Head Start's homeless-child priority proven to work, proposed for deletion anyway.

…(cont) On September 15, Democrats pressed HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to scrap the overhaul before it went further, warning it would weaken services for thousands of families nationwide. They worked from the department's own title for the proposal: "Reducing Federal Burden for Head Start Programs." A title is a ledger entry too; it tells you whose burden gets counted and whose doesn't.

Two days later, on September 17, NPR filed the account the title's ledger leaves out. Not a column of figures — a household. A woman the homelessness priority had already moved out of homelessness, in a story about what happens to the next ones in line if the priority goes. The reporting carried no number. It carried the thing a number would have to summarize: a case where the line worked.

The proposal predates that account by three weeks. Nothing in the record since shows the agency reopening its math to account for it.

By October 3, the fight had, in The Hill's own phrase, reached a tipping point: advocates renewing the push against a change that would, by The Nation's reading, slash enrollment of homeless children in a program serving 700,000. Interested parties have until Tuesday to tell the federal government what they think of a line item with a working case on file against deleting it.

Nineteen days separate that case from the Tuesday the comment window closes. That is the whole gap. Not a dispute over whether the priority works — nobody in the filing claims it doesn't. A dispute over whether the agency has to read the file before it closes it.

Reducing federal burden, the title says. The families stay exactly where the record found them, hon. Only the line that put them at the front is the one coming out.