What we can VERIFY about Project 2025’s plans for the Head Start program and free school lunches

Interest in Project 2025, the Heritage Project’s plan for the next conservative president to transform the federal government, has peaked in recent weeks. VERIFY has received dozens of questions about the plan and what it entails.

Several VERIFY readers asked if Project 2025 would eliminate free school lunches and the Head Start program, which offers preschool and early child development services to low-income families.

THE SOURCES

THE QUESTION

Would Project 2025 eliminate the Head Start program?

THE ANSWER

Yes, Project 2025 proposes eliminating the Head Start program. 

WHAT WE FOUND

The proposal to eliminate the Head Start program is in the chapter about the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). That chapter explicitly calls for the elimination of the Head Start program because the author claims it’s “fraught with scandal and abuse.”

Roger Severino, the author of the chapter, claims the Head Start program is in a “crisis of rampant abuse,” citing a HHS Office of Inspector General report that found 1 in 4 Head Start grant recipients had cases of child abuse, unsupervised children or unauthorized release between October 2015 and May 2020. Severino also claimed, without citing any sources, that research has found “little or no long-term academic value for children.”

THE QUESTION

Would Project 2025 eliminate free school lunches?

THE ANSWER

Project 2025 does not propose eliminating free school lunches. However, it does call for narrowing the program’s eligibility requirements so that fewer students would receive free or low-cost lunches through it.

WHAT WE FOUND

Project 2025 does not propose eliminating free school lunches; it does, however, include a proposal to reduce the number of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches.

The NSLP, which began in 1946, reimburses schools and districts for offering low-cost or no-cost lunches to children each school day. Children in families at or below 130% of the federal poverty line qualify for free lunches and children in families at or below 185% of the federal poverty line qualify for low-cost lunches.

In 2010, the NSLP was expanded with the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which gives all students in a school or district free meals if a certain percentage of students within that school or district are eligible. The threshold was 40% until last year, when it was lowered to 25%.

Bakst calls for an end to the CEP and to reject lawmakers’ efforts to expand eligibility for the free school lunch program. Bakst claims that the free school lunch programs have gone beyond their original purpose of serving meals to low-income students and now resemble “entitlement programs.”