Trump and Project 2025’s Plan for Public Education

Public education is a fundamental pillar of our democracy. Education reduces crime, improves public health, strengthens gender equality, and produces a more informed, idea generating citizenry that is able to think critically. Well-educated citizens are more employable and help make the U.S. more competitive in a 21st Century global economy.

The Heritage Foundation’s ultra-conservative policy manifesto Project 2025, and the less detailed Republican National Committee 2024 Platform, both designed for Donald Trump, provide a blueprint that will reshape the American education system from early childhood education through college. That reshaping is rife with bad ideas that would inflict harm on students and schools nationwide and would end public education as we know it.

Perhaps the most important takeaway from the 44-page education chapter of Project 2025 is the goal to abolish the U.S. Department of Education. Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed at rallies that he would disband it and “move everything back to the states where it belongs.” The Department of Education is the only federal agency that is mandated to ensure equal educational opportunity and accountability and to fund states and school districts for elementary and secondary education. Thus, ending the Department ends federal education funding and any civil rights protections, promotes public school closures, and allows for the diversion of public money to private and charter school voucher programs.

Most public schools receive the majority of their funding from local and state governments, but the federal contribution (~8─14%) still translates into billions of dollars annually. States and school districts that receive a higher share of those dollars would feel a disproportionate hit, particularly affecting earmarked programs that support special needs and disadvantaged students and aid for college students (e.g., Pell Grants). Other Project 2025 recommendations that will drastically overhaul federal education policy include:

· Discontinuing the Title I program that provides federal funding to schools serving low-income children

· Eliminating the Head Start program for young children in poverty

· Rescinding federal civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students

· Undercutting federal capacity to enforce civil rights law

· Reducing federal funding for students with disabilities and remove guardrails designed to ensure these children are adequately served by schools

· Promoting universal private school choice

· Privatizing the federal student loan portfolio

These policy proposals are hugely consequential. By dismantling the Department of Education, its Title I program, which helps fund schools with large populations of K─12 students from low-income families, would be transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Ending would be Title I, Part A’s Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which obligates supplemental federal funding to states to ensure that all children, regardless of their income status, receive a fair, equitable, and high-quality education. The plan aims to move the funding into a block grant, giving states more flexibility on how to spend this ‘no strings attached money’ on “any lawful education purpose under state law”. It also recommends redirecting taxpayer dollars intended for K─12 public education to fund private and religious schools. The proposal phases out Title I over 10 years.

Ending Title I funding also ends funding critical to hiring and retaining well-prepared teachers. The Center for American Progress estimates that ending Title I would abolish 180,000 teacher positions, nearly 6% of the public education teacher workforce, and greatly exacerbate a nationwide teacher shortage. During the 2023-24 school year, every state in the country reported a teacher shortage in one or more subject areas, being most pronounced in high-poverty schools with poor working conditions and unmanageable workloads. Project 2025 recommends funding divestments in the Department’s Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, moving the special education money that now goes to schools into HHS-run block grants for states to distribute to parents.

Abolishing the Department of Education and its programs would take an act of Congress, but Project 2025 has a workaround for that. The plan involves skeletonizing the Department so that all that is left is a hollow shell that can only gather statistics to disseminate. Project 2025 also proposes to eliminate Head Start, a program that funds early childhood education for low-income families in both urban and rural areas. The Center for American Progress says eliminating Head Start would reduce access to and increase costs for childcare, hurting national economic stability.

In addition, Project 2025 calls for: rolling back Title IX, which prohibits discrimination based on sex; blocking student debt cancellation programs; shifting the handling of student loans to private lenders which would quadruple monthly payments; censoring anti-racist curricula that teach tolerance in schools; ending programs related to diversity of LGBTQ+ youth; eliminating school nutrition programs, particularly for children experiencing food insecurity during the summer when they lack access to school meals; and increasing privatization of education. Together, these policies reflect a white Christian Nationalist education agenda.

Our public education system is not without flaws. However, Trump and Project 2025 would spell an end to everything our country has sought to do with public education. It spells an end to hard-fought policies on racial justice and human rights and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. As Joyce Vance, Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Alabama, writes, “It spells the establishment of religion, even at the college level, in ways that are inimical to creating a population that is taught to think, not what to think.” It undermines our democracy.