Excerpts
When Alex Adams arrived in Washington late last year as the Trump administration’s point man on child care, he was little known outside his home state of Idaho, where he had helped engineer a massive deregulation effort that became the envy of many conservative activists.
He made his intentions clear right away.
Federal child care regulations, he told his new staff, should “fit on an index card in my back pocket,” according to two people who heard him make the remark.
Now, five months into his job as head of the Administration for Children and Families, which controls about $25 billion in child care and preschool funding for some 2.3 million poor children, Mr. Adams is preparing what he has said will be a “bonfire” of regulations.
Among his top targets: the most sweeping overhaul in a generation for Head Start, which provides child care and preschool to hundreds of thousands of the nation’s poorest children. Mr. Adams intends to loosen or eliminate the rules that limit how many children can be supervised by each teacher, according to three people familiar with the plans. Conservatives say the changes could give more poor children access to the service, yet many child care experts say they could jeopardize quality and safety. The alterations are expected to affect almost every other aspect of Head Start as well, such as nutrition standards for meals and health standards that require staff to ensure that children get access to medical care.
“We’re going to barbecue a lot of sacred cows,” Mr. Adams, who declined through a spokesman to be interviewed for this article, recently told the Imprint, a podcast about family policy. His office is part of the Department of Health and Human Services.
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President Trump last year tried but failed to freeze funding for Head Start, and considered proposing its full elimination, calling its curriculum “radical.” But Mr. Adams’s effort to transform the program by undoing regulations could have implications for many more young children than just those enrolled in Head Start. That is in part because preschools that enroll a mix of Head Start recipients and other children are generally required to follow the program’s rules and ratios for all students.
Mr. Trump has indicated in recent weeks that he would like to curtail federal spending on child care.
“We’re a big country, we have 50 states, we have all these other people, we’re fighting wars,” Mr. Trump said this month. “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care.”
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“There’s a differencebetween common-sense streamlining of regulations and throwing the rules that keep children safe into a bonfire,” said Elliot Haspel, an early-childhood education expert at Capita, a family policy research organization.
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When attention turned in December to the day care fraud scandal in Minnesota, Mr. Adams sent letters to state officials there demanding the “complete universe” of personal data on families receiving subsidies, including Social Security numbers and alien registration numbers, which can be used by the Department of Homeland Security to track applicants for asylum.
Mr. Adams said the demand for data was intended to “give confidence to the American taxpayer” that the money was not being improperly spent. It is illegal to use federal subsidies to pay for child care for undocumented children.
After Mr. Vance and Mr. Musk shared a video by a right-wing influencer purporting to show more fraud at day care centers in the Somali community, Mr. Adams followed up with similar demands for data about child care subsidy recipients in New York, California, Illinois and Colorado. He threatened to cut off $10 billion in funding if the states did not comply.
The states sued, saying the administration had no justification for the action beyond a “desire to punish” them for their political leadership, and courts have halted the freeze in funds.
Mr. Adams also ramped up verification requirements for all states receiving child care subsidies, saying his agency would send payments only after receiving photo evidence or receipts detailing how the money was spent.
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