What is Project 2025? (Part I)
And what are its plans for public schools?
We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.
—Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation, author of the forward to the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership
What is the big picture? Project 2025, spearheaded by The Heritage Foundation (source of much of the policy and rhetoric behind the current anti- “woke” culture wars), is a plan for what its authors call “the next conservative” presidency1.
The goals of the project are controversial enough that former president Trump has denied any connection to it, but 81% of the contributors to the Mandate for Leadership, Project 2025’s 800-plus-page manual for the “next conservative president” are former Trump officials. Many, like Dr. Ben Carson, are definitely current Trump associates. The editors of the document, listed on the front cover, are Paul Dans, Trump’s former chief of staff, heading the Office of Personnel Management, and Steven Groves, a member of Trump’s transition team.
Trump’s campaign even cites the Heritage Foundation by name in the “Agenda 47” section of his official campaign website, to bolster his plan for universal school vouchers: “Freedom in education increases school accountability. A Heritage Foundation report found that school choice creates a ‘feedback loop that does not exist in the more centralized, top-down systems like the district schools’.”
I go into more depth about how unlikely it is that Trump is not connected to the Project in Part II:
Most of the Mandate’s considerable length is devoted to “conservative” politicians, talking heads, and culture warriors holding forth about how individual cabinet agencies should work (and whether they should even exist). I’ll provide page numbers throughout this piece, and encourage you to read it here (it’s also archived here, just in case).
The focus of this piece will be Project 2025’s plan for all-but-eliminating federal involvement in public education, and how this relates to its restrictive view of “civil rights”— one which certainly does not include transgender or nonbinary people, and which takes the “colorblind” (19) view that America does not need protections for marginalized groups.
So what about education, broadly? According to EdWeek, the Mandate calls for sweeping changes to public education in America, including phasing out Title I, “the $18 billion federal fund that supports low-income students” within ten years, removing most regulations from how special education funds are used (and allowing them to be used by parents without oversight), abolishing the US Department of Education, and scaling back “the federal government’s ability to enforce civil rights laws”.
To give an idea of the scale of the plan to phase out Title I funding, South Carolina’s Title I schools received over $266 million in 2024 alone, according the state Department of Education, with many of the poorest districts receiving millions.
These funds often make up for budget shortfalls caused by local economic conditions, and in a state that historically underfunds its entire school system, Title I funding is crucial. While there are surely reasonable arguments for improving the oversight of those funds, it’s hard to imagine any reason to end that funding entirely— unless your goal is to make it impossible for poor, rural districts to offer an acceptable level of public education.
The Mandate also calls for:
significant cutbacks to school meal programs— with a strong implication that greedy children and their families are somehow fleecing the American taxpayer by wanting to eat every day (see page 303).
significant expansions of private school voucher programs, which have a documented history of defunding local public schools (too many pages to list, but I’ll get into this more below).
total removal of federal protections for transgender and nonbinary students, and an end to programs that track other kinds of discrimination against students (pages 332-334 are a good place to start, but anti-trans rhetoric is woven deeply into the fabric of the document).
the elimination of Equity in IDEA (the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act) (more on this below)
the end of Head Start, a program which provides services to families, children, and expectant parents (see page 482).
the elimination of GEAR UP, a program “designed to increase the number of low-income students who are prepared to enter and succeed in postsecondary education” (see page 361).
labeling content/ books Project 2025 doesn’t like as “pornography” and then jailing the people (including teachers and librarians) who distribute this “pornography” (see page 5). It’s important to remember that “conservative” culture warriors have labeled everything from Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation to Julián is a Mermaid “pornography” (although neither contains explicit sex by any definition, and the latter is a book about a child who wants to be a mermaid).
Of course, with the planned elimination of the Department of Education, there are probably many more potential sources of funding and protective regulations that will be removed from public school children.
How does Project 2025 plan to accomplish all of this?
The first step, of course, is to elect “the next conservative president” (a phrase used about thirty times in the document).
Then, according to the Associated Press, the “next conservative president” goes about “firing as many as 50,000 federal workers” and replacing them with what the report repeatedly calls “political appointees” (in other words, Trump loyalists).
This is obviously a huge number, so huge that Project 2025 has a kind of job application database on its website that screens prospective government workers for their ideological perspective. It’s not clear what happens to this data, but presumably it could come back to help or haunt you if you apply for a job during the “next conservative president’s” administration and didn’t answer correctly to prompts like “The gender wage gap is the result of prejudice and discrimination”.
