Children at The Playing Field, a Madison child care center that participates in the federal Head Start program. (Courtesy of The Playing Field)

Head Start child care providers in Wisconsin and five other Midwestern states were stunned Tuesday to learn that the federal agency’s Chicago regional office was closed and their administrators were placed on leave — throwing new uncertainty into the operation of the 60-year-old child care and early education program.

“The Regional Office is a critical link to maintaining program services and safety for children and families,” said Jennie Mauer, executive director of the Wisconsin Head Start Association, in a statement distributed to news organizations Tuesday afternoon.

The surprise shutdown of the federal agency’s Chicago office — and four others across the country — left Head Start program directors uncertain about where to turn, Mauer said.

“We have received calls throughout the day from panicked Head Start programs worried about impacts to approving their current grants, fiscal issues, and applications to make their programs more responsive to their local communities,” Mauer said.

The regional offices are part of the Office of Head Start in the Administration for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). 

In an interview, Mauer said there had been no official word to Head Start providers about the Chicago office closing. Some program leaders learned of the closing from private contacts with people in the office. 

“We have not seen official information come out” to local Head Start directors, who operate on the federal grants that fund the program, Mayer said. “It’s just really alarming. For an agency that is about serving families, I don’t understand how this can be.”

The National Head Start Association issued a press release Tuesday expressing “deep concern” about the regional office closings. 

“In order to avoid disrupting services for children and families, we urge the administration to reconsider these actions until a plan has been created and shared widely,” the association stated.

Katie Hamm, the deputy assistant secretary for early childhood development at HHS during the Biden administration, posted on LinkedIn shortly before 12 noon Tuesday that she had learned of reduction-in-force (RIF) notices to employees in the Administration for Children and Families earlier in the day. 

RIF notices appear to have gone to all employees of the Office of Head Start and the Office of Child Care in five regional offices, Hamm wrote, in Boston, New York, San Francisco and Seattle in addition to Chicago. 

“Staff are on paid leave effective immediately and no longer have access to their files,” Hamm wrote. “There does not appear to be a transition plan so that Head Start grantees, States, and Tribes are assigned to a new office. For Head Start, it is unclear who will administer grants going forward.”

Hamm left HHS at the end of the Biden administration in January, according to her LinkedIn profile. 

Mauer said regional office employees “are our key partners and colleagues,” and their departure has left Head Start operators “incredibly saddened and deeply concerned.” 

Regional employees work with providers “to ensure the safety and quality of services and to meet the mission of providing care for the most vulnerable families in the country,” Mauer said. 

The regional offices provide grant oversight, distribute funds, monitor Head Start programs and advise centers on complying with regulations, including for child safety, she said. They also provide training and technical assistance for local Head Start programs.

“The Regional Office is a critical link to maintaining program services and safety for children and families,” Mauer said. “These cuts will have a direct impact on programs, children, and families.”

In addition to Wisconsin, the Chicago regional office oversees programs in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Minnesota. 

Head Start supervises about 284 grants across the six states in programs that  enroll about 115,000 children, according to Mauer. There are 39 Head Start providers in Wisconsin enrolling about 16,000 children and employing about 4,000 staff.

The federal government created Head Start in the mid-1960s to provide early education for children living in low-income households. Head Start operators report that the vast majority of the families they serve rely on the program to provide child care so they can hold jobs.

The regional office closings came two months after a sudden halt in Head Start funding. Head Start operators get a federal reimbursement after they incur expenses, and program directors have been accustomed to being able to submit their expenses and receive reimbursement payments through an online portal.

Over about two weeks in late January and early February, program leaders in Wisconsin and across the country reported that they were unable to log into the system or post their payment requests. The glitches persisted for some programs for several days, but were ultimately resolved by Feb. 10.

Mauer told the Wisconsin Examiner on Tuesday that so far, there have not been new payment delays. But there has also been no communication with Head Start operators about what happens now with the unexpected regional office closings, she said.

“No plan for who will provide support has been shared, and the still-existing regional offices are already understaffed,” Mauer said. “I’m very nervous to see what happens. With no transition plan this will be a disaster.”

In her statement, Mauer said the regional office closing was “another example of the Federal Administration’s continuing assault on Head Start” following the earlier funding freeze and stalled reimbursements.

She said closing regional offices was undermining the program’s ability to function.

“We call on Congress to immediately investigate this blatant effort to hamper Head Start’s ability to provide services,” Mauer stated, “and to hold the Administration accountable for their actions.”

