Testifying in front of Congress this May, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. assured lawmakers funding would not be cut for Head Start, a child care program that serves nearly 28,000 low-income children and families across Illinois.
Kennedy said during the meeting that he “fought very, very hard” to ensure Head Start would not be cut from next year’s budget. The Trump administration is committed to “preserving legacy programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Head Start as the foundation of the MAGA agenda,” he said. DHHS will work to ensure Head Start “continues to serve its 750,000 children and parents effectively.”
Head Start providers across the country have been deeply concerned about the future of the 60-year-old program in recent months after widespread funding freezes and regional Head Start office closures have left many grantees without federal support or direction.
Despite Kennedy’s assurance of the program’s sustained funding, many Illinois Head Start providers remain wary about receiving the equivalent in grant funds as in previous years.
The Illinois Head Start Association (IHSA) receives over $478 million in federal funding for its Head Start and Early Head Start programs each year. According to internal grant data, the state has received $59 million less in federal funds than this time last year.
IHSA Executive Director Lauri Morrison-Frichtl said that while it’s a “really good win” for the organization to avoid elimination, any pattern of continued funding delays could have devastating impacts on local providers.
“When it takes so long to draw down funds, and we can only hold on to those funds for three days, it puts the program in a bind because some of them don't have reserves that they can lean through,” said Morrison-Frichtl.
Federal regulations require that state-based agencies can only hold onto their grant funding for three days before it’s rescinded.
“What we're anticipating is that we're going to find more and more examples of programs waiting too long to receive their funding and they have no other option but to close their doors,” she said.
Morrison-Frichtl said she expects delays will continue to get worse as the Trump administration requires increased justifications for federal grant allocations, as in the case of the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) “defend the spend” initiative.
When grantees attempt to draw down their funds, they are required to enter a detailed description of what the money is being used for. Requests found “unsatisfactory” will be denied and have its funding stalled, according to DOGE.
Head Start offers numerous diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives built to assist children with severe disabilities, like language learning curriculum. These, Morrison-Frichtl said, are at risk. “We are so embedded in that work and we’re worried.”
In April, Illinois joined several other state Head Start organizations, including Wisconsin, Washington, and Pennsylvania, along with two other parent-led organizations in Oregon and California, in an ACLU lawsuit challenging the administration’s efforts to dismantle the organization without Congressional approval.
The lawsuit also alleges that federal efforts to remove programs geared towards DEI are “unconstitutionally vague” and violate the free speech of Head Start teachers and staff.
Providers remain unclear on how to avoid losing this funding, and this has caused internal disarray, the suit argues.
“This lawsuit was necessary to prevent the administration from attempting to illegally dismantle a program that is authorized by Congress and that does such crucial work in communities across the country,” said Allison Siebeneck, a senior supervising attorney at ACLU. “I think the administration underestimated just how popular [this program is] and just how many people have been personally impacted by Head Start,” she said.
Over the past 60 years, Head Start has served nearly 40 million children nationwide and more than 790,000 in the last year alone.
A majority of children who utilize Head Start services come from households where income is at or below the poverty level. These families frequently qualify for additional government aid programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
For a family of four, an income of $32,150 or less is considered below the poverty level, according to DHHS guidelines. The reconciliation budget proposal passed in the House would strip close to $300 billion through 2034 from SNAP, adding to uncertainty.
Shauntay Gregg has worked at the Loop Learning Center in Chicago—a Head Start grantee—for nearly 25 years. Gregg said the services do much more than just provide an early childhood education to at-risk children.
Roughly 15% of children enrolled at the Loop Learning Center are Head Start children. The center provides year-round child care to families in the South Loop neighborhood. (Credit: Loop Learning Center).
“What a lot of people don’t know is that Head Start covers the entire family,” said Gregg, who serves as the program administrator and Head Start coordinator for the Learning Center.
“We help [parents] re-enroll in school, budget, help with nutritional needs for their families. We try to offset any problems with transportation issues or medical issues,” she said.
Gregg said she has personally reviewed the resumes of parents and conducted mock interviews to help them feel comfortable in a formal setting. “I’ve seen [our services] help families move from literally being homeless to having a stable career [with] their children doing great in school. That was all because of Head Start,” said Gregg.
National evaluations of the program support the conclusion that a Head Start education offers numerous long-term benefits for children, including improved social and emotional development.
Without the support of these services, thousands of families across Illinois, and the country, would be left without sufficient child care.
“We're just thankful that we weren't eliminated, [but] we are concerned about the other programs,” said Morrison-Frichtl. “The ACLU lawsuit is really the protection around that until we can figure out where this administration is going to go with that work,” she said.
Claire Murphy is a master’s student in the investigative specialization at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. She is also a freelance journalist based in Chicago, IL.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.