Reading Project 2025, part 3: defense, welfare, and higher education

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 continue 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 continues last week’s “The Common Defense” section then starts another one, on “The General Welfare,” all found on pages 201-318.  After summary I’ll draw out the bits which bear directly on higher education. Next I’ll add some reflections and then several discussion questions.  At the end I’ll add some more resources.  Please join in with comments below – for examples of that, you can see good discussion at the end of our first post.

Summary overview

With this section the book continues to break down the agencies tasked with providing for “The Common Defense,” a task we saw commence in last week’s reading. It then offers a first attempt at other federal entities which address “The General Welfare.”

Dustin J. Carmack analyzes the intelligence community, all eighteen departments of it, and recommends a more powerful Director of National Intelligence (DNI), who could reduce bureaucracy, focus on cyberwarfare, strengthen covert operations, and reduce any signs of political bias.  For Carmack China is America’s leading enemy and requires an all of the above governmental response.  Intelligence services need a big dose of improved IT and should play a bigger role in space operations.

Next, Mora Namdar reviews the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM), finding it vulnerable to security threats, not protecting its staff, wastefully spending federal funds, and running redundant programs, as well as being politically biased.  “[T]he USAGM must be fully reformed top to bottom with congressional and White House support.” (245) Mike Gonzalez continues the focus on government information services by discussing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, primarily to call for defunding National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).

Max Primorac then analyzes the U.S. Agency for International Development, charging it with wasteful spending and “pursu[ing] overseas a divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systemic racism.”  Primorac goes on to criticize USAID’s humanitarian aid “as sustaining war economies, creating financial incentives for warring parties to continue fighting, discouraging governments from reforming, and propping up malign regimes.”

His recommendations for USAID start with ending its Biden-era climate change work and turning its global programming against China.  Further,

[t]he next conservative Administration should scale back USAID’s global footprint by, at a minimum, returning to the agency’s 2019 pre–COVID-19 pandemic budget level. It should deradicalize USAID’s programs and structures and build on the conservative reforms instituted by the Trump Administration.

Additionally, this chapter calls for a reversal of gender policies, including establishing pro-life support around the world, plus this:

The next conservative Administration should rename the USAID Office of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (GEWE) as the USAID Office of Women, Children, and Families; refocus and realign resources that currently support programs in GEWE to the Office of Women, Children, and Families; redesignate the Senior Gender Coordinator as an unapologetically pro-life politically appointed Senior Coordinator of the Office of Women, Children, and Families; and eliminate the “more than 180 gender advisors and points of contact… embedded in Missions and Operating Units throughout the Agency.”

That ends the “Common Defense” section of Project 2025.  Next up is a look at the rest of gover a task we saw commence in last week’s reading. It then offers a first attempt at other federal entities which address “The General Welfare,” introduced as “a massive bureaucracy that would someday spend $3 trillion in a single year…the massive behemoth that is the modern administrative state.”

The first organ of that beast to be examined is the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).  Daren Bakst deems it too large and also a victim of mission creep beyond a focus on helping farmers “efficiently produc[e] safe food.”  Bakst wants a reformed USDA to cease trying to change American food production for reasons of climate change and social justice.  He recommends cutting back some USDA insurance and price support systems, reducing K-12 free meal to non-poor students, ending the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), and removing all climate change policies. Bakst wants USDA to support biotechnology research, development, and usage (307) while calling for the reform or abolition of the federal Dietary Guidelines.

What does all of this mean for higher education?

As we saw last week, the Project 2025 document wants to use colleges and universities for various functions.  This week’s reading offers more examples, like this one concerning the CIA:

The Director should… mandate that all CIA employees acquire, as a condition of securing senior (GS-14+) rank, additional or enhanced language skills, technical or cyber expertise, or field training or serve in overseas assignments.

Similarly, higher education must play a role in the struggle with China:

Corporate America, technology companies, research institutions, and academia must be willing, educated partners in this generational fight to protect our national security interests, economic interests, national sovereignty, and intellectual property as well as the broader rules-based order—all while avoiding the tendency to cave to the left-wing activists and investors who ignore the China threat and increasingly dominate the corporate world. [emphases added]

There are other organizational changes with implications for academia, such as the idea of “reinstituti[ng] the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board.” (Wikipedia; 218) The USAID chapter would cut some post-secondary support, based on the argument that “[w]e must admit that USAID’s investments in the education sector, for example, serve no other purpose than to subsidize corrupt, incompetent, and hostile regimes.” (275)

Considered as public education services, the changes to information services would alter their missions.

At a different level, to push to transform information, aid, and farming agencies would impact students seeking careers in those fields, not to mention faculty and staff researching therein.

Reflections

We see several themes from earlier in the document continue: cutting spending, reducing or shuffling certain organizations, ending a “woke”/climate agenda, promulgating a “pro-family” one, reducing immigration, and battling China.  Project 2025 keeps tracing these ideas across the federal government, often in very practical ways.

I’m curious about how far Project 2025 goes in restricting immigration.  There seems to be a loophole for Latin American students in this passage: “The United States remains the favored destination for higher education and business opportunities for Latin Americans. Successful diasporas in the United States serve as powerful economic, cultural, and political bridges to every country in the region.” (277) Would a second Trump administration try to build its border wall while also helping certain students over it?

There is an interesting balance or contradiction in how these chapters approach science.  In some ways they oppose current scientific research, notably in climate change. At the same time the text calls for more science and technology development, from cyberwar to space-based intelligence and biotechnology for agriculture.

There is another tension between the document’s desire to reduce federal interventions in daily life, while at the same time wanting to impose its own ideology.  This isn’t new, of course, but is worth noting here.

Questions

1. What do you make of these contradictions?  Are they expressions of a “big tent” party trying to reflect a diverse constituency?
2. How would the policy changes expressed in this week’s chapters impact your professional and personal lives?
3. Do you see Trump as likely to attempt what this week’s reading describes?
4. How might the world change if these global policies take effect?
5. If you oppose what these chapters call 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?

And two meta-questions:

1. When we finish this gigantic reading, would a giant pdf including all of these posts be useful?
2. If Trump keeps distancing himself from Project 2025, should we keep going with this reading?

Resources

• Alec MacGillis, “The Man Behind Project 2025’s Most Radical Plans.”
• Scientific America, “What to Know about Project 2025’s Dangers to Science”
• Project 2025’s director steps down, under fire from Trump.  There’s talk of Heritage winding down the project. (Should we keep doing this reading?)
• Potential impact of a second Trump administration on climate policies. (Adam Tooze)
• A YouTube series of reading the book aloud:

…and that’s it for this week’s reading.  For next Monday, August 12, we’ll continue through “The General Welfare,” pages 319-416. NB: this starts with a chapter on the Department of Education.

Please do comment in the box 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 many people who help keep this reading alive)