The Trump administration is dismantling Head Start to abandon poor children.
That is what happened Thursday when the administration proposed gutting the performance standards of Head Start, the sixty-year-old program that feeds children, teaches them to read, screens them for developmental delays, and connects their families to services they cannot reach alone. The proposal cuts the administrative-overhead cap from 15 percent to 5 percent, shifts teacher qualifications, student-teacher ratios, background checks, and transportation standards to the states, and loosens the 133-page federal standard that has served as an evidence-based floor for quality in Head Start centers and thousands of unaffiliated child-care providers.
Alex Adams, the assistant secretary for family support at Health and Human Services, called the change “flexibility.”
“Flexibility is permission. It’s not a mandate,” Adams said. “The opportunity for these programs to make a different decision does not necessarily mean they must make a different decision.”
Let me take the man at his word, because it is the word that needs watching.
I have believed, and still believe, that the family is the first institution God made. No government can replace a parent, and no honest reading of Scripture pretends otherwise. But “parents are children’s primary teachers” has become a refrain that does the opposite of what it sounds like. It is being used to loosen the only net beneath the parents who have the least.
I was inside the Evangelical apparatus long enough to know how this story gets told in the pews. Government programs are wasteful. Families should raise their own children. Federal mandates cannot account for local realities. These sentences have the cadence of common sense. I taught versions of them for years before I learned to read the prophets without the machinery that had been installed between the Bible and my conscience.
So read the text the way the text asks to be read.
In Matthew 25:31–46, Jesus describes the Son of Man separating the nations as a shepherd separates sheep from goats. The test is not doctrine, family structure, or political affiliation. It is what people did for the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned.
“I was hungry and you gave me something to eat,” Jesus says. “I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you invited me in. I needed clothes and you clothed me. I was sick and you looked after me.”
When the righteous ask when they did these things, the answer is: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”
The plain-language reading is not difficult. The criterion is concrete care for people who cannot secure that care by themselves. The passage is addressed to the nations, to the collective, not merely to private acts of individual charity. Head Start is one of the collective arrangements through which approximately 700,000 of the nation’s poorest children are fed, taught, examined, transported, and connected to help.
The captured reading does something else. It restricts “the least of these” to the comfortable, the kin, the deserving. It turns family primacy into an exemption from the stranger’s claim. It treats public responsibility as an intrusion rather than as the means by which a society protects children whose families are already carrying more than they can bear.
That is the legalism.
The Evangelical-right political apparatus also conscripts Romans 13 to justify whatever regime currently holds power, Deuteronomy 28 to bless wealth as evidence of obedience, and a selective reading of 2 Thessalonians 3:10 to cast poor children as the offspring of adults who simply will not work. But 2 Thessalonians 3:10 addresses idle members of the believing community who refuse to contribute. It does not condemn a single mother working two jobs who cannot afford child care. Applying that verse to her is not faithful interpretation. It is a policy preference wearing a Bible costume.
The gap between what the text says and what the Heritage Foundation does with the text is not a harmless difference of opinion. It is a captured operation using sacred language as decoration for an agenda that concentrates institutional power while exporting the cost to families.
And let me tell you what Head Start actually does, because the people stripping it have never had to make a child’s unmet need fit inside a fifteen-minute appointment.
I practice family medicine. My patients include the families Head Start serves: children whose mothers work the early shift at the warehouse and the late shift at the clinic, grandparents raising grandchildren on fixed incomes, families driving ninety minutes because the county hospital closed and the nearest pediatrician is in the next state. Head Start is where a child receives a first dental screening. It is where a teacher notices that a three-year-old is not speaking at the level expected for that age. It is where a family learns that a child qualifies for services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
Those are not administrative luxuries.
They are the difference between a child entering kindergarten ready to learn and a child entering kindergarten already behind. In my experience, that gap does not close simply because a politician has called the staff who identified it “overhead.”
The proposed cap falls from 15 percent to 5 percent. “Overhead” is doing the same dishonest work here that “flexibility” is doing. Overhead is how a center pays for the specialist who supports a child with a disability. It is how a program hires staff with specialized training. It is how a center fills gaps that exhausted families cannot fill themselves.
Yvette Sanchez Fuentes of Start Early put it plainly: administrative costs cover “children with disabilities” and “additional special services or staff with specialties who could come in and support kids.”
You do not cut ten points of a child’s care by calling it overhead. You cut the care.
The administration says the $2.2 billion in savings will be reinvested to create 200,000 new spots. But the same administration’s policy blueprint, Project 2025, calls for eliminating Head Start, and the Heritage Foundation — the Christian-Nationalist policy infrastructure that drafted Project 2025 — has argued for years that the program should disappear. The administration praised Head Start as a success in the very call announcing its demolition.
Believe the pattern, not the press release.
The promise of expansion is the coat of paint. The deregulation is the deliverable.
