Twenty-five states have stopped seizing foster children’s Social Security survivor benefits in just the last six months and a proposed rule could add 236,000 new Head Start spots nationwide.
On this episode of “The Sitdown with Alex Swoyer,” host Alex Swoyer sits down with Alex Adams, Assistant Secretary for the Administration for Children and Families, marking his first year in office — covering Head Start reform, the “orphan tax,” foster care shortages, migrant children and more.
[SWOYER] Can you explain Head Start and what the new proposed rule you guys unveiled earlier this month?
[ADAMS] Head Start’s a program that’s been around since 1965. My boss, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has the family connection to the program. His uncles helped to create this, both President John F. Kennedy as well as Sargent Shriver. What the program is, it is designed to help kids between birth and age five be ready for school. It’s got a school readiness goal, but more importantly, it’s got a comprehensive wraparound service goal so that the child and their whole family can access health, education, and social services that will benefit child and family development. In 2015, about a million kids were in the program. Today, it’s less than 700,000, and it’s decreasing each year.
[SWOYER] Why is that, do you think?
[ADAMS] Well, like many administrative programs, over time, regulation gets added on top of regulation. Form gets added on top of form. Reporting requirement gets added on top of reporting requirement. It drove up the cost of doing business. So at the end of the Obama administration, they adopted a wholesale slate of regulations that was by design going to increase the cost of doing business for Head Start providers by a billion dollars. And because the budget didn’t catch up, that meant…
[SWOYER] Fewer spots. Is that correct?
[ADAMS] Fewer spots. But the Obama administration was very generous in saying that while this will reduce access, these regulations will increase quality, and the quality gains for the shrinking number of children who access it will outweigh the benefits of lost access to those who can no longer access it. Unfortunately, that did not prove to be the case.
An independent research arm at HHS, ASPE, the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, just published a brief showing that costs did go up more than inflation. Slots did reduce more than the Obama administration predicted, but quality remained flat. So they made a bet, and unfortunately that bet failed, and that bet failed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of children.
We’re taking a different approach. We’re saying Head Start works. Head Start is a program that has benefited children and families, and we think more people should be able to access it. Because there’s 1,600 Head Start providers around the country, some in Missouri, some in Texas, some in Idaho. The approach we’re taking is that what those local communities need is different. We can’t write one-size-fits-all policies from here in Washington that are going to account for the nuances of every local community.
[SWOYER] So just to back up, some of the regulations the Obama administration put in were certain students-per-teacher ratios?
[ADAMS] It became highly prescriptive of inputs. You must have this ratio of children to teacher. You must have these educational requirements. But it was even more granular than that. These are the advisory committees you must have. Here’s the terms of how long people should serve on those advisory committees. If a child shows up or is missing from class, here’s how many minutes you have to contact them. Here’s which forms you have to aggregate in triplicate. It just became very, very prescriptive about inputs. And we’re more focused on outputs. What are the outcomes? Are children more prepared for school? Do families have the comprehensive wraparound health and education services that the statute expects?
So as you said, we proposed a new path. We proposed getting the pages of regulations from 130 pages down to about 10. So we’re getting rid of all of those hyper-specific one-size-fits-all requirements and saying to local communities, you guys frame your own inputs. You decide what the curriculum is. You decide…
[SWOYER] …your teacher-to-student ratio.
[ADAMS] And we are going to hold you accountable for the outcomes you achieve. We’re not going to tell you how to get to the outcomes. We are going to hold you accountable for the outcomes. That means local communities will be able to try different things, test different things, and I think we’re going to see better quality at lower cost.
As you said, the proposed regulation is proposed to save $2.2 billion. And rather than pulling that money back, what we’re doing is we’re proposing that that be reinvested in the program, which would cover 236,000 new spots nationwide, which would allow more families to access the program.
[SWOYER] Yeah, that’s incredible. Can you tell us a little bit about some of these children that would benefit, or like these families, for example, like different criteria?
[ADAMS] Head Start is really focused on low income. So most of them are at or below the federal poverty line. There are some circumstances in which you can go above. And under the act passed by Congress, it’s really geared for certain populations. So in addition to low income, there’s hyper-focus on serving children with disabilities, children who are in the foster care system, and children who have experienced homelessness. And one by one, there’s fewer kids in the program. So there’s fewer foster kids served. There’s fewer children with disabilities served.
[SWOYER] Which is counterproductive.
[ADAMS] Which was unfortunately the design of the Obama administration. In 2024, the Biden administration saw what the Obama administration did and said, let’s do it again. Let’s double down. And they passed another slate of regulations that, by design, was going to increase costs by $2 billion and, by design, reduce access to children and families, with a goal of shaking the money tree at Congress and hoping that Congress would bail out the additional regulatory cost.
Watch the video for the full conversation.
Read more: Health and Human Services Department agency pushes states to ditch ‘orphan tax’
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