Dr. Sterling Johnson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison speaks at a forum on NIH funding cuts conducted by U.S. Senate Democrats on Wednesday. (Photo courtesy of Sen. Tammy Baldwin's office)

Drastic funding cuts at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have disrupted biomedical research, potentially setting back projects that could advance treatment and prevention efforts for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and other major causes of illness and death, researchers and patients told Democratic Senators Wednesday.

“We are hearing from researchers, research institutions, and patients about the ongoing attacks on NIH,” said Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin), at the start of a  two-and-a-half hour forum she chaired as the ranking Democrat on a Senate subcommittee that oversees NIH.

“Understandably, most are reluctant to publicly speak out because the Trump administration is actively extorting institutions of all types, including major research universities,” Baldwin said. “This administration is seeking to dismantle the NIH and destroy the hopes of millions of Americans who are counting on life-saving treatments and cures.”

Witnesses who testified Wednesday warned that with projects being canceled in midstream, years of research data would likely be wasted and the role of the NIH as the world’s leading funder of biomedical research was at risk of being displaced.

NIH-funded advances have contributed to reductions in death rates from cancer, heart attacks and stroke in the U.S., said Dr. Monica Bertagnolli, who was director of NIH in the Biden administration and stepped down in January.

“This progress would not have happened without taxpayer support,” Bertagnolli said.

But in the first two months of the Trump administration, she said, more than 300 grants have been terminated and $1.5 billion in funding has been delayed.

In the last year, Bertagnolli told Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington), NIH identified women’s health as “a high priority area” and “launched many new programs to really begin to address the deficiencies that we’ve had in women’s health.” Since the change in administration, however, “nothing new has moved forward.”

Dr. Sterling Johnson, the associate director of the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and a professor at the University of Wisconsin, said NIH funding over the last two decades helped make it possible to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease through blood tests and brain imaging scans rather than having to wait until after the patient’s death to be certain.

The NIH also funded clinical trials on surgical procedures involving the brain that can slow symptoms of the condition, he said, as well as trials on potential preventive therapies.

“These discoveries are changing the way we diagnose and treat Alzheimer’s and related causes of dementia,” Johnson said, but there is growing concern about how to sustain those gains.

In the last few months, he said, there have been delays in peer review and funding approvals for some projects.

“There are proposed cuts that threaten major ongoing studies, including treatment trials, risking the loss of millions of dollars already invested and setting our patients back,” Johnson said. With cuts threatening to slow down studies, “we will lose ground on hard-won progress.”

Senators as well as witnesses recounted stories of research that was cut off that involved investigations of health disparities.

Poorer counties across the country have “a persistent problem with poorer outcomes for all kinds of health issues,” Bertagnolli said, with maternal and fetal health among the most visible. “And without targeting those particular populations to understand the reasons behind the disparities, how can we ever even begin to overcome them?”

Research that considered members of the LGBTQ+ community and how illness affects racial and ethnic groups differently have been recurring targets in the Trump administration NIH, several said.

Dr. Whitney Wharton, an Alzheimer’s researcher at Emory University, said the Trump administration’s NIH has canceled research projects that she and other colleagues were conducting on Alzheimer’s in racial and ethnic minority groups, including LGBTQ+ people.

Previous research by her lab found Black Americans were 64% more likely than non-Hispanic whites to get Alzheimer’s disease and are living with the disease longer, she said.

“The systematic elimination of these high-risk” groups of patients from research “will only serve to increase the total number of [Alzheimer’s] patients every year,” Wharton said. Understanding those disparities is especially important, she added, because with shifting demographics racial and ethnic minority groups will represent the majority of the population.

“These terminations will have very grave consequences for patients, for families, for communities, and for taxpayers,” Wharton said.

Wharton read from a letter she received Feb. 28 that canceled another project she was in the midst of.

“It cites transgender issues,” Wharton said. “And it says, ‘Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans. Many such studies ignore rather than seriously examine biological realities. It is a policy of NIH not to prioritize these research programs.’”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) said the cancelation of grants, such as one on mental health therapies for LGBTQ people and other on LGBTQ cancer survivors, appear to violate a federal court order blocking the NIH from withholding grants that were already in progress.

He urged panelists to let the senators know if funds aren’t released when they’re supposed to be. “We need to know when they’re jammed because you can’t believe anything that the Trump administration tells you about the progress of the funds unless the funds are actually flowing,” Whitehouse said.

Wharton and Johnson both said the turmoil for NIH-funded research was at risk of driving away a generation of researchers.

“These cuts are very, very devastating and they’re very scary for young investigators, for students, whether they’ve been affected or not,” Wharton said. “These young scientists may leave research altogether because they’re nervous.”

