When he launched the War on Poverty in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson spoke of the “millions of Americans…who have not shared in the abundance which has been granted to most of us, and on whom the gates of opportunity have been closed.” The ensuing years would see the creation of Medicaid and Medicare, the launch of Head Start. This era also ushered in the establishment of a permanent national food assistance program and a dramatic expansion of federal support for education and housing. These policies and programs were all rooted in the principle that the federal government has a responsibility to help families meet their basic needs and, ultimately, thrive.
As people who have dedicated our careers to advancing policies that can reduce poverty in America, we are dismayed to now see the return of the disastrous 1990s-era “welfare reform” approach that measures success by how many people are kicked off of public assistance programs, rather than whether fewer people actually need it. Economic research consistently shows that this approach fails to meaningfully address poverty or increase employment. A true anti-poverty agenda would learn from those mistakes, rather than repeat them, and build on what works.
Earlier this month, the Trump Administration set its sights on Head Start, the federal preschool program for low-income children which has served more than 40 million since its creation. Head Start has been proven to reduce poverty and improve health, educational attainment, and employment opportunities over participants’ lifetimes. It does this by providing young children with essential supports: early learning in small classes, qualified teachers, consistent meals, support for parents, and regular health and developmental screenings. These supports benefit every child who participates, but especially children with developmental delays whose families may struggle to access these services elsewhere.
The White House disregards that record of success by seeking to strip away the standards that make it work. Under the guise of giving states more “flexibility,” it proposes to eliminate class size standards while reducing children’s access to needed medical and dental care. This follows President Donald Trump’s previous attempts to freeze Head Start funding in 2025 that impacted 20,000 children in 23 states, and consideration of budget proposals that would have eliminated it entirely.
It is clear to us that targeting Head Start is the Trump Administration’s latest shot across the bow at America’s social safety net. Its signature legislative achievement, last year’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” cut $187 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), expanded its already complex and burdensome work requirements, and imposed similar requirements on Medicaid nationwide for the first time. As a result, more than 4 million Americans have lost SNAP benefits over the past year, and more than 10 million Americans are projected to lose their health insurance over the coming decade. Making it harder for Americans to afford food or see a doctor is a recipe for exacerbating poverty, not alleviating it.
If this playbook sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve seen this movie before. In 1996, Congress created Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, a block grant that ended the guarantee of cash assistance for families who need it and handed states broad discretion over the money. One of us, Peter Edelman, resigned from the Clinton Administration in protest.
Thirty years later, we know the results. States diverted the funds, the block grant lost half its value to inflation, and by 2023 just 21 of every 100 families with children in poverty received cash assistance, down from 68 in 1996. TANF now reaches far fewer families and provides far less help.
Instead of going down this path again, the Trump Administration and Congress should advance an anti-poverty agenda centered on two core principles: cash and care.
The 2021 expansion of the Chaild Tax Credit showed how the right type and amount of cash assistance can transform people’s lives. It helped drive child poverty to a record low during a pandemic without a significant drop in employment. When Congress let the expansion expire in 2022, child poverty immediately shot back up, and it has stayed elevated since. Research from our center finds that returning to the higher child tax credit, as the American Family Act proposes, would cut child poverty nearly in half.
In much of the country, child care now costs more than rent, a mortgage, or college tuition. Without support, parents often can’t take or keep jobs. When pandemic relief delivered the largest federal investment in child care in our history, our research found it helped more than 400,000 mothers of young children stay in or return to work. When that funding ran out, many were pushed back out of their jobs. Leaders in Washington should be making those types of investments a priority again.
We hope Americans will take advantage of the public comment period to push back on the Administration’s Head Start proposal. But protecting what we have, while important, is still not enough. A country serious about reducing poverty would invest in policies with a demonstrated record of expanding economic opportunity. It would strengthen SNAP to keep pace with the real cost of food, and invest in guaranteed income programs that would give millions of people a stable floor to build on. It would offer paid family and medical leave, so that caring for a new baby or a seriously ill parent no longer forces families to choose between a paycheck and the people they love.
America is still fighting the War on Poverty, and every American, regardless of income, has a stake in winning it. The measure of success isn’t how many people we can push out of public programs. It’s how many people no longer need them because they have the income, care, and opportunity to thrive. Thirty years of experience should have taught us the difference.
