Head Start and heating assistance targeted in Trump draft budget proposal

The Trump administration is considering eliminating funding for two key federal programs that help millions of low-income Americans educate their young children and heat their homes.

The Trump administration is considering eliminating funding for two key federal programs that help millions of low-income Americans educate their young children and heat their homes. A draft of President Donald Trump’s budget proposal for the coming fiscal year calls for ending support for Head Start, which provides early childhood education and other services to nearly 800,000 kids, and for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, known as LIHEAP, which assists about 6 million households with their utility bills. The move is part of a draft plan, which CNN has reviewed, to slash roughly a third of the discretionary federal health budget, eliminate dozens of programs and greatly shrink health agencies. “The budget is callous because they are not thinking about the people who will be hurt,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, which works with state officials who oversee LIHEAP. “To them, it’s a numbers game. They are not recognizing the enormity of the impact on ordinary people.” Trump does not have the power to defund the programs on his own. Those decisions are up to Congress, which often does not follow a president’s budget recommendations. Still, both Head Start and LIHEAP have been rocked by other recent changes instituted by the Health and Human Services Department, which administers them. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier this month laid off the entire LIHEAP staff, who disbursed federal funding to state agencies and provided them with support. He also shuttered at least five regional offices, which provided oversight and guidance to local Head Start programs, as part of his shedding 10,000 agency employees to comply with Trump’s purge of the federal workforce.