A bipartisan call: Congress must fund critical Head Start program | Opinion
By Patrick Ahrens and Heather Hadwick Special to The Sacramento Bee October 15, 2025 6:00 AM
What policy issue can a progressive Democrat representing Silicon Valley and a Republican representing the most conservative district in the far north of the state agree on in these hyper-partisan times?
With common experience as graduates from Head Start, we are working together to urge Congress to support children and families with enough funding to sustain this critical program.
Head Start is a federally funded early childhood education program that provides comprehensive services — including education, health, nutrition and family support — to low-income children (ages 0-5) and their families.
In the six decades since its founding, Head Start has served nearly 40 million children and their families.
Head Start enrolls more than 750,000 children across the country each year, including 80,345 in California. For the past three years, the federal budget has included approximately $12.1 billion for the program. While this is a lot of money, it is a tiny fraction of the overall federal budget.
In this year’s budget negotiations, the House of Representatives and President Donald Trump have proposed to flat-fund Head Start; the Senate has proposed a mere .6% increase, extending flat funding for the third year in a row. Given rising costs, this funding level would equal a real-world cut that will limit Head Start programs from serving eligible children.
Our country can do better than this.
We know firsthand why Head Start is so essential: These services were indispensable to us and our families, providing access to healthy meals and supportive, educationally enriching environments that prepared us to start school ready to learn. Head Start allowed our struggling parents and guardians to maintain employment while we gained early math and reading skills and built confidence and resilience — skills that all children need to be successful in school and life.
Federal Head Start funding supports high-quality early learning and comprehensive family services that benefit children and families across California — like the families we grew up in. Head Start parent choice programs are foundational to our state’s early childhood education and family support infrastructure.
The evidence-based services provided by Head Start have been shown to strengthen parent-child relationships, improve child development outcomes, increase graduation rates, reduce instances of child maltreatment and support parents’ ability to maintain a job and achieve stability — all in a cost-effective manner.
Jobs associated with Head Start support community well-being and economic mobility. Program providers employ over 25,000 Californians and utilize thousands of contractors.
As working families face rising child care costs and economic instability, Head Start is essential workforce infrastructure in California. Access to reliable early education and child care allows parents to work or pursue training. California’s working families already face a shortage of such options. The current lack of child care access costs California an estimated $17 billion in lost productivity and economic output annually. Cuts to Head Start would exacerbate this loss.
The positive impacts of Head Start are deeply aligned with our shared bipartisan goals of advancing opportunity and economic resilience. We’re alarmed by the April closure of half of the regional offices supporting Head Start providers, including the office serving California, as part of the recent abrupt reduction in the federal workforce. This closure delayed required Head Start program renewals and left California’s Head Start programs without reliable points of contact to address funding delays. As a result, thousands of workers in Head Start programs across California received pink slips.
This anemic federal funding proposed for Head Start raises serious concerns about the future of early learning for millions of children across the country. Lack of funding could lead to the disruption of necessary comprehensive services for learning that are often unavailable elsewhere, such as developmental screenings, mental health care and family case management.
We are proud bipartisan champions of Head Start as a vital part of California and our nation’s early learning and care system. We recently joined with nearly 100 of our colleagues, both Democrats and Republicans, to urge leaders in both parties to protect federal investments in Head Start. To keep up with inflation, a mere 3.2% increase would allow Head Start to maintain its capacity to serve children and families.
By fully funding this critical early education program they will ensure that Head Start can continue to make a profoundly positive impact on young children and families in California, especially those who start furthest from opportunity.
Assemblymember Patrick Ahrens is a Democrat representing California Assembly District 26. Assemblymember Heather Hadwick is a Republican representing California Assembly District 1.
