Ever since the hyper-conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, released Project 2025, a guide for remaking the government in MAGA’s image should Trump retake the White House, progressive think tanks have been studying the manifesto page-by-page to determine what we’d be in for should it pass.
PEN America, a progressive advocacy organization focused on freedom of expression in education, libraries and book publishing, has released a white paper examining Project 2025’s probable impact on American education, should it be implemented. Their findings are predictably dire.
The freedom to read, learn and teach
For the past several years, free expression in public education has been under siege, as state legislators, local city councils and school boards have enacted educational gag orders and facilitated book bans. PEN America’s preliminary documentation of book bans is showing a record-breaking increase in books removed from school classrooms and libraries—more than 10,000 instances of bans during the full 2023-2024 school year, considerably hindering students’ freedom to learn and read.
New laws and policies are taking effect in multiple states continuing the worrisome trend, leading to book bans from Utah to Tennessee, and the dismantling of DEI offices and programs from Kentucky to Texas.
So far, these attacks on the freedom to read, learn and teach have been restricted to the state and local level. However, Project 2025 proposes to mimic these efforts federally, and to do so using as many levers of federal power as possible. Most egregiously, Project 2025 actually proposes dismantling the Department of Education in its entirety, which would eliminate essential data on America’s public schools and related research — like student demographics and attainment or curricula effectiveness.
Dismantling the Department of Education would also weaken the federal government’s capacity to focus national attention on key educational issues, like reading and censorship, as well as address discrimination and ensure equal access to education.
Project 2025 wants to enshrine educational censorship as federal policy
PEN’s report quotes Heritage President Kevin Roberts, who in his forward to the Project 2025 manifesto, explicitly spells out their extremist agenda. Roberts writes, “Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms.” He also posits that higher education has been “captured by woke ‘diversicrats.’” In particular, Roberts argues, “The noxious tenets of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’ should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children.”
What Project 2025 envisions is a federal ban on Critical Race Theory — or what it defines as such — within K-12 schools controlled directly by the federal government. Federally-administered schools include Washington D.C. public schools, and schools administered by the military and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This means that the teaching of the history and culture of millions of marginalized people, including Black, Hispanic, Asian, indigenous and LGBTQ+ students, would be subject to governmental revisionism and censorship.
Since the definition of “critical race theory” is vague at best, ultimately it includes whatever officials want to include. That would give the government Orwellian level power to edit, rewrite or ban any works of history, culture and literature it chooses.
Project 2025 would use “parental rights” rhetoric to target specific ideas in education
In Chapter 11, its education section, Project 2025 leans heavily on a framing of “parental rights,” as a means of legitimizing school-wide restrictions on LGBTQ+ content. Project 2025 proposes that the next Administration work to pass a federal “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” and ensure that any education-related regulation contains similar “parental rights” protections. It even calls on Congress to give parents a “private right of action” against schools—in essence, enabling parents to sue public schools for including any curricular content that offends them.
A host of incidents have been reported, including several in PGN, where “parental rights” rhetoric has been weaponized by extremist groups like Moms for Liberty and its allies to erase content in schools that includes LGBTQ+ people, or that involves depictions of race and racism that may be challenging but truthful. This framing of “parental rights” very explicitly prioritizes the rights of some parents, while running roughshod over the rights of others.
Project 2025 wants to define LGBTQ+ content as “porn”— and treat librarians like criminals
Project 2025 is upfront about its intent to equate LGBTQ+ content in children’s books and in school curricula with pornography, and to treat making such content accessible as a crime. In his foreword to the 2025 manifesto, Roberts writes, “children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.” He goes on to say, even more explicitly, “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children … has no claim to First Amendment protection…. Pornography should be outlawed…Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.”
Already, 20 states either have passed laws or are considering laws that would treat librarians as criminals for refusing to pull books from their shelves. Project 2025 would federalize such laws, either through congressional legislation or presidential executive orders.
Project 2025 wants to give politicians greater ideological control over universities, by stripping away guardrails
Project 2025 also takes direct aim at colleges and universities, proposing to strip away the guardrails that help defend public colleges from the ideological whims of state politicians. The first way would be by significantly altering the system of university accreditation by stripping accreditation agencies of much of their authority to establish standards. Project 2025 alleges that these agencies’ processes are too concerned with promoting diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
The new process would allow state governments to establish and appoint their own accreditation agencies. So, instead of nonpartisan accreditors applying impartial standards to determine access to federal student aid, accreditation would be controlled by a state government’s handpicked agency, or by the state itself. Governors who have built their political brand on attacking higher education — like Florida’s Ron DeSantis — would be handed a powerful new mechanism to punish universities whose faculty or academic programs they disapprove of, and to reward universities that promote their ideological preferences.
Secondly, Project 2025 would also substantially narrow the tools of the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, and moving it to the Department of Justice while restricting its process, removing the Office’s most effective tool for ensuring compliance with federal civil rights law, the authority to investigate and negotiate solutions to civil-rights violations.
With both university accreditors and federal regulators out of the way, state governors and legislatures would be given drastically expanded powers to remake public universities in their image — including by favoring or disfavoring academic programs and professors on ideological grounds. A perfect example of this has already occurred in Florida with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ takeover of what was once (but is no more) the state’s premiere liberal arts college, the New University.
The PEN America report concludes with this assessment: “In sum, Project 2025 proposes a radical overhaul of the United States education system, with the foreseeable effect being a frontal assault on the freedoms to read, learn, and teach. If implemented, this slate of proposals would turbocharge the forces of censorship that have been running rampant in states across much of the country for the past four years.”
To read the full white paper, visit pen.org/report/project-2025/.