U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Black Earth) addresses union members at a weekend rally in support of federal workers whose jobs are on the line under the administration of President Donald Trump. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Moves by the Trump administration to cut the federal workforce have caused chaos and fear inside agencies ranging from the U.S. Forest Service to the Social Security Administration, advocates for federal employees say.

Some two dozen Forest Service employees in Wisconsin returned to work Monday, five weeks after receiving termination notices and being walked out, as a result of a court order March 13 holding the termination notices issued on Valentine’s Day were illegal.

Wisconsin is home to some 18,000 federal workers, U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Black Earth) said at a rally in Madison Saturday — workers whose jobs are on the line under orders from Washington, D.C.

“I am getting record numbers of calls in our office, literally thousands of calls every single week,” Pocan said. “People are pissed. They’re upset about cuts to the Veterans Administration. They’re upset about what’s happening with the Social Security Administration. They’re upset about Medicare and Medicaid potential cuts. They’re upset about cuts to agriculture and education.”

At the Social Security Administration, the acting Social Security commissioner has announced plans to close regional offices and cut 7,000 jobs “through buyouts, layoffs, resignations and terminations,” said Jessica LaPointe, president of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Council 220, who joined the Saturday rally at the headquarters of the South Central Federation of Labor. The council represents Social Security field office employees.

Social Security operations have been “historically understaffed,” LaPointe said, and the planned reductions “will lead to longer service delays, systems failures, and even inevitably benefit disruptions.”

In an interview with the Wisconsin Examiner during a Wisconsin visit in October, Martin O’Malley, Social Security commissioner at the time, said staff at the agency’s Madison field office has dropped by 40% since 2019. O’Malley said he told members of Congress they should increase staffing at the agency to restore “at least an adequate level of customer service.”

The cuts the agency has announced are “exacerbating the chaos, confusion and anxiety felt by workers under siege,” LaPointe said Saturday. She added that the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s project to slash operations across the federal government “are destroying the public’s ability to access timely and effective service from the Social Security Administration, with the intent — let’s be real about their intent — of turning the American people against Social Security.”

William Townsend, president of the AFGE local at the Department of Veterans Affairs VA hospital in Madison, said the department’s plan to cut 80,000 or more positions nationwide would be detrimental to the health care of veterans counting on the agency.

AFGE also represents employees at the Transportation Security Administration. The union and the Biden administration signed a new contract in 2024, but Trump administration TSA leaders told the union last month they were canceling the contract and would no longer recognize the union.

Nevertheless, said TSA worker and AFGE Local 777 president Darrell English, the union will continue to stand up for its members’ rights while conducting a legal battle to restore their union contract. “We know it’s going to be a long fight, but we’re here,” English said at Saturday’s rally.

At the U.S. Forest Service, 24 Wisconsin employees were fired on Feb. 14 — part of a wave of thousands of “probationary” employees let go, said Carl Houtman, a union official.

Houtman works at the Forest Service Products Laboratory in Madison and is president of the National Federation of Federal Employees union local there. He is also the national negotiation chair for the union’s Forest Service Council. In an interview Monday, he stipulated he was speaking strictly as a union leader, not as a Forest Service representative.

About 170 of the Forest Service’s 672 Wisconsin employees work at the laboratory, researching the use of wood as a building material and wood chemistry for papermaking and in a variety of new applications. Most of the other Forest Service employees in the state are associated with the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest in northern Wisconsin.

After a series of legal challenges, a federal judge in California ordered the Trump administration to reinstate the fired probationary workers, ruling that Trump administration officials hadn’t followed required procedures.  

The fired workers returned Monday, said Houtman, including a colleague who was among those who had been dismissed.

“It’s crazy the inefficiency that has caused,” he said Monday. “They walked her out the door, took her computer and her door card, and they basically had to hire her back. In this intervening month she could have been reasonably doing her job, but the agency was forced” by the federal Office of Personnel Management, now under the Trump administration’s control, “to fire these people.”

The federal judge’s ruling requires the administration to follow the legal procedures for reducing the federal workforce. Houtman said federal workers and their unions involved in the February firing expect to learn more about the administration’s intentions in the next month.

“We anticipate about the middle of April getting an idea about what’s going on,” he said. “It’s possible that a large number of people in Wisconsin will get wiped out — we just don’t know.”

Houtman said there are concerns among employees that “this administration wants to wipe out the science arm of the Forest Service” and possibly sell most or all federally owned forest land, harming the nation’s natural resources.