There is also a secret 180-page document that is for the “next conservative president’s” eyes only, though it’s hard to imagine what they’re holding back if this is what they released to the public.
Project 2025’s anti-public education vision (more specifically)…
First, of course, vouchers: The Mandate starts relatively small with its plans to reform (read: defund and privatize) public education in America. For example, Christopher Miller (the Trump official accused of delaying National Guard assistance on Jan 6) writes a chapter about— of course— the Department of Defense that includes the directive to “Support legislation giving education savings account2 options to military families” (104).
Heritage’s Mike Gonzalez argues for ending federal funding to PBS and NPR:
Every Republican President since Richard Nixon has tried to strip the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) of taxpayer funding. That is significant not just because it means that for half a century, Republican Presidents have failed to accomplish what they set out to do, but also because Nixon was the first President in office when National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which the CPB funds, went on air. (246)
Rolling back school meals: Things get significantly more intense when Derek Bakst (former Heritage/ Federalist Society) calls for eliminating the Community Eligibility Provision (303), which “allows the nation’s highest poverty schools and districts to serve breakfast and lunch at no cost to all enrolled students without collecting household applications.”
This move would mean that a child not having an application proving they are impoverished enough to deserve food might simply go hungry.
Only “conservatives” should be able to use federal power to push their views: Former Trump official Rick Dearborn touches on the education wars when he writes, “Finally, future [Intelligence Community] leadership must address the widely promoted ‘woke’ culture that has spread throughout the federal government with identity politics and ‘social justice’ advocacy replacing such traditional American values as patriotism, colorblindness, and even workplace competence” (204).
Important to note that the document might seem to argue against “indoctrination” but what it actually argues forcefully against is whatever “wokeism” is— it openly, freely and repeatedly promotes a specific worldview, enforced through government actions— including actions by agencies like the FBI— which requires patriotism, “colorblindness,” and a belief in meritocracy.
Down with the tyrannical Department of Education: Lindsey Burke worked under arguably the most successful anti- “CRT” crusader in politics, Glenn Yougkin, and now works for Heritage and EdChoice. She starts her section on the Department of Education by writing, wistfully, “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.” (Of course, the rightwing push to abolish the DOE is as old as the DOE— particularly among segregationists and voucher supporters— and the editors telegraphed this by calling the DOE “a convenient one-stop shop for the woke education cartel” on page 285).
However you feel about the successes or failures of the Department, it’s helpful to imagine a world where Special Education requirements aren’t tied to an agency that distributes needed funds to to schools with “strings” requiring that schools do things like desegregate, follow anti-discrimination laws, and serve students with special needs.
That world probably looks like the worst nightmares conjured by the Mandate itself, where schools, not parents or communities, decide who to teach, what to teach, and how to teach, without any oversight.
It’s really about vouchers, though. Of course, Burke’s real goal is pretty simple: “Elementary and secondary education policy should follow the path outlined by Milton Friedman [the libertarian economist who formulated early ideas about public funding for private schools, who was embraced by segregationists in the 1960s] in 1955, wherein education is publicly funded but education decisions are made by families” (319).
What this means, of course, is that the big bad government middle man— the one which requires that students with special needs receive schooling, the one which requires that schools desegregate, the one which requires that funding decisions be transparent— should go away so that “families” can spend everyone’s tax dollars with impunity.
Ending all protections for LGBTQ+ students, and many protections for nonwhite students and students with special needs: Burke calls for the next president— ideally after abolishing the Department of Education and moving the Office of Civil Rights to to “quickly move to rescind… changes, which add a new ‘nonbinary’ sex category to [The Office of Civil Rights’] data collection and issue a new CRDC that will collect data directly relevant to OCR’s statutory enforcement authority” (332) and ‘define “sex’ under Title IX to mean only biological sex recognized at birth” (333).
In other words, to score political points and punch down at transgender students, Burke wants to make it impossible for the federal government to track complaints of discrimination against them. Part of this would be achieved by stacking the Office of Civil Rights with “political appointees” (334).
According to Burke, “Enforcement of civil rights should be based on a proper understanding of those laws, rejecting gender ideology3 and critical race theory” (323). This is a vision of “civil rights” that has nothing to do with the rights of actual human beings— in this case children— who Burke is okay with being mistreated at schools, as long as that mistreatment is because they identify as, or are perceived by others as, transgender or nonbinary.
