Hi Rulers. Happy Women’s History Month! I’m Mackenzie Wilkes, an education reporter at POLITICO dropping in for this week’s Women Rule. Let’s get into it: President Donald Trump decried “unelected bureaucrats” this week in his address to Congress as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency continues slashing the federal workforce. While Republican lawmakers publicly support the cuts, Democratic lawmakers are warning the bleeding of federal workers will be particularly harmful to women and children. Two offices that specifically serve women and children are in Musk’s crosshairs. The Office of Head Start, which oversees the free federal early education program for children from low-income families, and the Office of Child Care, which has jurisdiction over the largest federal funding source for child care, have reportedly lost 20 to 25 percent of their staff. That could impede coordination between the federal offices that oversee these programs and the local grantees who receive federal dollars. Congressional lawmakers and early childhood advocates argue the loss of staff in those federal offices could trickle down to local programs — resulting in delays in accessing federal grants and technical support. “They want to undermine trust in the ability of the federal government to provide services,” said Democratic Women’s Caucus Chair Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.) in an interview, “and then they want to take those savings and turn them into tax cuts for billionaires.” In a letter shared first with POLITICO, Leger Fernández and over 40 members of the Democratic Women’s Caucus asked Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose agency has jurisdiction over those programs, to “immediately reinstate any [Administration for Children and Families] federal employees whom HHS fired and not remove any others.” “While Elon Musk believes that women and families who benefit from these programs are parasites, we know that these programs provide hard-working families with crucial services,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter Thursday. “Further, it is the dedicated federal workers who allow these essential services to support families across the nation.” An HHS spokesperson downplayed the cuts’ impact, saying that all operations in both offices are continuing, including the provision of technical assistance and grants. The spokesperson did not comment on the percentage of staff reductions. White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said in a statement to POLITICO that the president is “streamlining processes and cutting bloat across all agencies,” adding it will “make the entire Executive Branch more efficient and ensure more timely access to services for the American people.” Funding for Head Start programs, which provide education and health services to nearly 800,000 children nationwide, was thrown into uncertainty in January when federal grant funds were frozen. The Trump administration subsequently said Head Start was excluded from the freeze but scores of program directors continued to report technical issues accessing their payment portal and delays in receiving their funds. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, underscored that there could be economic consequences: “Mom and dad can’t go to work if they can’t get child care,” Murray, a former preschool teacher, recently told reporters. In 2023, the Labor Department found higher child care costs are keeping women out of the workforce. Meanwhile, data from the Federal Reserve show that low-income parents are more likely to reduce their work hours to care for their kids. According to Murray, Trump and Musk are haphazardly freezing Head Start funding, then promising to turn it back on, without actually ensuring that happens. As a result, she said, Head Start centers and the families who count on them are being thrown “into complete chaos” — making “the child care crisis that much worse.” But it’s not just women’s access to child care and early learning being affected. Some military spouses working for the Department of Veterans Affairs are being caught in widespread layoffs. Arielle Pines, a military spouse who worked at the VA for roughly 15 years in various patient care and administrative roles, was recently laid off. Pines, who had moved into a new HR role at the VA in the Veterans Integrated Services Network where she helped collect and analyze data, was considered a probationary worker. “It was based on efficiency and looking at numbers and looking at the data and tracking the metrics and see how we can improve our services to our veterans,” Pines said in an interview. “It's very unfortunate because my job was based in efficiency and I was fired under the guise of efficiency.” The Veterans Affairs Department has laid off thousands of probationary and “non-mission critical positions” in the last month. “They fired veterans, they fired military spouses … and with those titles, they have 15 years of experience,” Pines added. SELMA SIXTY YEARS LATER The nation marks a dark, but important milestone in its history with the commemoration of Bloody Sunday. On this day in 1965, the late Civil Rights icon John Lewis and hundreds of others marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama to call for the eradication of Jim Crow laws that blocked Black Americans from voting, particularly in the South. POLITICO's Brakkton Booker highlights three women working to elevate the 60th anniversary. If Bloody Sunday never happened, it’s hard to imagine President Lyndon Johnson signing the landmark Voting Rights Act that summer. This week Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.) whose district includes Selma, reintroduced H.R. 14, the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which calls for strengthening the law after recent Supreme Court decisions weakened some of its enforcement provisions. “It will give us the tools to suppress modern-day voter suppression and ensure every American can cast their ballot fairly and freely,” Sewell said this week on Capitol Hill. Meanwhile, in the city itself, Ainka Sanders Jackson and Lydia Chatmon, two lifelong friends, are using the 60th anniversary festivities for a different mission: to showcase Selma so that investors will be inspired to help revitalize their city. “So often people see Selma as a symbol, but not a city,” says Sanders Jackson, executive director of the Selma Center for Nonviolence, Truth and Reconciliation. In 2020, during the first Trump administration, the center received its first federal grant of nearly $1 million to combat violent crime in the city. That aid, the women said, was temporarily stopped in late January when the second Trump administration issued a memo ordering the pause of federal aid programs.
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