Editorial roundup: Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2025

The Wall Street Journal

Jan. 26

Negligence and mismanagement of Head Start

Head Start has been something of a sacred cow in Washington since its creation in 1965. The $12.3 billion federal program provides pre-school services to nearly 790,000 low-income children each year. But a report released by the Government Accountability Office reveals serious negligence and fiscal mismanagement in Head Start, putting at risk the very children the program claims to help.

The report studies Head Start programs that are operating under interim management, meaning those whose former managers - usually local agencies or nonprofits - gave up or lost their federal grants due to poor performance. Interim managers are appointed by the Office of Head Start, or OHS, and run the programs until new grant recipients can be found.

According to the report, OHS oversight of these interim-managed programs is woefully inadequate. Between January 2020 and June 2024, 28 programs were due for oversight. OHS monitored only half of them, "leaving it unaware of documented and potential child safety incidents and other concerns."

The report says one local center director saw "a teacher grab a child by the hood of their coat and slam them to the ground." At another program, the interim manager told a center director not to inform parents about mold in school, "even though children and staff had developed respiratory symptoms, and one child had a known allergy to mold." While state licensing agencies documented 15 major child-safety violations between August 2019 and March 2024, OHS' records noted only nine of them.

OHS also failed to monitor fiscal waste. Despite fewer than half of all available seats at interim-managed programs being filled in the 2022-23 school year, OHS "never enforced enrollment standards or required Head Start funds to be returned for children not served." In fiscal 2022, interim-managed programs spent 72% of the total pool of taxpayer-funded grants, though student enrollment was 47%.

Where did the money go? Local staff at several programs reported purchases of costly equipment that didn't work or sat unused. One interim manager agreed to pay "rent that was more than four times" what it should have been for the classroom space. Another program "frequently ran out of diapers, baby wipes, soap, and other essentials," requiring teachers to buy supplies with their own money.

A 2012 study from the Department of Health and Human Services found that any advantages enjoyed by Head Start students mostly vanish by the end of third grade. Moreover, reports of Head Start's lack of financial oversight and child safety risks have circulated for decades. But lawmakers don't like the optics of opposing early childhood education, which is why the program's funding keeps growing.

Perhaps this is about to change. Michigan Rep. Tim Walberg, chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, reacted to the report, writing, "We have an obligation to protect these children and end this gross negligence immediately."

The GAO wants Head Start to enhance its oversight standards and fiscal accountability. But if it can't prove its results are worth $12.3 billion, it may be time to make some cuts - or perhaps simply pass the money down to the states, which are already better equipped for educational oversight.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Jan. 31

The hazards of RFK Jr. as DSHS head

If and when the full Senate votes on whether to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the federal government's top health agency, it will say as much about the senators who are voting as about Kennedy himself.

The central question is this: Are Senate Republicans willing to put their duty to the nation above their fealty to a president whose appointment in this case is so intentionally irresponsible as to barely rise above the level of a fraternity prank? The indications aren't good.

President Donald Trump's pick to head the Department of Health & Human Services has the potential, more than any of the others, to cost significant numbers of American lives. As we've noted here before, the fact that America is currently in the midst of a potentially deadly anti-vaccination trend makes it especially important to have a strong supporter of vaccines at the helm of the country's health care system.

Senators are granted - no, tasked with - the constitutional power to reject presidential nominees for this very kind of scenario. That is, stopping the appointment of a fundamentally dangerous appointee.

Notwithstanding Kennedy's deeply dishonest attempts to rewrite his personal history while testifying before senators this week, his role as arguably America's most prominent conveyor of anti-vaccination tripe and other dangerous conspiracy theories is undebatable.

"There's no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective," Kennedy said during a July 2023 podcast interview, dressing up that completely false, potentially deadly nonsense as reasonable debate.

"Did (the polio vaccine) cause more death than it averted? I would say I don't know because we don't have the data on that," Kennedy went on to say in the same interview - again, promoting an utterly baseless narrative that flies in the face of generations of data.

In July 2020, on a show for the anti-vaccination nonprofit Children's Health Defense (for which RFK was a chairman) he offered this: "(T)he current state of the science that shows clearly that vaccination is causing autism." And this: "According to those data, your chance of dying from the (HPV) vaccine is 10 times the chance of you dying from cervical cancer. What kind of bargain is that?" Both assertions are flat-out false.

Then there was Kennedy's cheerleading role in a tragic measles outbreak in Samoa that killed more than 80 people, mostly children. The tragedy was caused in large part by public rejection of vaccines there that Kennedy encouraged just months earlier with a highly publicized visit to anti-vax activists prior to the outbreak.

He later characterized that outbreak as "mild." Is this the kind of health care leadership Americans have to look forward to as our country experiences its own ominous trend toward public distrust of vaccines?

These are just a few examples of what, according to a recent Washington Post count, has been more than 100 instances in which Kennedy has promoted dangerous lies about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Yet Kennedy had the gall on Wednesday to tell members of the Senate Finance Committee that his reputation as a fervent anti-vaxxer is incorrect.

That means it's not only his anti-vax garbage that senators should take into consideration, but also his willingness to lie to their faces about his promotion of that garbage.

Despite all of this, it appears at this writing that Kennedy has the votes, if barely, to win Senate approval, with perhaps three GOP votes at most against him.

It's a foregone conclusion that Missouri Sens. Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt will, out of blind loyalty to this president, cast "yes" votes. Before they do, we would urge them to do one thing: Ask their personal physicians what they think about putting RFK in charge of the nation's health care system.

We would urge all readers to do the same. Most Americans trust their own doctors. Listen to what they will almost certainly tell you: RFK is hazardous to America's health.