Trump education policies hew closely to Project 2025 despite campaign denials
While the president said on the campaign trail that he had nothing to do with Project 2025, experts say his actions align with the right-wing’s playbook’s objectives on education.
Experts say that President Donald Trump’s actions on education to date largely follow proposals contained in Project 2025, despite Trump’s assertions in the lead-up to the 2024 election that he knew nothing about the right-wing blueprint for a new Republican administration.
“I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” Trump said during the ABC News presidential debate in September 2024. “I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it purposely. I’m not going to read it.”
Although the right-wing playbook’s website features a July 2024 USA Today headline that says “Project 2025 is an effort by the Heritage Foundation, not Donald Trump,” Michigan State University education policy professor Josh Cowen says everything Trump has done so far hews closely to Project 2025.
“The first three paragraphs in the education chapter of Project 2025 are basically his entire education agenda so far,” Cowen said. “The first is getting rid of the Department of Ed. That’s paragraph one.”
Indeed, the very first line of the playbook’s chapter on education, written by Heritage Foundation Center for Education Policy director Lindsey M. Burke, states: “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.”
Heather DuBois Bourenane, executive director of the Wisconsin Public Education Network, said she was alarmed to see the alignment between Project 2025 and Trump’s actions so far.
“I think there are many good-faith Americans who simply thought that was a lot of noise and didn’t think that it was something to really be worried about,” DuBois Bourenane said. “And now that they’re seeing the impacts of that agenda, they’re, you know, equally confused and disturbed.”
Trump signed an executive order March 20 directing the secretary of education to begin the process of winding down the cabinet-level department, saying that its main functions “can, and should, be returned to the States.”
The president can’t legally put an end to the department on his own, though, DuBois Bourenane pointed out.
“I just want to remind folks that these orders are not binding. The president has no authority to dissolve the Department of Education. That is not something that can be accomplished by a fiat of political whim. It requires an act of Congress,” she said.
Legislation to dissolve the Department of Education is unlikely to make it through Congress: Republicans are unlikely to be able to overcome a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, barring a rule change. But that certainly hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from trying, Cowen says.
The Trump administration already initiated a reduction in force on March 11, which it says will result in the layoffs of more than 2,000 people, or about 50% of the Department of Education’s workers.
The Department of Education, through its Office for Civil Rights, is responsible for protecting students against discrimination. However, the Trump administration has ordered the closure of a number of the Office’s field branches, making it harder to enforce those protections.
Under President Joe Biden, the department was a small but not insignificant source of funding for public schools around the country, with millions of dollars in grants helping to support low-income schools and special education students.
Project 2025 envisions a future in which, without the federal Department of Education, parents have the option to receive school vouchers “funded overwhelmingly by state and local taxpayers.” Vouchers are government-funded accounts that parents can use to pay for private education for their children rather than send them to publicly funded schools.
States that have tried such voucher programs have already seen their education costs balloon. In Arizona, the state’s universal school vouchers program, which was implemented in 2022, has shot far past its $65 million cost estimate to $429 million this year, according to ProPublica, as the state has had to continue funding its existing public schools even while spending more on vouchers.
Nevertheless, Cowen said, the Trump administration is suggesting this path to states, though it hasn’t yet gone as far as it can. On March 31, it sent a letter to chief state school officers informing them of what it said was flexibility in federal funding formulas that allows states to use a percentage of their federal dollars “so that parents can be given a range of options – advanced courses, dual enrollment, academic tutoring, career and technical education, personalized learning, and out-of-school activities – to select for their child.”
“I think it’s actually a big deal, it was not in Project 2025 but the point is, in spirit, it’s certainly there,” Cowen said.
“You go down the list, it’s very clear that in the education space, Trump’s following that playbook.”
DuBois Bourenane said it’s now up to parents and members of the public who oppose Trump’s Project 2025 agenda to speak out and put pressure on their elected officials.
“What’s next for this conversation depends entirely on the extent to which people who share our concerns are willing to pick up the phone and call their Congress people and really make sure that their voices are being being raised against these maneuvers, and that the voice of reason, and what’s best for kids really prevails at the end of the day,” she said. “Because if any of this stuff goes through … I think people have no idea how impactful these measures are going to be.”
