Project 2025 Would Cut Ed Department, Fulfill Conservative K-12 Wish List Under Trump

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This article is part of The 74’s EDlection 2024 coverage, which takes a look at candidates’ education policies and how they might impact the American education system after the 2024 election.

An ambitious Republican agenda to transform the federal bureaucracy under a second Trump presidency would have considerable fallout in the world of education, reimagining the U.S. government as a guardian of parents’ rights and reconstituting decades-old programs to serve as vehicles for school choice. 

The full program, entitled Mandate for Leadership, is a roadmap for conservative rule whose heft rivals that of the more prolix Harry Potter novels. Laid out in 43 bullet-pointed pages, its chapter on education offers prescriptions that range from the sweeping to the picayune — proposing both to eliminate Title I grants to high-poverty schools and to revise accreditation requirements under the Higher Education Act. 

The ultimate goal is the wholesale abolition of the Department of Education, with many of its dedicated offices and responsibilities distributed either to states or other agencies. Jack Jennings, a retired policy maven who formerly served as Democrats’ top education aide in the House of Representatives, said that prize may prove difficult to win. 

But even failing the ideal, he argued, the plan offers a step-by-step playbook to shrink the federal government’s role in schools as much as possible over the next four years.

“They want to get rid of the department in the long term, but the way to do that in the short term is by spinning off agencies until they don’t have anything left,” Jennings said. 

With this week’s Republican National Convention putting a spotlight on the party’s aspirations for governance, the text could become the public face of conservative policy throughout the campaign.

Mandate for Leadership is the intellectual product of the right-leaning Heritage Foundation and its efforts to guide the next presidential transition, dubbed Project 2025. It is only the latest of a series of “policy bibles” issued by Heritage, dating back to the beginnings of the Reagan administration, which have heavily influenced Republicans presidents and presidential candidates.

Each of its 30 sections focuses on revamping a different domain of the U.S. government in the event of a GOP victory in November. Beyond those specific battle plans, its authors seek to empower President Trump with the flexibility to fire and replace thousands of civil servants, sometimes referred to as denizens of the “deep state.”

Perhaps more importantly, the chapter delves into a level of detail seldom seen even among wonk monographs, carefully listing the agency regulations and executive orders it intends to either cull or restore.

President Trump disavowed any connection with Project 2025 earlier this month, calling some of its notions “ridiculous and abysmal” after the effort provoked a deluge of criticism from Democrats and the media. Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, who was announced as the former president’s running mate on Monday, said in an interview over the weekend that only Trump will determine the priorities of his potential administration; his own pronouncements on education — including a proposal to tax university endowments as a means of curbing DEI efforts and legislation that would force colleges to abide by the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against racial preferences in admissions — have largely avoided the issue of K–12 schools.

Yet Mandate for Leadership’s education portion bears a striking resemblance to that of his party’s official 2024 platform, which promises to expand school choice, revert educational authority to states, and combat “gender indoctrination” in classrooms.

Several longtime education observers believe that many of those goals could be enacted with the help of friendly courts and Republican majorities in Congress. Jennings said it was rare for a strategy document to both set out an ideological vision and instruct its audience how to realize it “by chapter and verse.”

It's the most precise that any candidate for president has been in terms of what they're going to do in office.

Jack Jennings, former Democratic House staff member

“This is very meaningful,” Jennings said. “In my experience, it’s the most precise that any candidate for president has been in terms of what they’re going to do in office.”

NEA as ‘radical’ interest group 

Written by Lindsey Burke, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, much of the Mandate’s chapter on education argues for a dramatic downsizing of Washington’s powers. 

Title I, an $18 billion program that sends aid to nearly two-thirds of public schools, would be transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services and disbursed to states as a block grant with no strings attached; within a decade, the states would assume the responsibility of funding it themselves. Roughly fourteen billion dollars of special education funding under the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act would similarly be shifted to the purview of HHS. 

In both instances, Burke suggests that existing funding be targeted directly to eligible families for use as “micro-education savings accounts.” ESAs, which provide money for families to use on education expenses such as private school tuition, have become the favored school choice policy for Republican governors in the Biden presidency, with new programs adopted in 13 states just over the last three years.
Federal authority could also be used to broaden school choice in schools under the direct jurisdiction of the U.S. government. The chapter advocates that ESAs be made available to students in Washington, D.C. — already home to its own school voucher program, though eligibility in the District is currently limited by income — as well as those attending schools on military bases and on tribal lands.

The chapter continues by calling on lawmakers to rescind the special congressional charter of the National Education Association, which Burke labels a “demonstrably radical special interest group.” The charter was created in 1906 in recognition of the NEA’s special educational mission, and has periodically generated criticism from Republicans for exempting the organization from paying property taxes on its sizable headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The proposed revocation would likely have few practical consequences, but would come as a blow to the prestige of America’s largest labor union. The NEA did not respond to requests for comment about the proposition. The Heritage Foundation declined to comment for this story.

Finally, Burke expounds at length on the need for greater protections for family autonomy, including legislation that would allow parents to seek legal redress if the federal government enforces a policy “in a way that undermines their right and responsibility to raise, educate, and care for their children.” In the absence of written parental consent, staff at schools under federal jurisdiction would also be forbidden from addressing students by a name or pronoun other than that which appears on their birth certificate. 

Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, executive director of the LGBT advocacy group GLSEN, said in a statement that a change of that kind would give parents “stronger judicial scrutiny than victims of sex discrimination.”

