The clear-cutting across the
federal government under President Donald Trump has been dramatic, with mass
terminations, the suspension of decades-old programs and the neutering of
entire agencies. But this spectacle has obscured a series of moves by the administration
that could profoundly harm some of the most vulnerable people in the U.S.:
children.
-Consider: The staff of a program
that helps millions of poor families keep the electricity on, in part so that
babies don’t die from extreme heat or cold, have
all been fired. The federal office that oversees the enforcement of child
support payments has been hollowed out.
-Head Start preschools, which teach
toddlers their ABCs and feed them healthy meals, will likely be forced
to shut down en masse, some as soon as May 1.
-And funding for
investigating child sexual abuse and internet crimes against children;
responding to reports of missing children; and preventing youth violence has
been withdrawn indefinitely.
-The administration has laid off
thousands of workers from coast to coast who had supervised education, childcare, child support and child protective services systems, and it has blocked
or delayed billions of dollars in funding for things like school meals and
school safety.
These stark reductions have been
centered in little-known children’s services offices housed within behemoth
agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department
of Justice, offices with names like the Children’s Bureau, the Office of Family
Assistance and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
In
part because of their obscurity, the slashing has gone relatively overlooked.
“Everyone’s been talking about
what the Trump administration and DOGE have been doing, but no one seems to be
talking about how, in a lot of ways, it’s been an assault on kids,” said Bruce
Lesley, president of advocacy group First Focus on Children. He added that “the
one cabinet agency that they’re fully decimating is the kid one,” referring
to Trump’s
goal of shuttering the Department of Education.
Already, some 2,000
staffers there have lost or left their jobs. The impact of these cuts will be
felt far beyond Washington, rippling out to thousands of state and local
agencies serving children nationwide.
=The Department of Education, for
instance, has rescinded as
much as $3 billion in
pandemic-recovery funding for schools, which would have been used for
everything from tutoring services for
Maryland students who’ve fallen behind to making the air safer to
breathe and the water safer to drink for
students in Flint, Michigan.
-The Department of Agriculture, meanwhile,
has canceled $660
million in promised grants to farm-to-school programs, which had been providing
fresh meat and produce to school cafeterias while supporting small farmers.
-t the Department of Health and
Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the agency’s secretary, has dismissed
all of the staff that had distributed $1.7 billion annually in Social Services
Block Grant money, which many states have long depended on to be able to run
their child welfare, foster care and adoption systems, including birth family
visitation, caseworker training and more.
-The grants also fund day care,
counseling and disability services for kids. (It is unclear whether anyone
remains at HHS who would know how to get all of that funding out the door or
whether it will now be administered by White House appointees.)
-Head Start will be especially
affected in the wake of Kennedy’s mass firings of Office of Head Start regional
staff and news that the president’s draft budget proposes eliminating
funding for the program altogether. That would leave one million
working-class parents who rely on Head Start not only for pre-K education but
also for child care, particularly in rural areas, with nowhere to send their
kids during the day.
-Some local Head Start
programs are
already having to close their doors, and many program directors are
encountering impediments to spending their current budgets. When they seek
reimbursement after paying their teachers or purchasing school supplies,
they’re being directed to a new “Defend the Spend” DOGE website asking them to
“justify” each item, even though the spending has already been appropriated by
Congress and audited by nonpartisan civil servants.
-Next on
the chopping block, it appears, is Medicaid, which serves children in
greater numbers than
any other age group. If Republicans in Congress go through with the cuts
they’ve been discussing, and Trump signs those cuts into law, kids from lower-
and middle-class families across the U.S. will lose access to health care at
their schools, in foster care, for their disabilities or for cancer treatment.
The Trump administration has
touted the president’s record of “protecting America’s children,” asserting in
a recent
post that Trump will “never stop fighting for their right to a
healthy, productive upbringing.” The statement listed five examples of that
commitment. Four were related to transgender issues (including making it U.S.
government policy that there are only two sexes and keeping trans athletes out
of women’s sports); the other was a ban on COVID-19 vaccine mandates at schools
that receive federal funding.
The White House, and multiple
agencies, declined to respond to most of ProPublica’s questions. Madi
Biedermann, a Department of Education spokesperson, addressed the elimination
of pandemic recovery funding, saying that “COVID is over”; that the Biden administration
established an “irresponsible precedent” by extending the deadline to spend
these funds (and exceeding their original purpose); and that the department
will consider extensions if individual projects show a clear connection between
COVID and student learning.
An HHS spokesperson, in response
to ProPublica’s questions about cuts to children’s programs across that agency,
sent a short statement saying that the department, guided by Trump, is
restructuring with a focus on cutting wasteful bureaucracy. The offices serving
children, the statement said, will be merged into a newly established
“Administration for Healthy America.”
Programs that serve kids have historically fared
the worst when those in power are looking for ways to cut the budget. That’s in
part because kids can’t vote, and they typically don’t belong to political
organizations. International aid groups, another constituency devastated
by Trump’s policy agenda, also can’t say that they represent many U.S.
voters.
