When you think about who is going to be hit the hardest by pollution, whether it’s conventional air water and soil pollution or climate change, it is very often low-income communities and communities of color. The undercutting of these kinds of protections is going to have a disproportionate impact on these very same communities.
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Department of Health and Human Services
sociological understanding of what it means to be a father—not a genderneutral parent—from social science, psychology, personal testimonies, etc.
ADMINISTRATION ON CHILDREN, YOUTH, AND FAMILIES (ACYF)
Allocate funding to strategy programs promoting father involvement or terminate parental rights quickly. ACYF is currently considering different programs to encourage parents, especially fathers, to engage with their children in foster care. While these program ideas and initiatives are still in the early planning stages, promoting responsible parenthood to reintegrate children or at least keep a consistent male figure in the minor’s life is crucial. At the same time, in cases where the father or mother does not make a sincere or serious effort to be involved in the child’s upbringing, termination of parental rights for children in foster care should be swift.
OFFICE OF HEAD START (OHS)
Eliminate the Head Start program. Head Start, originally established
and funded to support low-income families, is fraught with scandal and abuse. With a budget of more than $11 billion, the program should function to protect and educate minors. Sadly, it has done exactly the opposite. In fact, “approximately 1 in 4 grant recipients had incidents in which children were abused, left unsupervised, or released to an unauthorized person between October 2015 and May 2020.”° Research has demonstrated that federal Head Start centers, which provide preschool care to children from low-income families, have little or no long-term academic value for children. Given its unaddressed crisis of rampant abuse and lack of positive outcomes, this program should be eliminated along with the entire OHS. At the very least, the program’s COVID-19 vaccine and mask requirements should
be rescinded.
ADMINISTRATION FOR COMMUNITY LIVING (ACL)
Support palliative care. Physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is legal in 10 states and the District of Columbia. Legalizing PAS is a grave mistake that endangers the weak and vulnerable, corrupts the practice of medicine and the doctor-patient relationship, compromises the family and intergenerational commitments, and betrays human dignity and equality before the law. Instead of embracing PAS, policymakers should focus on the benefits of palliative care, which works to improve a patient’s quality of life by alleviating pain and other distressing symptoms of a serious illness. HHS ACL should survey their programs to ensure that they are supporting vulnerable persons of age or disability and are not facilitating or encouraging participation in PAS.