Heard of Project 2025? Something For Everyone to Worry About

 If you have somehow missed this, there is a document from the ultra right-wing group, The Heritage Foundation, a blueprint of sorts nicknamed Project 2025. Its real name is Mandate for Leadership. This 900-page monstrosity would tear apart much of how our country works. Including public education. 

But before I get into the weeds on public education, here's other key points from Vox:

• Project 2025 proposes that all Department of State employees in leadership roles should be dismissed by the end of January 20, 2025.
• The project lays out quite aggressive proposals to use federal power to prevent abortions and restrict certain contraceptive coverage. It even says that pornography should be “outlawed” and its creators and distributors should be “imprisoned.”
• The “Schedule F” plan to reclassify tens of thousands of civil servants as political appointees, so they could be fired and replaced with Trump cronies.
• Deprioritize fighting climate change, repeal Biden’s clean energy subsidies, further unleash oil and natural gas production, roll back various environmental regulations
• Roberts also adds that pornography is “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children,” suggesting that he may define “pornography” much more broadly than is typical — that he may view any attempt to explain or teach about trans people as worthy of outlawing and imprisonment. 

Yeah, I think that last one on defining what is pornography is going to expand what it is. But, as the late great Justice Potter Stewart said, "I know it when I see it." They can ban porn all they like but, just like abortion, it will always exist somehow. 

From The 74:

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.

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.” 

Here are two looks at that portion from two different sources. First up, the Network for Public Education. They have a great little video explanation but basically, 

Destroy your neighborhood public schools and make parents shop for schooling using vouchers. Even as that is occurring, it would whittle away protections and support for LGBTQ students, disadvantaged students, and students with disabilities. 

As well, reduction in help with college tuition, elimination of Title One, the elimination of the Department of Education. Know who helped write it? Betsy DeVos. 

From The 74:

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. 

On education:

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. 

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. 

They point out:

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.

“There’s an irony to that because of the prominence of school issues in the conservative movement over the last few years,” (Heath) 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.”

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.

Chester Finn, from the right-wing Hoover Institute:

“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.”

From the BBC:

Project 2025 aims to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs in schools and government departments as part of what it describes as a wider crackdown on "woke" ideology. 

It proposes to eliminate a long list of terms from all laws and federal regulations, including "sexual orientation", "gender equality", "abortion" and "reproductive rights". 

Please register and vote. Please tell your friends and relatives and co-workers to vote.