Yes, the 2025 project wants to eliminate the advance

Claim:

Project 2025, a conservative coalition’s plan for a future U.S. Republican presidency, proposes eliminating the federal Head Start education program.

Rating:

For several months, asserts that Project 2025 intend to eliminate the US Head Start program, which provides early childhood education and services to low-income families, have been circulating in various media. media points of sale and on social media platforms, including posts by US Vice President Kamala Harris. “Donald Trump’s Plan 2025 would eliminate the Department of Education and eliminate Head Start,” Harris’ Facebook account wrote.

“Project 2025 is eliminating the Head Start program,” said one X user wrote, addition that “Project 2025 aims to chart the path to success”.

Indeed, this claim has been circulating on several social media platforms, including Facebook, X, TikTokAnd Instagram.

They are right. “Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise,” a document outlining the goals of Project 2025, explicitly recommends eliminating the Head Start program, so we considered this statement to be true.

What does the Project 2025 document say?

The recommendation to eliminate Head Start has drawn widespread criticism, as many view it as essential to supporting low-income families. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) website, Head Start programs supporting the growth of children from birth to age 5 through services focused on early learning and development, health and family well-being.

The proposal to eliminate Head Start was describe in the “Leadership Mandate” chapter on DHHS, written by Roger Severino, vice president for domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation. Specifically, this recommendation appeared in the section on the Office of Head Start (OHS) on page 482, as follows:

Eliminate the Head Start program. Head Start, originally created and funded to support low-income families, is riddled with scandal and abuse. With a budget of more than $11 billion, the program should aim to protect and educate minors. Unfortunately, the exact opposite happened. In fact, “around one in four grant recipients experienced incidents where children were abused, left unsupervised or handed over to an unauthorized person between October 2015 and May 2020.” (…) Research has shown that federal Head Start centers, which provide preschool child care to children from low-income families, have little or no long-term academic value for children. Given the unresolved crisis of widespread abuse and lack of positive results, this program should be eliminated along with the entire OHS. At the very least, the program’s COVID-19 vaccine and mask requirements should be waived.

The document criticizes Head Start for alleged inefficiencies, safety violations and a lack of long-term academic benefits for participating children. The paragraph referred to a article from the Heritage Foundation in November 2022, titled “More than 1,000 security breaches in March. Children Deserve Better,” written by Madison Marino, senior research associate at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.

“Head Start has faced multiple cases of financial fraud and child abuse over several decades. And those who attend Head Start do no better in school than similar children who don’t go, meaning that Head Start has little or no long-term academic value for children,” the article states.

The article was originally published by the The daily signala conservative news site, and was based on actual news from September 2022. goodbye published by the Office of the Inspector General of the United States, entitled “The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) Should Improve Oversight of Head Start to Better Protect Children’s Safety.”

The federal review stated that “approximately one in four Head Start grant recipients received an adverse outcome from ACF for child abuse, lack of supervision, or unauthorized release between October 2015 and May 2020. These unfavorable results concerned 1,029 individual incidents. It also concluded that ACF “is not aware of all incidents in which children in the care of a Head Start center are abused, left unsupervised, or released to an unauthorized person, thereby hindering efforts of ACF to protect the safety of children”.

Project 2025 and Education

This was not the first claim related to education and the 2025 project that we investigated. For example, in August 2024, we verified facts whether Project 2025 proposes that all public high school students be required to take the military entrance exam (true). We too confirmed Project 2025 called for closing the U.S. Department of Education. In September 2024, we look at claims that United States President-elect Donald Trump said, “I’m going to close the Department of Education and bring education back to the states” (true).

Trump has publicly distanced itself from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document. Instead, he presented Agenda47 as its official set of proposals, which shares some common goals with Project 2025. The degree of influence that Project 2024 will have on its administration remains to be determined.

For further reading, we recommend our comprehensive article on the subject, “What you need to know about Project 2025, the pro-Trump plan to overhaul the US government.”