This dynamic may be part of why
cuts on the health side of the Department of Health and Human Services —
layoffs of doctors, medical researchers and the like — have
received more political and press attention than those on the human
services side, where the Administration for Children and Families is located.
That’s where you can find the Office of Child Support Services, the Office of
Head Start, the Office of Child Care (which promotes minimum health and safety
standards for child care programs nationally and helps states reduce the cost
of child care for families), the Office of Family Assistance (which helps
states administer direct aid to lower-income parents and kids), the Children’s
Bureau (which oversees child protective services, foster care and adoption) and
the Family and Youth Services Bureau (which aids runaway and homeless teens,
among others).
All told, these programs have
seen their staffs cut from roughly 2,400 employees as of January to 1,500 now,
according to a shared Google document that is being regularly updated by former
HHS officials. (Neither the White House nor agency leadership have released the
exact numbers of cuts.)
Those losses have been most
acutely felt in the agency’s regional offices, five out of 10 of which —
covering over 20 states — have been closed by the Trump administration. They
were dissolved this month without notice to their own employees or to the local
providers they worked with.
It was these outposts that had monitored Head Start
programs to make sure that they had fences around their playgrounds, gates at
the top of their stairs and enough staffing to keep an eye on even the most
energetic little ones.
It was also the regional staff who had helped state
child support programs modernize their computer systems and navigate federal
law. That allowed them, among other things, to be able to “pass
through” more money to families instead of depositing
it in state coffers to reimburse themselves for costs.
And it was the regional staff
who’d had the relationships with tribal officials that allowed them to
routinely work together to address child support, childcare and child welfare
challenges faced by Native families. Together, they had worked to overcome
sometimes deep distrust of the federal government among tribal leaders, who may
now have no one to ask for help with their children’s programs other than
political appointees in D.C.
In the wake of the regional
office cuts, local child services program directors have no idea who in the
federal government to call when they have urgent concerns, many told
ProPublica. “No one knows anything,” said one state child support director,
asking not to be named in order to speak candidly about the administration’s
actions. “We have no idea who will be auditing us.”
“We’re trying to be reassuring to
our families,” the official said, “but if the national system goes down, so
does ours.”
That national system includes the
complex web of databases and technical support maintained and provided by the
Office of Child Support Services at HHS, which helps states locate parents who
owe child support in order to withhold part of their paychecks or otherwise
obtain the money they owe, which is then sent to the parent who has custody of
the child.
Without this federal data and assistance, child support orders would
have little way of being enforced across state lines.
For that reason, the Trump
administration is making a risky gamble by slashing staffing at the federal
child support office, said Vicki Turetsky, who headed that office under the
Obama administration. She worries that the layoffs create a danger of system
outages that would cause child support payments to be missed or delayed.
(“That’s a family’s rent,” she said.) The instability is compounded, she said,
by DOGE’s recent unexplained move
to access a highly confidential national child support database.
But even if the worst doesn’t
come to pass, there will still be concrete consequences for the delivery of
child support to families, Turetsky said.
The staff members who’ve been pushed
out include those who’d helped manage complicated, outdated IT systems; without
updates, these programs might over- or undershoot the amount of child support
that a parent owes, misdirect the money or fail to give notice to the dad or
mom about a change in the case.
When Liz Ryan departed as
administrator of the Department of
Justice’s juvenile division in January, its website was flush with
opportunities for state and local law enforcement as well as nonprofits to
apply for federal funding for a myriad of initiatives that help children. There
were funds for local police task forces that investigate child exploitation on
the internet; for programs where abused children are interviewed by police and
mental health professionals; and for court-appointed advocates for victimized
kids. Grants were also available for mentoring programs like Big Brothers Big
Sisters and the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.
But the Trump administration
removed those grant applications, which total over $400 million in a typical
year. And Ryan said there still hasn’t been any communication, including in
what used to be regular emails with grant recipients, many of whom she remains
in touch with, about whether this congressionally approved money even still
exists or whether some of it might eventually be made available again.
A spokesperson for the Office of
Justice Programs within the DOJ said the agency is reviewing programs, policies
and materials and “taking action as appropriate” in accordance with Trump’s
executive orders and guidance. When that review has been completed, local
agencies and programs seeking grants will be notified.
Multiple nonprofits serving
exploited children declined to speak on the record to ProPublica, fearing that
doing so might undermine what chance they still had of getting potential
grants. “Look at what happened to
the law
firms,” one official said, adding that time is running out to fund his
program’s services for victims of child abuse for the upcoming fiscal year.
“I never anticipated that
programs and services and opportunities for young people wouldn’t be funded at
all by the federal government,” Ryan said, adding that local children’s
organizations likely can’t go to states, whose budgets are
already underwater, to make up the funding gap.
“When you look at this
alongside what they’re doing at HHS and the Department of Education and to
Medicaid, it’s undercutting every single effort that we have to serve kids.”
-Eli Hager, a ProPublica
reporter who writes about issues affecting poor and working-class people across
the country.
