By now, you’ve likely heard of “Project 2025,” short for the Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project, a well-funded manifesto from the far-right extremist Heritage Foundation and more than 100 other organizations (including Moms for Liberty, ALEC, and Turning Point USA). The goal, according to Democracy Forward, is to “take swift, far-right action that would cut wages for working people, dismantle social safety net programs, reverse decades of progress for civil rights, redefine the way our society operates, and undermine our economy.” Read this excerpt from our latest blog below. 

Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” is a 900+ page policy playbook that provides a dangerous vision for our nation — and a detailed road map to implement it immediately upon the inauguration of a new, authoritarian president. Within these 900 pages are sweeping changes to K-12 education that will fundamentally undermine and dismantle public schools as the centerpiece of American democracy. 

Project 2025’s Impacts on K-12 Education

Project 2025 contains sweeping reforms for K-12 education across the US, stripping protections for LGBTQ+ students, attacking civil rights, and implementing universal private and religious school vouchers across the US. This playbook plans to completely remake the executive branch and its powers relating to K-12 education:

• Eliminate Title I funding for low-income students: Title I, the $18 billion federal fund that supports low-income students, would disappear in a decade. Instead, the Project says states “should assume decision-making control over how to provide a quality education to children from low-income families” and would send funding in unregulated “block grants” (aka, vouchers) to be used for public or private purposes — furthering their ideal of elite private education for a select privileged few and under-resourced schools for the rest.

• Eliminate the U.S. Department of Education: Donald Trump has said he wants to shut down the USDOE, saying at rallies that it should be disbanded to “move everything back to the states where it belongs.” Project 2025 lays out how dismantling the USDOE would work, leaving behind a husk focused solely as a “statistics-gathering agency that disseminates information to the states” — and evaporating the federal government’s ability to prevent discrimination by overseeing schools nationwide.

• Scale back civil rights protections. The Project would ax the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights within the USDOE. The federal government’s ability to enforce civil rights laws in schools would be scaled back “based on a proper understanding of those laws, rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory.” Instead, Project 2025 would perpetuate a framework of people unwilling to acknowledge our country’s racist history and its impacts today, hanging vulnerable children out to dry. 

• End federal protections for LGBTQ+ students: Project 2025 would direct a future Secretary of Education to rescind the Biden administration’s expanded Title IX protections for LGBTQ+ students. It proposes ridding education programs of any “gender ideology and critical race theory,” such as a “non-binary” category in data collection or the ability of trans youth to participate in sports aligned with their gender. It also calls for parental approval for using names or pronouns other than those on birth certificates. And it wants to gut current protections against discrimination based on students’ sexual orientation and gender identity. 
• Privatize public education: Federal education funds would be converted to vouchers for parents to use on private schools and other education expenses — regardless of whether these schools discriminate or segregate. Project 2025 enacts vouchers for all “federal” children, meaning military children and members of sovereign tribes, and seeks to convert federal IDEA funding for students with special needs to unregulated voucher programs. It also aims to universalize the federal DC voucher program, making all students eligible and allowing private schools “to control their admissions” (or reject any students they don’t want). 

Given the rhetoric Trump and his enablers have unleashed about public schools, none of this is surprising. At a June 2024 “Faith & Freedom Conference” in Washington, DC, Trump vowed to sign an executive order on the first day of his 2025 administration that would cut federal funding for “any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto the lives of our children.” This broad brush flings open the door to vast inequities and discrimination, rolling back hard-fought decades of progress on the civil and social protections that actually make America great. 

Only the beginning: Project 2025 likely represents only the beginning of this concerted attack on American values. On the campaign trail, Trump has also said that parents should elect school principals, called for merit pay for teachers and the abolition of teacher tenure, promised to cut federal funding to schools (allegedly) pushing progressive social ideas, and pledged to establish universal school choice.

Vouchers across the US: Project 2025 would develop massive expansions of voucher programs that would siphon dollars to unregulated private schools nationwide. Trump has said that he supports universal “school choice,” or the ability of any student to use taxpayer funds to attend whatever school they want. The Project cites Arizona’s expansion of vouchers to all students as a model, despite the fact that our state’s program has been the subject of much controversy — including driving a massive budget debt crisis, leading to public school closures, and funneling taxpayer dollars to extras like ski trips, $1800 collectible Lego sets, kayaks, and Sea World admissions. 

The Heritage Foundation’s plan would fully privatize federal dollars for public education. Project 2025 calls for federal spending on education to be turned into “block grants” (aka vouchers) and given to states without “strings” (aka regulations). Its demand for more “education freedom” means vouchers and a privatized system, including tax credit scholarships, a type of voucher that allows the wealthy to fund private schools in lieu of paying taxes.

The Revolution “Will Remain Bloodless If the Left Allows It to Be”: Lest anyone believe Project 2025 is a peaceful mandate or a gradual transition, Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation, recently discussed Project 2025 on the news, saying, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” 

Heritage has spent millions to block voting rights in battleground states, to push election denialism, and to force in school vouchers under the disingenuous guise of “school choice.” They have worked to push critical race theory bans and praised Florida’s dismantling of public education. They even once tried to argue that school vouchers would increase the birth rate. 

Allowing elitist dark-money special interests like the Heritage Foundation to dictate the future of our public schools — and our democracy — is a horrifyingly dangerous plan that should not be followed by any future president. 

The Path Forward: Arizona is the nation’s most crucial battleground state, meaning Arizona voters can tip the scales of justice this November. It is our fervent hope that you will all do your research and share it with friends and family. Please vote up and down the ballot for people who will protect public schools. If we all stay engaged and take action where and how we can, together, we will defend our democracy. 

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