Cato

“First and foremost, the federal government should not be in the business of funding education, free meals, etc.,” said Neil McCluskey, director of Center for Educational Freedom at Cato Institute, a libertarian thinktank.

The Head Start program has long been a target among conservative thinkers at the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, who say the federal government should not be involved in child-care programming.

“The country is just too big and too diverse for bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., to really know what education should look like in random towns or cities around America,” said Colleen Hroncich, an education policy analyst at Cato, who points to federal research that found the positive effects of the Head Start program fade out by third grade.

Still, the case will be challenging for the FTC to win, said Jennifer Huddleston, a senior fellow for technology policy at the libertarian think tank Cato Institute.

The workload needs to be examined, said Neal McCluskey, director of Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute.