A lot can happen in an information vacuum: rumors, fear. Almost always, chaos. Last week, all three hit the families of 400 children participating in a Head Start program in Central Washington, before it abruptly closed for three confusing days.
It’s becoming a pattern with federal programs lately — upheaval, outcry and then backpedaling. The upshot? A whole lot of turmoil and pain, for nothing.
For 42 years, Inspire Development Centers in Sunnyside has offered free child care through the nation’s landmark preschool program. The founding belief behind Head Start, a pillar of Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 war on poverty, was that providing early learning and nutrition to low-income children could raise them out of poverty as adults.
After decades of study, and some controversy, the numbers appear to bear that out. “Head Start increased economic self-sufficiency in adulthood,” announced researchers in 2021, after tracking some 22 million Head Start kids over time.
The impacts ripple even wider than that. When children have safe, reliable preschool, their parents no longer need to stay home and babysit. They can work, saving money, paying taxes and strengthening their families.
All of this was thrown into disarray last week for hundreds of families — and 72 staffers — connected to Inspire Development. Every six months, the program, which is funded on five-year cycles, would receive notification of its next grant block, with the money following soon afterward. That is, until this year. Inspire’s CEO Jorge Castillo kept checking the system. But word of his six-month grant for the last half of 2025 never arrived.
On April 15, Castillo announced he would be forced to close Inspire until there was information about the expected $4.2 million. His payroll depended on it. Families scrambled to find help. Unemployed workers began considering their options.
Was it mere coincidence that this happened as the Trump administration undertakes a massive contraction of the federal workforce? Six regional Head Start administrators in Seattle were among those recently laid off, along with staff at Head Start offices in Boston, Chicago, New York and San Francisco.
Joel Ryan, executive director of Washington State Association of Head Start, believes none of it is accidental. USA Today has reported that the Trump administration is considering a plan to “zero out” Head Start entirely, and Ryan thinks closing the regional offices was their first step, a way of nudging the program toward collapse by gutting it from the inside.
But suddenly, after weeks of increasing panic and confusion in Sunnyside, some administrator somewhere pushed a button, and on Friday, Inspire got word that the money is coming. It’s the same kind of whipsaw experienced by fired-then-reinstated federal scientists, researchers and nuclear security workers.
This is no way to run a government.
Whether an oversight or harbinger of something more serious, the confusion at Inspire bears watching, if only as a symbol of the way the federal government currently does business.
