning programs for families living in poverty. Many of the local organizations, or grantees, running these programs also provide child care services to families who receive child care subsidies and parents who pay for child care without assistance.
Wisconsin has 39 Head Start providers serving 16,000 children and employing 4,500 staff across the state. Reach Dane's Head Start program in Madison is one of many Wisconsinites rely on.
The day after the announcement, Jen Bailey, executive director of the program, said her program and others were unable to access funds because their payment management system was shut down. She described the overwhelming chaos and fear that morning as she wondered how to keep this vital service afloat.
The Trump administration initially said this freeze was necessary to ensure funding aligns with the president's priorities. Normally, Jen and her staff would have a direct line of communication to the federal Office of Head Start, but when the freeze was announced she described a lack of communication with the federal government — leaving her and her staff to rely on news articles and press conferences to glean any insight into the meaning of the mayhem.
Across Wisconsin, on the first morning of the freeze, parents received emails from their child care providers warning of potential closures to programs. On Tuesday afternoon, the Trump administration walked back its initial inclusion of Head Start in the government-wide freeze. But some programs had already made the decision to close their doors Wednesday — leaving parents scrambling to find potential backups for child care and wondering if they would be able to go to work. Program staff at those centers were also unsure if their next paychecks would be delayed or if they even still had jobs.
As of Tuesday, Feb. 4, seven providers serving roughly 3,000 children had still not received funding from the federal government since the freeze went into effect. The National Head Start Association reported that the funding issues are widespread across the country. At least 45 Head Start grantees serving nearly 20,000 young children are still having problems accessing their funds.
Unfortunately, this is unlikely to be the last time Wisconsin families dependent on these programs experience uncertainty and even panic under the current administration. The radical far-right playbook Project 2025 proposed eliminating Head Start entirely, which would increase the number of Americans living in a child care desert and particularly harm child care supply in rural communities. If the leaders in the Trump Administration who helped author Project 2025 had it their way, no Head Start programs would be opening their doors to the vulnerable families in need of services.
Fifty-four percent of young children under the age of 5 in Wisconsin live in a child care desert, and the high cost of child care pushes 134,000 families across the U.S. into poverty every year. What Wisconsin parents and families need now is to know that their current child care arrangements are secure while policymakers work on solutions to build supply and bring costs down.
Over a week since the publication of the freeze memo, it's obvious the stress and harm inflicted on families and providers was created not only thoughtlessly, but needlessly. It's been hard to keep track of all the walk-backs and attempts at 'clarification' from the Trump administration that only sowed more confusion. Most recently, the administration announced it was rescinding the freeze memo after a judge had blocked the spending freeze. That about-face came less than 48 hours after the same administration sent federal programs and the people dependent on them into a tailspin. So what was all the chaos and confusion for?
The frantically mixed messages from the Trump administration tell us the president and the people working for him spend very little time thinking through how their actions will affect everyday Americans, especially parents. When you play unnecessary games with trillions of dollars in federal funding that millions of people depend on, real people suffer. We're barely two weeks into this new administration. How many more threats to their livelihood can Wisconsin families and providers like Jen expect over the next four years?
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