Yasmina Vinci Supercommittee Letter
November 21, 2011
Dear Colleague:
As you may already have heard in the news, the Congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, or “The Supercommittee”, announced this afternoon that it had failed in its duty to put together legislation that would reduce the nation’s deficit by $1.2 trillion. As a result, the law now states that automatic cuts will be imposed on domestic spending starting in January 2013.
These cuts are designed to be indiscriminate across all programs, including defense spending and programs like Head Start. We know from our talks with lawmakers since the passage of the Budget Control Act in August, which began the Supercommittee process, that Members are intensely uncomfortable with the sweeping nature of these cuts and are working in a number of ways to soften or even prevent their impact on multiple fronts. I assure you that the National Head Start Association is following these developments closely and will undoubtedly call on you for your support and ACTION in the coming weeks and months as Congress’ next steps become clearer.
In the meantime, as 2011 comes to a close we are still working tirelessly to ensure that funding for Head Start and Early Head Start is preserved in Fiscal Year 2012. As you know, the Senate proposed funding Head Start at $7.89 billion, and the House proposed $8.1 billion. We are fortunate that your meaningful work with these vulnerable families has produced bipartisan, bicameral support for maintaining funding for the program, and we hope to sustain this over the next year as we begin to deal with funding decisions for 2013.
Thank you for your engagement this year, and for your time today. We hope that you will continue to be an effective advocate as we face these new challenges together
Sincerely,
Executive Director