Project 2025 about public education and just about everything else

The conservative threat is real, not a mirage

America’s authoritarian radical right has laid out its policy wish list in a document called Project 2025. Most of the policies are radical. They typically involve a taking power from the federal government and individual citizens. The stolen power* will flow to states and powerful, wealthy elites and special interests. Project 2025 is truly an authoritarian manifesto aimed at neutering democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties. If Project 2025 is mostly implemented, Americans will be governed by some form of a combination of (1) kleptocratic dictatorship, (2) kleptocratic, bigoted Christian fundamentalist theocracy, and (3) kleptocratic, unregulated capitalist plutocracy. The 887 page manifesto is online at this link.

* Stolen because a majority of Americans would oppose most of what is in Project 2025 if they understood what it advocates implementing

One of the Project 2025 goals is gutting public education. That is a cherished goal of America's Christian nationalism (CN) wealth and power political movement. The CN goal is to eventually replace all secular education with mandatory Christian religious “education”, whatever that is.

Commentary from a North Carolina news source:

The Trump team’s radical plan to gut American public education

Not surprisingly, low-income children of color are among the chief targets

In many ways, it’s one of the great mysteries of modern American policy debates: What does the political right aim to achieve by destroying public education?

The idea of siphoning off billions of public dollars to fund private school vouchers is more obvious: It’s a straight money [and power] grab that abets the longstanding desire of many people of means to avoid having to send their children to melting pot schools that include poor kids and kids of different races and ability levels.

But why the relentless attack on the public schools and the kids and families who remain in them?

Is it simply a matter of the fact that – as Willie Sutton infamously said of the banks he robbed – “that’s where the money is”?

Is it born of that strange passion still found in some corners of the market fundamentalist right that all things public are inherently evil and a threat to their “freedom”?

Is it just a function of the fact that public schools in states like North Carolina have become majority-minority?

Whatever the explanation, it’s impossible to deny that such a mission of destruction is a top conservative priority these days and well underway in many places.

The document is chockful of remarkably extreme objectives in dozens of areas, but few are more striking than the field of public education, where the plan calls for:

• Ending the nation’s oldest and largest federal program for the support of public education – Title I.
• Gutting the nation’s free school meals program.
• Eliminating the Head Start program.

Title I is the nation’s signature initiative for aiding schools with large numbers of low-income students. In the current fiscal year, $20.5 billion has been allocated across the nation. Ninety percent of the nation’s school districts and all 115 in North Carolina benefit. About half the public schools in North Carolina, as well as many private schools, receive Title I funding.

Amazingly, however, Project 2025 calls for “phasing” Title I out of existence and turning the responsibility over to the states. North Carolinians familiar with their General Assembly’s cheapskate approach to funding schools will find that notion laughable.

And the same is true with the other proposed draconian cuts.

Free school meals – an initiative that has been expanded wisely and to great benefit in recent years – is one of the most obvious and affordable things the U.S. government does to directly enhance the lives of millions of children.

Given the intense hostility of the authors of Project 2025 to domestic and social welfare spending, it is reasonable to assume that the unspoken intent of Project 2025 is complete elimination of federal programs like free school meals and food stamps. The language of the document is more moderate and speaks only of “reform” and means testing of various programs to stop “misuse” of taxpayer money.

For example, at page 298, Project 2025 calls for separating the agricultural provisions of the annual farm bill from the nutrition provisions. This would be the first step in completely eliminating federal food programs because the the radical right has to protect the farm bill to keep rural voters in line. Years ago, Democrats explicitly combined food programs with the farm bill to insure that government haters would refuse to pass food programs while passing the farm bill.

Q: It is reasonable to distrust the expressed intentions of Project 2025 in view of the authors’ radicalism, hate of government, hate of domestic spending programs and sympathy for authoritarianism?[1]

Footnote: 

1. Project 2025 authors include fanatic Trump supporter Peter Navarro, presently in jail for contempt of congress. Trump and his campaign are openly collaborating with key Project 2025 proponents. One source comments:

The Mandate’s veneer of exhausting technocratic detail, focused mostly on the federal bureaucracy, sits easily alongside a Trumpian project of revenge and retribution. It is the substance behind the showmanship of the Trump rallies.

Developing transition plans for a presidential candidate is normal practice in the US. What is not normal about Project 2025, with its intertwined domestic and international agenda, are the plans themselves. Those for climate and the global environment, defense and security, the global economic system and the institutions of American democracy more broadly aim for nothing less than the total dismantling and restructure of both American life and the world as we know it.

The unapologetic agenda, according to Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts, is to “defeat the anti-American left – at home and abroad.”  

Recommendations include completely abolishing the US Federal Reserve in favor of a system of “free banking”, the total reversal of all the Biden administration’s climate policies, a dramatic increase in fossil fuel extraction and use, ending economic engagement with China, expanding the nuclear arsenal and a “comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of U.S. participation in all international organizations” including the UN and its agencies. And that’s not all.

Wikipedia comments, highlighting the authoritarianism (autocrat and plutocrat) and hate of government that dominates the document:

Project 2025, also known as the Presidential Transition Project, is a collection of policy proposals to thoroughly reshape the U.S. federal government in the event of a Republican victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Established in 2022, the project aims to recruit tens of thousands of conservatives to the District of Columbia to replace existing federal civil servants—whom Republicans characterize as part of the “deep state”—and to further the objectives of the next Republican president. It adopts a maximalist version of the unitary executive theory—which asserts that the president has absolute power over the executive branch upon inauguration. Unitary executive theory is an interpretation of Article II of the Constitution of the United States. 

Project 2025 envisions widespread changes across the entire government, particularly with regard to economic and social policies and the role of the federal government and its agencies. The plan proposes slashing funding for the Department of Justice, dismantling the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security, sharply reducing environmental and climate change regulations to favor of fossil fuel production, eliminating the Department of Commerce, and ending the independence of various federal agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. The blueprint seeks to institute tax cuts, though its writers disagree on the wisdom of protectionism.  

Project 2025 recommends abolishing the Department of Education, whose programs would be either transferred to other government agencies, or terminated. Scientific research would only receive federal funding if it suits conservative principles.  

The Project urges the government to explicitly reject abortion as health care and to restrict access to contraception.  

The Project advises the future president to immediately deploy the military for domestic law enforcement and to direct the DOJ to pursue Trump's adversaries by invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807. It recommends the arrest, detention, and deportation of undocumented immigrants across the country. It promotes capital punishment and the speedy “finality” of such sentences. Project director Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official, explained that Project 2025 is “systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army, aligned, trained, and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state.”