This is not the maximal version of Project 2025. It is the intermediate step: degrade the program until it fails, then cite the failure as proof that government does not work. The playbook has been run on public-health funding, housing assistance, and Medicaid expansion in Alabama and Georgia, where Evangelical-aligned Republican supermajorities have refused for a decade to fully cover their own neighbors. Georgia offered a limited waiver instead. The congregations suffer the consequences, and the political apparatus calls the suffering evidence of personal failure.
Defund. Deregulate. Declare the wreckage proof of failure. Use the Bible to bless the result.
That is not an accident. It is a governing method.
A Head Start center in Wasilla, Alaska, has already closed for lack of staff and money. The withdrawal this deregulation accelerates is visible on the ground. The administration is not removing waste from a functioning system. It is removing the people and safeguards that make the system function.
The proposal would also shift teacher qualifications, student-teacher ratios, background checks, and transportation requirements to the states. Erica Phillips, executive director of the National Association for Family Child Care, warned that “quality is now dependent on your ZIP code or on your geography.”
She is right.
A child in a state with strong child-care regulation will receive a different program from a child in a state whose legislature has been captured by the same coalition funding the Heritage Foundation. One child will have trained teachers, safe transportation, screened adults, and a workable student-teacher ratio. Another will receive whatever protection remains after local officials decide that the federal floor is an inconvenience.
That is not decentralization. It is a two-tier system in which the children who most need federal protection are the least likely to receive it.
Nobody proposes this kind of “flexibility” for the SEC’s disclosure rules that protect retirement savings, or for USDA inspectors standing at the line in the plant that produces the food their own families eat. The mandates become “one-size-fits-all burdens from Washington” only when the children being protected are poor.
This administration spent the spring binding its own employees’ mouths through proposed nondisclosure agreements, yet it cannot wait to hand the care of the nation’s poorest children to a flexibility no one will enforce. That is not a principle about mandates. It is a judgment about whose children count, rendered in the vocabulary of family values.
Isaiah 1:17 says: “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless.”
The sentence is addressed to people who bring their worship to God on Sunday and then do the opposite on Monday. Isaiah does not separate worship from public obligation. Amos 5:21–24 says, “I hate, I despise your religious festivals,” and then demands that “justice roll on like a river.” The prophets are not offering a private lesson about having a nicer heart. They are indicting religious people whose worship coexists with the abandonment of the poor.
The people dismantling Head Start are, by the plain-language standard of the texts they claim to uphold, the people those texts are addressing.
I taught these verses as spiritual lessons about the condition of my own heart. I did not teach them as an economic mandate: defend the fatherless, protect the child with no advocate at the statehouse, share food with the hungry, build institutions that keep the vulnerable from falling through the floor. I did not connect them to the $12 billion program that feeds children, screens them for developmental delays, and pays teachers enough to remain in the classroom.
I did not make the connection because the apparatus I served did not make it. And the apparatus did not make it because the connection would have indicted the apparatus.
Let me name the testimony. I voted for politicians who defunded programs I prayed for. I supported the policy infrastructure that stripped children of dental screenings and developmental assessments while telling myself that my concern for families was sincere.
It was sincere.
It was also compromised.
That is the complicity I carry, and it is the same complicity the Heritage Foundation is weaponizing now. We can mean the prayer and still vote for the abandonment. We can love the child in the abstract and refuse the public duty that would protect the child in particular.
The text is not a mascot for any political team. It is a standard against which every political team must be measured. That includes my own. When a coalition uses the Bible to bless a policy that protects the poor, the text is doing its work. When a Christian-Nationalist coalition uses the Bible to bless dismantling a program that serves the poor, the text is being captured.
Read the text. Ask whether the policy meets the standard the text sets.
If it does not, name the gap.
Isaiah 58:6–7 asks, “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?” It continues: “Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter?”
The children in Head Start are hungry. The program shares its food with them. It identifies disabilities, transports children safely, and supplies trained adults where the market and the family cannot supply them alone. The people dismantling the program call that government overreach.
The plain-language reading of Isaiah 58 calls it responsibility.
Matthew 18:6 gives the warning: “If anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” I will not claim to know all that God intends by that image. I have been wrong about Scripture before, and humility requires remembering that I may be wrong again.
But I can read what the text plainly says, and I can read what is plainly happening.
The ratios are being loosened. The background checks are being weakened. The training requirements are being shifted. The specialists are being recategorized as overhead. The money is being removed from the people who screen, feed, teach, and refer children, then counted as savings.
That is not a different decision.
It is the children’s decision, made for them by adults who will not bear the cost.
The comment period will run. The rulemaking clock will turn. “Flexibility,” which sounds like generosity and is, in fact, the oldest word the powerful have for abandonment, will fall on the families who had the least to begin with.
The coat of paint was expansion.
The deliverable is the care.
Call the cutting of that a mandate if you like, or call it whatever the administration pleases. Matthew 25 names the standard: what you did for one of the least of these, you did for me.
And what this administration is doing is telling them to make do with permission.