Similarly, Burke argues for changes in reporting of school disciplinary actions by rolling back considerations of “disparate impact” on students of different races (334). “As part of this effort, the new Administration should also direct the department and DOJ jointly to issue enforcement guidance stating that the agencies will no longer investigate Title VI cases that exclusively rest on allegations of disparate impact” (335). After all, if the state-approved perspective is that we all live in a “colorblind” society, it would be wrong for the federal government to track outcome disparities for people of different races, because we solved racism long ago!
However, the documented reality is that Black students are punished disproportionately, which has an impact on their academic performance. Of course we only know this because districts are currently required to track this data. However reasonable people might disagree on how best to address that issue, it’s going to be harder to do so if the public has no idea which states, districts, or schools are the worst offenders.
Burke goes on to claim that, “Special education services provide extra assistance to students; they do not harm them. And according to the most rigorous research on the subject, conducted by Penn State’s Paul Morgan, black students are actually underrepresented in special education once adequate statistical controls are made. That means that this regulation effectively further depresses the provision of valuable services to an already underserved group” (336). Other studies differ on this, including this one which actually cites Paul Morgan. Importantly, Morgan also found that race was a factor in students being disproportionately suspended in a separate study, but these complexities don’t fit well in a narrative whose primary purpose is to support school voucher programs at the expense of public schools.
Burke would also like to get rid of Equity in IDEA (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act), writing, “The next Administration should immediately commence rulemaking to rescind the Equity in IDEA regulation. No replacement regulation is required” (336).
Make teachers and nurses pay back their exorbitant federal loans: And it wouldn’t be 2024 without an attack on those greedy Public Student Loan Forgiveness recipients: Burke seems very opposed to pretty much any action the Biden administration has taken to make it easier for recipients of federal loans, including PSLF, to pay off their loans. It should be pointed out here that the PSLF program was designed to incentivize people to fill needed positions in hard-to fill public service jobs. Many teachers and other public workers have paid off their loans by doing the agreed-upon work, only to be disqualified by technicalities and loopholes.
And it goes without saying, down with unions: “Congress should rescind the National Education Association’s congressional charter and remove the false impression that federal taxpayers support the political activities of this special interest group” (342).
Blah blah blah “critical race theory” (343). (Seriously, this stuff is so copied and pasted from other tirades about CRT that it’s not worth covering here, but feel free to read Burke’s thoughts in the Mandate.)
Parents’ Rights— but only for the right kind of parents: Burke wants to “Work to pass a federal Parents’ Bill of Rights that restores parental rights to a “top-tier” right” (344). Remember how parents’ rights were in the original Bill of Rights? No? Remember all of those Supreme Court cases that upheld the fundamental right of grownups to do whatever they want to their offspring (other than, of course, help them find gender-affirming care)? No? Well, the 2025 Project would like the president to restore a federally-protected right which never existed. Burke would also like for parents to be able to sue schools over disagreements around FERPA, rather than going through the Department of Education (which, to be fair, will have a hard time assisting these parents after the “next conservative president” has abolished it).
Let’s attack transgender people some more: After other authors have argued for scaling back school lunch programs heavily in earlier sections Burke pivots to use USDA rules on school meals to slam the Biden Administration: “The next Administration should prohibit the USDA or any other federal agency from withholding services from federal or state agencies—including but not limited to K–12 schools—that choose not to replace ‘sex’ with ‘SOGI’ in that agency’s administration of Title IX” (337).
Whatever the merits— like protecting trans students— or issues— potentially threatening school meals in states that choose to discriminate against trans students— the Biden administration’s use of federal strings in an attempt to reduce discrimination against students based on gender seems like a very similar strong executive strategy to the one the Mandate is pushing. But the implicit argument is that a strong executive is only good if consists of “the next conservative president” and his appointees.
Burke also cites a commonly argument against services and protections for transgender children (via anti-trans activist Abigail Shrier) that “social contagion” is causing an increase in gender-affirming surgeries (345). This belief has been repeatedly debunked by researchers, but this isn’t nearly the only time the Mandate cherry-picks less-than-credible data or outright misinformation data to support its sources.
But, yet again, remember that it’s really about vouchers! All of this handwringing about “civil rights” is immediately followed by calls to open enrollment in a federal school voucher program to all students and remove all oversight (347). Burke claims opening the DC voucher program to more students will barely impact budgets, and earlier cites state like Arizona as success stories, but budgets have ballooned in voucher states— including, notably Arizona.
