The Office of Head Start has instructed Head Start grantees to remove from funding applications nearly 200 words and phrases, including “disability,” “women,” “tribal,” “Black,” and “mental health,” according to evidence submitted on December 5 in a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
As several senators pointed out in a December 18 letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., many of the banned words are explicitly referenced in the Head Start Act signed in 2007 by then-President George W. Bush.
For example, Head Start agencies are required to describe “how the needs of pregnant women…will be addressed” under section 645; to provide “disability-related services for children” under sections 645 and 650; and to consult Tribal governments, Indian Tribes, or Tribal organizations in administering the American Indian and Alaska Native Head Start programs in sections 641, 645, and 649.
Head Start programs in states including Pennsylvania, Washington, Wisconsin, and Illinois filed a lawsuit arguing that the Trump administration’s ban on DEI prevents them from providing early intervention services for children with disabilities and other programming that is mandated by Congress, NPR reported.
In a declaration submitted in the suit, the director of a longstanding Head Start program in Wisconsin explained that HHS returned her renewal funding application with instructions to remove particular words contained in a list of nearly 200 words and phrases “to make sure are not in your applications.”
This put her in “an impossible situation,” the director said. Federal law requires Head Start “to create inclusive and accessible classrooms for children with disabilities” and the application requires her to report on the services her agency provides for children with disabilities, including mental health services, services for pregnant women, and culturally and linguistically responsive services—but HHS has barred her from using “disability,” “disabilities,” “inclusion,” “women,” and other terms in her grant application.
She added that the grant application itself already includes some of the prohibited words and it specifically asks for responses that include these words, such as budget line items for mental health and disability services professionals.
Moreover, the application requires her agency to provide a summary of data from its community needs assessment that includes “demographic variables,” such as race and ethnicity and the number of children with disabilities.
“[W]e cannot report this information if we are prohibited from using words like “race,” “ethnicity,” “Black,” “Hispanic,” “Latinx,” “Native American,” “tribal,” and “disability,” she stated, adding that she fears the word ban will impact her agency’s ability to continue providing programming in compliance with the Head Start Act.
NPR reported that it is not clear whether or how many other Head Start programs received similar instructions from HHS, but court filings show that a Head Start program on a Native American reservation was told to remove sections from its application needed to prioritize services for tribal members and their descendants as explicitly permitted by federal law.
Head Start provides childcare, early learning, free meals, health screenings, and family support for roughly 750,000 infants, toddlers, and preschool-age children nationwide.
But the Trump administration withheld more than $825 million from Head Start between January and April, Senators Patty Murray, Bernie Sanders, and Tammy Baldwin wrote, creating chaos and forcing some programs to temporarily close. “The constant chaos and uncertainty facing 1,600 Head Start grantees,” they wrote, “undermines the early education and care of tens of thousands of children and their families nationwide.”