Reading Project 2025, part 1: the agenda and the start of a guidebook

How might a likely second Trump administration impact higher education?  How can academics plan for and anticipate that major event, should it occur?

This week we begin our reading of Project 2025, a key document in understanding the near- and medium-term future of American politics.  This is an online, open, and distributed reading and anyone can participate. Here’s a post explaining how it works.  You can find all of our Project 2025 posts here.

In today’s post I’ll summarize this week’s reading, which is the first part of the book, “Taking the Reins of Government”: front matter through page 85.  I’ll draw out the bits which bear directly on higher education. Next I’ll add some reflections and then several discussion questions.

Summary overview

The book is actually titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, and that does describe what follows.  It assumes an electoral victory yielding a mandate to take major political steps. And it describes what the conservative authors promise to do.

There are several sections here.  The first, the foreword, is an introductory overview, which summarizes the book’s ideas.  The next, “Taking the Reins of Government,” consists of three chapters breaking down how the federal bureaucracy works from the very top.  The former strikes me as more interesting and provocative, while the latter looks very useful.

Before those is a quick “Note” which describes the book’s intention: to inform a new Trump administration about what to implement in its first days in office, and how to do it.  It is a “a consensus view of how major federal agencies must be governed.”

The Note also names its enemies:

The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before. The task at hand [is] to reverse this tide and restore our Republic to its original moorings…

That first sentence is a not too well hidden gesture at colleges and universities.

Beyond the book we’re reading, Project 2025 has other operations in play: “a personnel database” where supporters can upload their profiles, auditioning for a role in the new administration, plus a “Presidential Administration Academy, an online educational system taught by experts from our coalition.”  The project’s team is also “forming agency teams and drafting transition plans.”  As noted elsewhere, this is a very ambitious and practical plan.

Also in the book’s front matter is a long list of main writers, editors, and contributors, which one could mine for all kinds of network analysis. For now I’ll note that many of these people worked for the first Trump administration.

The foreword, written by Heritage Foundation leader Kevin Roberts, is a passionate text.  Like Trump, it describes an America falling through decline into ruins, and the only way to turn things around is by an aggressive Trump administration.  Roberts repeatedly condemns crime, inflation, drugs, drag queens, antiracism (“the Great Awokening”), pornography, China, lack of Christian faith, transgenderism, and more.  He condemns Democrats, progressives, and the left (terms used interchangeably) as totalitarian and dictatorial. He then recommends a new administration advance along “four broad fronts that will decide America’s future”:

1. Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.
2. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.
3. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.
4. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”

Quite a few recommendations flow from this quartet in just a few pages: removing DEI language from government documents, preventing kids from using smartphones, federally banning abortion, massively cutting parts of the federal budget (“the Administrative State”), focusing foreign policy solely on Beijing, closing the national border to illegal immigrants, turning away from some international agreements, decoupling America’s economy from China’s, and otherwise deregulating the economy.  There’s a clear call to ban pornography at a breathtaking level, with one eye on educatior:

The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered. [emphases added]

Climate change doesn’t appear as an issue at all. Instead, Roberts calls out environmental policies as bad for humanity. Instead, he’d like to massively increase America’s fossil fuel production.

The foreword condemns academic credentials and progressive elitism:

Intellectual sophistication, advanced degrees, financial success, and all other markers of elite status have no bearing on a person’s knowledge of the one thing most necessary for governance: what it means to live well. That knowledge is available to each of us, no matter how humble our backgrounds or how unpretentious our attainments. It is open to us to read in the book of human nature, to which we are all offered the key just by merit of our shared humanity.

Higher education comes in for another critique, this time via connections to China.  Roberts refers to “Beijing-compromised colleges” and singles out  Confucius Institutes, which have been “compromising and coopting our higher education system as they have at compromising and coopting corporate America.”   In fact, “[u]niversities taking money from the CCP should lose their accreditation, charters, and eligibility for federal funds.”

The next section, “Taking the Reins of Government,” includes a short introduction followed by chapters breaking down the federal system.  The intro offers a quick jeremiad against bureaucracy before admonishing us that “the new Administration must fill its ranks with political appointees.”  That’s a key feature of the next chapters.

“White House Office” would be a great primer for any politician, analyst, or interested party looking for a clear breakdown of top level offices, positions, and bodies.  What each one does, who appoints them, whom they can hire, the limits of their remits are all there, along with a swarm of acronyms.  It’s not an ideological treatise but a user’s guide to the uppermost federal bureaucracy.

“Executive Office of the President of the United States” continues this civics class drive with an added layer of political theory.  Author Vought takes us through more offices, from the National Security Agency to the Office of Management and Budget, to show us how they work and how a new president could use them.  Said executive could also cut, break, or shut down some of these entities, like the Gender Policy Council.

“Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy” focuses on how to change the federal government’s personnel.  This chapter delves into the weeds of supervision, hiring freezes, pensions, approval processes, union negotiations, merit pay rates, even the design of application tests.  The goal is to “bring that bureaucracy more under control and enable it to work more efficiently and responsibly.”

Reflections

There’s a lot going on in the book so far. Well, in the foreword. I don’t have much to add to the three chapters on governance, as they seem straightforward to me.  Yet I’m not a political scientist, so would like to hear from readers who are.  One point I would make is that Project 2025 calls for a massive replacement of federal staff by people whose most important feature is political reliability:

In order to carry out the President’s desires, political appointees must be given the tools, knowledge, and support to overcome the federal government’s obstructionist Human Resources departments. More fundamentally, the new Administration must fill its ranks with political appointees.

The foreword feels like a full throated attempt to express the hard right side of the culture war in politics through total federal power. The focus on the family – i.e., one particular version of the nuclear family – anchors an agenda some of us will find terrifying, even dystopia.  Personally, I found it hard to maintain a sense of calm analysis.

The document expresses some classic contradictions in the conservative worldview.  For example, it calls for liberty, then favors the imposition of extreme authoritarian policies around abortion and pornography. It wants to shrink the federal government, but at the same time to expand the military.

I might be biased, given my work, but I was impressed by the fairly prominent role higher education plays in the foreword.  Academia plays a major role in creating the society Project 2025 wants to overthrow, from credentialism to communication.

Questions

1. What do you think of the agenda described in the foreword?  How would it impact your life, if implemented?
2. Is the guide to government power in “Taking the Reins of Government” accurate?  Can a president effect such changes?
3. Do you see Trump as likely to attempt what this week’s reading describes?
4. What does Project 2025 mean for higher education, thus far in our reading?
5. If you oppose what the book calls for, what opposition strategy and tactics would best resist it?
6. Having read this far, what do you anticipate from the rest of the book?

That’s it for this week’s reading.  For next Monday (August 29) we’re tackling “The Common Defense,” found on pages 87-199.

Please do comment in the boxes below this post.  If you’d prefer to share your reactions on other platforms, tag me or otherwise let me know about those comments so I can include them in our next post.  If you want to respond but are worried about what people could make of your reactions, feel free to contact me here without the web knowing.

Comment away!  And on to the next tranche of Project 2025.

Thanks to Steve Greenlaw and others for thoughts and suggestions.