Vice President Kamala Harris correct that Project 2025 would end Head Start

Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, warned that Project 2025, a conservative policy agenda, could spell the end for Head Start, a federally funded program that supports early education and other services for low-income Americans.

During a July 18 campaign event in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Harris said, "Their Project 2025 agenda would even end Head Start to take away preschool from hundreds of thousands of our children."

Before and after President Joe Biden’s announcement July 21 that he would forgo a second term, Democrats have been targeting the conservative policy agenda, saying it promotes proposals that would be unpopular with American voters.

Some Biden-Harris warnings about Project 2025 have gone too far in describing what the policy blueprint calls for, including exaggerating claims about its impact on Social Security and abortion policy. Other claims are accurate; much of the plan calls for extensive executive branch overhauls and draws on both long-standing conservative principles, such as tax cuts, and more recent culture war issues, such as LGBTQ issues and diversity, equity and inclusion. Project 2025 lays out recommendations for disbanding the Commerce and Education departments, eliminating certain climate protections and consolidating more power to the president. 

Harris’ claim about ending Head Start, which the Department of Health and Human Services administers, is accurate. On Page 482, the document reads: "Eliminate the Head Start program."

Two related programs, Head Start and Early Head Start, collectively provide free early childhood education, health and nutrition services for infants, toddlers and preschoolers from low-income families. The programs are federally funded but run by local nonprofit organizations and focus on pregnant women and children up to 5 years old.

Head Start was established in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society initiative. During the 2022-23 school year, the program enrolled about 788,000 children and 13,000 pregnant women. For fiscal year 2024, Congress appropriated $12.27 billion for the Office of Head Start. Approximately two-thirds of program participants are Black or Latino. 

In 2023, Biden signed an executive order calling on the Department of Health and Human Services to reduce Head Start eligibility barriers and to increase pay and benefits for the program’s teachers and staff. 

Although a Democratic president enacted the program, lawmakers from both parties have regularly supported Head Start since its creation. During his presidency, Trump’s daughter Ivanka brought attention to early childhood education and convened a panel in Mississippi in 2018 that included a local Head Start official.

Head Start tends to be popular with a wide cross section of voters. A July 2023 poll by the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies on behalf of the First Five Years Fund, a child care advocacy group, found widespread support for Head Start across party lines. When asked whether increases to funding for Head Start and Early Head Start should increase, 71% of Republicans and 89% of Democrats said yes.

Project 2025 is a presidential transition project led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank with contributions from more than 100 conservative organizations. The foundation released a 900-page guide in 2023 advocating a range of policies to be instituted following a potential Republican win in November.

In his 2024 presidential campaign, former President Donald Trump has sought to disassociate himself from Project 2025, writing on Truth Social that he "knows nothing" about the project and has "no idea" who leads it. However, CNN reported that at least 140 former Trump administration advisers contributed to the project.

Max Eden, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., drew a distinction between congressional Republicans’ views of Head Start and those of outside conservative groups.

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"There's quite a bit of daylight" between conservative think tanks "and the Republican Party proper, much less President Trump," Eden said. "The call to end Head Start is pretty common within the conservative wonk sphere. Heritage has been saying this for many, many years."

The Project 2025 document proposes that Head Start be eliminated entirely because it is "fraught with scandal and abuse."

"Given its unaddressed crisis of rampant abuse and lack of positive outcomes, this program should be eliminated along with the entire (office that runs it). At the very least, the program’s COVID-19 vaccine and mask requirements should be rescinded," the document says on Page 482. (The Department of Health and Human Services published final rules eliminating the universal masking and vaccine requirements for Head Start programs in January 2023 and June 2023, respectively.) 

The Project 2025 document cited a Heritage Foundation report from 2022 that details 1,000 incidents in which children were abused, left unsupervised or released to an unauthorized person while enrolled in Head Start programs. 

It also referred to Heritage Foundation research that said Head Start programs do not have lasting positive effects on students’ academic achievement.

Greg J. Duncan, a professor in the University of California, Irvine’s School of Education, told PolitiFact that eliminating Head Start would be a consequential development for low-income families, including the one-third of participants who were dual-language learners, most of them in families that speak primarily Spanish at home.

Also, "by providing no-cost child care services, Head Start helps to support parental employment efforts," Duncan said. "Pre-K programs are a rapidly growing alternative to Head Start, but most pre-K programs have to ration slots owing to high demand. Reducing Head Start slots would undoubtedly increase further the demand for pre-K programs," and cost more for families out of pocket.

Head Start’s effectiveness in improving educational readiness is more of an open question. 

In 2005, a report by agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services, found that a year of Head Start improved cognitive skills, but only modestly. A 2010 report by the same groups showed that by the end of first grade, the effects phased out. And the next report in the series, released in 2012, found no effect by the end of elementary school.

Eden pointed to a 2019 study that "found no statistically significant impacts on earnings and mixed evidence of impacts on other adult outcomes."

Duncan acknowledged that "longer-run benefits of the program on children's developmental trajectories are still being debated."

Duncan added that Head Start has had other positive impacts, however, such as increasing parents' involvement with their children, including reading to them and participating in math activities. 

Harris said Project 2025 would "end Head Start."

She is correct about what Project 2025 would do with Head Start. The conservative policy blueprint says on Page 482 that it would "Eliminate the Head Start program."

We rate the statement True.