Transparency for thee, but not for me! Also, there is evidently something called the “Accreditation Cartel” (355): This is where it’s important to watch how the Mandate continually flips from arguing for transparency (for programs Project 2025 opposes) to arguing for none (when it comes to private entities and positions it supports).
For example, Burke spends many pages analyzing federally-required testing data (NAEP) for public schools, but then complains at length about about the accreditation being required for colleges receiving federal funds, accreditation that often requires those colleges to meet goals that benefit the public that is now funding those colleges— goals like fair admissions practices and inclusion:
One egregious example of this is the extent to which accreditors have forced colleges and universities, many of them faith-based institutions, to adopt diversity, equity, and inclusion policies that conflict with federal civil rights laws, state laws, and the institutional mission and culture of the schools. Perhaps more distressingly, accreditors, while professing support for academic freedom and campus free speech, have presided over a precipitous decline in both over the past decade. (352)
Burke eventually suggests that maybe we shouldn’t require any accreditation at all for colleges and universities receiving federal funds (353).
Burke would also like to “Eliminate the ‘list of shame,” which is a federal requirement that religious colleges which request and accept federal funds voluntarily and can still opt out of various federal requirements under “religious exceptions” then have to explain that to the public (which is funding their colleges)":
In 2016, the Obama Administration published on the Department of Education’s website a list of colleges that had applied for [a religious] exemption. This “list of shame” of faith-based colleges, as it came to be known, has since been archived on ED’s website, still publicly available. The President should issue an executive order removing the archived list and preventing such a list from being published in the future. (357)
You can take a look at the “list of shame” here to see private religious colleges that receive federal funds explaining why they “couldn’t”, for example, follow Title IX rules prohibiting discrimination against transgender people or why a woman can’t be elected to certain leadership positions at the college.
It’s bad for the federal government to force colleges what and how to teach, unless that stuff is supported by Project 2025: Burke argues for cutting back funding for “area studies” and writes, “In the meantime, the next Administration should promulgate a new regulation to require the Secretary of Education to allocate at least 40 percent of funding to international business programs that teach about free markets and economics and require institutions, faculty, and fellowship recipients to certify that they intend to further the stated statutory goals of serving American interests” (356).
While we’re at it, let’s take even more money from public school students: “Eliminate GEAR-UP. It is not the responsibility of the federal government to provide taxpayer dollars to create a pipeline from high school to college. GEAR UP should be eliminated, and its functions should instead be handled privately or at the state and local levels, where policymakers are better equipped to increase college preparedness within their school districts” (361).
(In my district, for example, GEAR-UP funds followed a cohort of students from grade to grade, paying for materials like iPads, and for things like test prep courses— but it’s only bad for “the money to follow the student”— the thing voucher supporters frequently demand— if the student in question goes to a public school.)
Following the path of Milton Friedman.
So, true to her word, Burke and her co-authors have set out a vision for education that treats Milton Friedman’s 1950s-era voucher theories as Gospel. This vision would also please the segregationists who eagerly latched on to Friedman’s ideas, not because they necessarily believed they made economic sense, but because they offered a science-y sounding rationale behind “independent schools,” which would allow communities to freely segregate without technically violating Supreme Court decisions and federal laws requiring racially integrated schools.
By rolling back federal reporting requirements— many of them expressly created during school integration to protect minority students— and by explicitly encouraging discrimination against students on the basis of gender and gender identity, the authors would make those segregationists proud.
In Part II, I plan to get more into the larger plans behind the Project, and into who is actually behind all this stuff.
In Part II, I share some more thoughts and specifics about Project 2025.
While Heritage is the main player here, the contributors and signatories are a who’s-who of rightwing culture warriors, school voucher champions, climate change deniers, and anti-transgender activist groups.
Education savings accounts in essence vouchers, giving public funds to families to spend ostensibly on educational services, though in practice these are often so underregulated that fraud is possible.
“gender ideology,” in this context, means any belief that LGBTQ+ people exist; the official position of the Mandate is that there are two genders, and that this “truth” should be enforced by the federal government, no matter what scientists and medical professionals say.
Yes, Steve. The proverbial nail in the coffin for public education. It has been hammering down on us since at least the 1980s when there was some bi-partisan support left for public education. All of that is long gone. We are at the deluge of darkness. Pardon if I have grown pessimistic, but I am starting year 42 in the field with fear and trepidation.