Project 2025 would change public education as we know it, experts say

Project 2025, the 922-page blueprint of right-wing policies that could be enacted if former President Donald Trump is elected president in November, includes plans to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and to make it harder for most people to afford college.

The document, officially called “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” is, according to its introduction, a plan for a Republican administration in 2025. The document was put together by the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation and 100 other right-wing groups, and at least 140 of its supporters previously worked in the Trump administration.

In the very first sentence of its chapter on the Department of Education, authored by Heritage Foundation Center for Education Policy Director Lindsay M. Burke, the document charges that the federal Department of Education should be completely eliminated.

That would unravel more than four decades of education protections that have been instituted since the department’s establishment in 1979, critics say.

“There are plans within Project 2025 to reverse core work for progress on civil rights. There are plans to adopt models like what we’ve seen in Florida and Texas with respect to seeking to kind of rewrite curriculum and rewrite history,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, a nonpartisan legal services group that seeks to expose corruption in the executive branch. “It calls for the abolishment of the Department of Education, it jeopardizes and would take away a variety of mechanisms for student loan relief, jeopardizing federal financial aid.”

Josh Cowen, author of the upcoming book “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers,” says the plan is “truly radical and fringe.”

“Eliminating the Department of Education, what it really means is eliminating 50 to 60 years of safeguards on discrimination and against misuse of funds that are specifically sent to historically disadvantaged communities and schools within those communities,” Cowen said.

A key part of Project 2025’s plan for education is to roll back the Biden administration’s expansion of discrimination protections to include people of all sexual orientations and gender identities.

The document characterizes the Biden administration as seeking to “gut the hard-earned rights of women” with its inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in anti-discrimination rules. Perryman, though, says Project 2025’s argument is incredibly misleading.

“Project 2025 overall is actually devastating for women and girls, from its policies with respect to reproductive healthcare, from its attempts to undermine overtime pay and a range of labor protections that we know have an effect on segments of the workforce that heavily include women,” she said.

Project 2025 would also hit Americans in their pocketbooks, experts say. It includes plans to take away affordable student loan repayment plans, eliminate the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, and privatize all student loans while ending federally backed student loans.

The plan, Cowen said, is “trying to diminish the sort of role of federal government in education entirely, in higher ed and K-12, in different ways, and also disincentivize students to go to college.”

The plans in Project 2025, Cowen said, reframe attending college as a luxury for most people.

“This is part of this larger attack on higher ed — don’t go there, it’s expensive,” he said. It’s for elites, it’s, if you do do it, you got yourself in debt, it is your own problem. That’s sort of how I interpret all these things going together.”

The plan would diminish the federal role in local K-12 education as well. On its first page, Project 2025’s chapter on education argues that parents should ultimately be entitled to school vouchers funded by local and state governments — not the federal government — to pay for their childrens’ education.

This, Cowen said, is simply a handout to people who can already afford private school for their children.

“70% of voucher users were already in private school to begin with,” he said. “And so when you see these folks pushing for vouchers in the states, what you’re seeing is essentially a smaller tuition forgiveness plan for K-12 private school kids. And so there’s this little of irony and hypocrisy for the right to push against student debt relief when they actually have a student debt relief plan for K-12 private tuition.”

Perryman added that Project 2025 is both expensive and dangerous for Americans.

“I think its goal is to take rights away from the American people that they have enjoyed for generations, and to completely remake our government into a government that serves political ideology as opposed to the needs of the vast majority of the American people,” she said.

Trump has claimed he “knows nothing” about Project 2025 despite the fact that many of his allies and former administration officials worked on it.

Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025, previously served in the Trump administration as chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management. Dans stepped down from the Heritage Foundation on July 30.

Trump expressed support for the Heritage Foundation’s plans at a dinner sponsored by the think tank in April 2022.

“This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America,” Trump said at the time.