The Department of Health and Human Services has directed Head Start providers to avoid nearly 200 terms in federal grant applications — including “race,” “Black,” “Native American,” “disability,” “women,” and “Tribal” — a move plaintiffs in an ongoing federal lawsuit say directly conflicts with the Head Start Act. A coalition of organizations representing Head Start providers and parents disclosed the directive in December court filings, saying HHS told a Head Start director in Wisconsin to cut those and related terms from her application.
Head Start serves babies, infants, and toddlers from low-income, foster care, and homeless families and receives the bulk of its funding from the federal government. The Head Start Act requires program directors to submit demographic data about the families they serve using the same terminology HHS now discourages, placing providers, according to court filings, in a position where complying with one federal mandate may mean violating another.
Providers describe conflicting obligations
An unnamed Head Start director in Wisconsin wrote in a court filing that if she complies with the Head Start Act and includes the banned words in her application, she could lose her grant. If she follows HHS guidance instead, she said she fears penalties for violating federal law. “This has put me in an impossible situation,” she wrote.
The grant application itself contains many of the discouraged terms, asking directors to include demographic data about their communities, including estimates of the number of pregnant women and children with disabilities, according to the filings.
Ruth Friedman, who led the Office of Child Care under President Joe Biden, said the guidance was already reshaping provider behavior. “Grantees are sort of self-selecting out of those activities beforehand because of fear and direction they’re getting from the Office of Head Start that they can’t do these important research-based activities anymore that are important for children’s learning and that are actually required by law,” Friedman said.
Reservation Head Start drops autism training
A Head Start program on a Native American reservation in Washington state was told to cut “all Diversity and Inclusion-related activities,” according to the court filings. The program subsequently dropped staff training on how to support autistic children and children with trauma. Officials also told the director she could no longer prioritize tribal members for enrollment, even though the Head Start Act expressly permits that practice. The word “Tribal” is among the terms HHS discourages.
The Trump administration associates the discouraged terms with diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, which it has said it intends to eliminate across the federal government.
Lawsuit and prior funding disruptions
Parent groups and Head Start associations in Washington, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin filed suit in April against HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other officials, alleging the Trump administration is illegally dismantling Head Start. HHS officials said they do not comment on pending litigation.
Jennesa Calvo-Friedman, an attorney for the plaintiffs with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the term restrictions were part of a broader pattern. “They don’t believe these public programs should actually be open to serving all communities,” Calvo-Friedman said. The effort to ban words from applications, she said, “is a way to gut the fundamentals of the program.”
Head Start programs reported problems drawing down their funding in the months after President Donald Trump took office, following an early, short-lived attempt by his budget office to halt all federal grants to review them for DEI-related activities. The Government Accountability Office later determined that the funding delays violated the Impoundment Control Act, which limits when the president can halt the flow of government funds.