Head Start and Medicaid providers hit glitches as Trump freezes federal money

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks at the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

WASHINGTON — As President Donald Trump paused federal grants and loans in a far-reaching directive, early childhood education centers and states discovered Tuesday they could no longer access money they rely on to provide care for some of the nation’s neediest families and children.

Across the country, staff trying to access Medicaid and Head Start funding through payment websites Tuesday morning were locked out, leaving some scrambling to figure out how they would cover payroll and pay vendors and rent. But the White House said hours later that funding for those programs should not have been affected by the freeze. By late Tuesday, some states and Head Start providers reported their access to the sites had been restored.

The confusion left some Head Start centers weighing whether to close. Early Flowers Learning, which operates 17 Head Start preschools with 600 students in southwestern Michigan, announced it would not open its doors on Wednesday because it could not pay staff — only to learn that website access had been restored.

“I worry about them, you know, certainly trying to hold it together right now, thinking about some of the children that we serve who might not have access to breakfast and lunch if they don’t have a place to go,” said Chanda Hillman said, executive director of Early Flowers Learning.

The funding freeze was temporarily halted by a federal judge late Tuesday, but the disruption showed how reliant programs serving the most vulnerable Americans are on the federal government. The White House would not elaborate on the cause of the outages — and whether they were connected to the directive.

Officials in several states said their staff struggled to access the website used to request funds for Medicaid, a federal program that provides health care coverage for about 80 million of the poorest of Americans, including millions of children.

Commenting on issues with the Medicaid site, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on X that the administration is “ aware of the Medicaid website portal outage.”

“We have confirmed no payments have been affected — they are still being processed and sent,” Leavitt wrote. “We expect the portal will be back online shortly.”

On the Head Start payment management system website, some providers got messages that read “Proxy Error” or “System Maintenance in progress, Interactive Access has been shut down.”

In Mississippi’s Harrison County, staff at an Early Head Start program messaged parents to come pick up their children early after discovering they could not access the money to stay open.

“Our families are being punched in the gut three times from different angles,” program director Katina Spaulding said. “This is so heartless.”

The center later told families that it would reopen Wednesday after learning its funding would not be halted.

In Oregon, Gov. Tina Kotek, a Democrat, said the state’s Medicaid portal was shut down and that the state health agency couldn’t log on to seek or receive reimbursements for health services provided to the program’s low-income recipients.

“I can tell you that when federal funds that are meant to serve the most vulnerable Oregonians are suspended or unavailable, that has an impact on Oregonians, and it’s a dereliction of the federal government’s duty to protect Americans,” she said.

By the end of the day Tuesday, Head Start operators expressed relief but said they remained uneasy about the turn of events. Hillman said she was still awaiting confirmation that her federal grant would be renewed.

If it’s not, she will have to once again have to shut down the preschools — this time for good.

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Associated Press writers Claire Savage in Chicago, Claire Rush in Portland, Oregon, and Amanda Seitz in Washington contributed to this report.

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Moriah Balingit, The Associated Press