U.S. President Donald Trump said federal authorities should concentrate resources on defense, while scaling back involvement in funding healthcare and preschool education, which he argued fall under the jurisdiction of the states. CNN reported this on April 2, 2026.
The remarks were made at a private Easter dinner on April 1, 2026. A video of the speech briefly appeared on the White House’s YouTube channel before being removed; a copy of the footage was preserved by a Business Insider journalist.
In his speech, Trump referred to a conversation with Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought. “I told Russell, ‘Don’t allocate money for kindergartens,’ because the United States cannot be in the kindergarten business. That should be up to the states. We can’t be in the kindergarten business. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all sorts of other people.’”
He then added, CNN noted: “We’re at war. We don’t have time for kindergartens.” In his view, states should raise taxes to cover the costs of kindergartens and medical programs on their own.
Trump also stressed that the federal level is incapable of managing such spending effectively: “We can’t be in the kindergarten business, Medicaid, Medicare—all these individual things can be handled by the states. It cannot be done at the federal level. We have to do one thing: military defense. We have to protect the country. But all these little things, all these small scams that have been going on—you have to let the states handle them, Russell.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on April 2, 2026, that the president “was speaking about the importance of stopping fraud and rooting out the billions of dollars in fraud within these vital programs that certain elected Democratic officials have allowed to persist.”
As CNN emphasizes, although Trump did mention the problem of fraud, the central thrust of his remarks was the redistribution of responsibility for financing medical programs.