Established in 1910, the forest products lab remains a vital source of research, he said. Its findings help shape codes and standards for building as well as for product manufacturing — such as a project currently underway to develop a consistent test for how recyclable consumer packaging is.

The lab also plays a role in training new scientists, he added.

“Most of the probationary employees were new hires, starting to learn wood science from us,” Houtman said. “You basically have wiped out the next generation of scientists. It’s going to do irreparable harm.”

A 2011 photo shows an exhibit at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum that commemorated the 75th anniversary of the signing of the Social Security Act in August 2010. (FDR Presidential Library & Museum/via Flickr)

The Social Security Administration has summarily closed a federally funded consortium of research centers, including one at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, that studied demographic trends and the impacts of policy on the federal retirement system.

Terminating the program has sharply limited the program’s research sources at a time when the Social Security Administration is poised to cut 7,000 workers, close field offices across the country and cancel the ability for people to file for benefits by telephone.

“It’s very, very frightening,” said Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works. “I’ve been working on this issue for 50 years and I think this is the most destabilized I’ve ever seen the administration of Social Security.”

The UW center was one of six members of the Social Security Administration Retirement and Disability Research Consortium. The consortium was established in its current form in 2019, a successor to retirement research centers established in 1998.

The Trump administration announced Feb. 21 that the consortium was being dissolved in keeping with an executive order President Donald Trump signed Jan. 22 gutting diversity activities across the federal government.

Shutting down the consortium canceled 19 research projects that were underway at the UW’s Social Security research center, said its director, J. Michael Collins. Collins, a specialist in family economics at UW-Madison. Collins holds positions at the university’s School of Human Ecology, The La Follette School of Public Affairs and several other university offices.

Research by the center and its consortium partners in collaboration with Social Security represented an important collaboration that has helped shape policy for the 90-year-old Social Security program, Collins said. Studies on the income and expenses of older Americans, for example, have helped guide the formulas that the Social Administration uses to develop its annual cost of living adjustments.

“It really is a collaboration, and that is hard to build,” Collins said — and may be difficult to recreate.

Along with canceling the consortium agreements, the Social Security Administration has relocated its own research operations while also cutting staff.

“They’ve greatly reduced their ability to conduct research internally,” Collins said. “Why would they want to eliminate their research capacity to that degree?”

Established during the Great Depression to lift seniors out of poverty, the Social Security program is primarily funded by payroll taxes. As each generation retires, its members’ benefits are paid by the generation of workers behind them.

Social Security provides retirement benefits as well as income for people with disabilities. About 73 million people in the U.S. receive benefits from the system, according to the Social Security Administration. Three out of four are 65 or older. Another 15% are people with disabilities under the age of 65.

One project underway at the UW center when the research consortium was canceled was looking at the impact of state mandates requiring employers to provide sick leave for employees — a law on the books in about a half-dozen states. (Wisconsin is not one of them.)

That study could have provided evidence whether or not mandated sick leave policies reduce the need for future permanent disability claims. “Either way, that’s an important question for Social Security” to understand, Collins said.

Another project cut off was a study of Long Covid — the lingering collection of health-hampering symptoms reported by millions of COVID-19 patients. Understanding how the condition affects trends in work, health and disability could inform the projections Social Security actuaries must make as they look at the program’s prospects 75 years into the future, Collins said.

The UW center was also contributing research to help structure Wisconsin’s ABLE account — a savings account for people with disabilities that the state is in the process of establishing.

The UW center was launched with a five-year grant for $12 million. The grant was renewed in 2024 with another five-year grant that was supposed to be for $15 million. About $2.3 million of that has been spent, but with the termination there will be no reports or final studies, Collins said.

Altman of Social Security Works said research has been integral to the Social Security system from when it was established in the Great Depression, spearheaded in part by people with ties to UW-Madison.

“They’ve always done research to determine how the program should be structured, what the needs of the American people are, how economic security can be improved and what other countries are doing,” Altman said. “You have to be informed to have legislation that will work and have administration that will work.”

The Feb. 21 Social Security Administration press release announcing the termination of the research consortium said the research center agreements “included a focus on research addressing DEI in Social Security, retirement, and disability policy” and that ending them was in line with ending “fraudulent and wasteful” initiatives.

“The reality is that Social Security is gender neutral, racially neutral,” Altman said. Nevertheless, she said, various social differences are important in understanding how disparate impacts might affect the long-term operation of the program. For example, an accurate projection for the program’s resources and ability to pay benefits in the future requires considering the differing labor force participation rates of men and women.

Altman said contrary to the claims of the Trump administration, its actions with the Social Security Administration are “the opposite of rooting out waste, because it’s creating it.”