Project 2025 exists outside the bounds of common decency and is a roadmap for an extremist refashioning of the United States.

Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, GLSEN

“Project 2025 exists outside the bounds of common decency and is a roadmap for an extremist refashioning of the United States that erases legal recognition of marginalized communities and tears apart the threads that bind our nation together,” Willingham-Jaggers wrote.

Chester Finn, a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution who served as an assistant secretary of education in the Reagan administration, said Burke’s plan combined perennial conservative calls for a reduced federal role — Heritage’s 2017 iteration of Mandate for Leadership also advocated that Title I and IDEA grants be made “portable” for families — with a sizable complement of “new regulations, new rights, new programs.”

“To me, the chapter is a little schizophrenic,” Finn said. “It’s about 70 or 80 percent ‘Let’s do away with this,’ and 20 or 30 percent ‘Let’s do new stuff that we want to get done.’ And they want to use their new leverage in the federal government to get it done.”

The chapter is a little schizophrenic. It's about 70 or 80 percent 'Let's do away with this,' and 20 or 30 percent 'Let's do new stuff that we want to get done.'

Chester Finn, Hoover Institution

Both forceful and wide-ranging, the education portion is the most assertive statement of policy intentions that Trump and his conservative allies have offered over the last few years. But pledging to unshackle states from federal interference — or else nationalizing the K–12 push of red states, which have spent the last few years rapidly expanding school choice and passing parental rights laws — the paper may also reflect a somewhat reduced interest in advancing new federal policies and programs. 

The often-vicious education controversies of the last few years, from COVID-related school closures to trans participation in youth sports, helped stoke a parent empowerment movement that captured national attention. But some of that energy dissipated as groups like Moms for Liberty and Republican aspirants like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis failed to convert their followings into national political gains.

An analysis by the Brookings Institution this spring found that just 54 candidates out of the 166 endorsed by Moms for Liberty won their races during the 2023 local election cycle; scandal involving one of the group’s founders has proved a distraction as organizing efforts ramp up for November.

A succession of Republican governors achieved a breakthrough beginning last year by establishing or expanding ESA programs in their states, but lasting victories on culture-war issues have been harder to achieve. Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry’s widely-publicized attempt to display the Ten Commandments in every K–12 classroom is expected to be viewed skeptically even by Republican-appointed judges.

Democrats have taken aim at Project 2025, making it their central target as doubts form around whether President Joe Biden will be replaced on the party’s presidential ticket. A recent YouGov poll found that while most Americans still haven’t heard much about the effort, a sizable minority feel unfavorably toward it. 

Heath Brown, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies presidential transitions, said that K–12 schools were “not as central” to President Trump’s political vision as issues like trade and immigration.

“There’s an irony to that because of the prominence of school issues in the conservative movement over the last few years,” Brown remarked. “But it doesn’t seem that the Trump campaign or the MAGA movement is nearly as concerned with schools today as they were 18 months ago.”

The president’s critical year one

The success of the Mandate education plan may hinge significantly on what happens in the next 18 months. 

If Trump wins, Republicans would also need to hold the House of Representatives and retake the Senate in order to advance legislation on codifying parental rights or shrinking the Department of Education. And given how contentious some of those proposals are likely to be, Jennings said, the president would likely need to act fast.

“The president has most of his power the first year he’s in office,” he said. “It’s a four-year term, and if he’s going to get something done, he has to do it right away.”

In the hyper-partisan climate of the 2020s, incoming presidents tend to enjoy their highest poll numbers and maximal sway with Congress in the aftermath of their elections. But reorganizing government can be achingly slow work: When then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos sought to alter Title IX regulations related to sexual assault on college campus, the process of review and revision took nearly the entire first Trump term. President Biden’s Department of Education spent almost as much time revising the revisions, which largely brought federal guidance back in line with the pre-Trump standard.

The task of dismantling an entire cabinet department, or at least scattering its responsibilities elsewhere within the executive branch, would be exponentially more complicated, said Brown. Even Republicans otherwise favorable to Trump’s platform might rebel once it became clear that their states and districts could lose out on federal dollars. Discussions have emerged among conservative legislators in Tennessee and Oklahoma about whether to forgo federal funds tied to mandates around gender identity recognition, but have thus far gone nowhere.

“The White House would face, on each and every one of these proposals, forceful resistance from those in Congress who believe in these programs; from all the advocates of these programs, whom the administration ultimately has to work with; and also the career officials, who understand that the programs are written into law and that changing them is likely infeasible,” he argued.

But some of the most prominent ideas in the Mandate for Leadership could likely be pursued without congressional approval. Most famously, the document recommends reinstating a Trump-era executive order known as Schedule F, which would make it far easier to fire huge numbers of federal employees in policymaking roles. While it would likely take years to identify, reclassify, terminate, and replace all the civil servants that a second Trump administration might like to target, such a reform holds the potential of fundamentally changing the way the Department of Education (among countless other agencies) functions.

It doesn't seem that the Trump campaign or the MAGA movement is nearly as concerned with schools today as they were 18 months ago.

Heath Brown, John Jay College

Finn, who would agree in principle to an “intelligent voucherization” of federal programs like Title I, said he believed much of the Project 2025 agenda could well be realized with a concerted push. 

“I really think you could do a fair chunk of this in a single term if you had the right stars lined up in Congress. Not many of these things are, on their face, unconstitutional; therefore, if you changed the laws and the regulations, the courts — especially a conservative Supreme Court — would be unlikely to undo the changes.”

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