Reading Project 2025, part 7: rethinking government and the economy

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, concluding the big “The General Welfare” section at last, then diving into “The Economy,” all found on pages 619-715.    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. In last week’s blog post comments Glen McGee offers a detailed, AI-assisted critique of one chapter’s labor regulations.  sibyledu observes that a returned president Trump wouldn’t have to authorize each item on the Project 2025 agenda; instead, the plan has so much detail that newly appointed subordinates can put their respective parts of the manifesto into action on their own, without Trump’s involvement.

There was more commentary on last week’s reading on Facebook.  Joey Lusk calls the drive to end anti-misinformation work as “telling on yourself.”  Ian Rowcliffe notes that Project 2025 might influence or inspire European Union legislation and policy. Jeff DeMarco and Earl Miller cautioned us to not take Project 2025 so seriously, as Trump has repeatedly disowned any connection with it.  Also on Facebook, I loved this comment from Olgy Aleu Gary:

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. How do you analyze Project 2025? One section at a time, especially with the help of Bryan Alexander of The Futures Trends Forum.

Thank you.  Onward!

Summary overview

Diana Furchtgott-Roth begins this section by analyzing the Department of Transportation (DoT), where she was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology during the Trump administration. She considers the DoT to have become too large and, interestingly, too focused on grant making. Furchtgott-Roth wants the DoT to expand its public-private partnership work. Along those lines she wants to reduce governmental scrutiny of new technologies for transportation and roll back Biden and Obama administration aviation controls.

Other topics addressed in this chapter include climate change, a cause for which the author finds the Biden administration to have overreached, leading her to call for relaxing car mileage regulations.  As per many other chapters in the book, this one calls for the department to support and make more use of new technologies. It also wants to reduce support for mass transit, especially rail. (635-6)

Our second chapter is by Brooks D. Tucker and it covers the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).  Tucker sees the Trump administration as having returned the VA to veteran-centric posture, but that the Obama and Biden teams veered away from that direction.  He additionally charges the Biden administration with pursuing equity and inclusion issues which “will affect only a small minority of the veterans who use the VA.” (642). Tucker calls for the VA to cut back on “abortion services and gender reassignment surgery” (644) as well as to increase its use of new technologies.  The DefeatProject2025 website sees Tucker as calling overall for benefit reductions.

The next chapters deal with the economically-focused parts of the federal government. Thomas F. Gilman begins by analyzing the Department of Commerce and urging the “consolidation, elimination, or privatization that examines the efficiency, effectiveness, and underlying philosophy of each individual component.”  Beyond cutting back, Gilman has two other themes, to “reverse the precipitous economic decline sparked by the Biden Administration and to counter Communist China.” To support these efforts Gilman calls for strengthening enforcement of trade agreements, supporting allies in trade deals, “strategic decoupling from China,” cutting back a range of environmental regulations, and more aggressively enforcing intellectual property rules.

Next, William L. Walton, Stephen Moore, and David R. Burton tackle the U.S. Treasury Department, beginning by calling for a slimmer staff and support for smaller government.  They urge Congress to change federal taxes, both for individuals (“a simple two-rate individual tax system of 15 percent and 30 percent that eliminates most deductions, credits and exclusions”) and businesses (“[t]he corporate income tax rate should be reduced to 18 percent”).  The authors would like a national sales tax or something close to it.  The website 25andme considers this as likely to result in “[m]illions of low- and middle-class households would likely face significantly higher taxes.”  They also want changes to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), including adding more presidential appointments and undoing the Biden administration’s push to double the number of agents.  They would privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

On the global stage, this chapter calls for the US to withdraw from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Authors want Treasury to scrutinize Chinese investments within the United States, as well as American investments which might strengthen China’s ability to compete with the US.

Walton et al follow previous chapters’ critique of the Biden administration’s equity focus. They deem Treasury support for racial minorities to be “racist policymaking” and want to end all such measures, wanting to fire any employee who “participat[ed] in any critical race theory or DEI initiative.”  Similarly, the authors abhor Biden-era climate action, calling for “[t]he next Administration [to] eliminate the Climate Hub Office and withdraw from climate change agreements that are inimical to the prosperity of the United States.”

What do these chapters mean for higher education?

Academic work on climate change would take a hit.  Furchtgott-Roth calls for a major climate science cut: “The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.” (664, also 674) Why?  NOAA is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.” (675) Faculty, staff, and students who rely on NOAA would lose out.

International collaboration and study would also suffer in one way. Gilman blames academia for improving one strategic adversary’s technology capacities: “technology transfer on a massive scale has occurred because of adversaries’ exploitation of the U.S.’s open economy and education system through both commercial transactions and university and government research programs” (671).  In response, a new administration should “[t]ighten… the definition of ‘fundamental research’ to address exploitation of the open U.S. university system by authoritarian governments through funding, students and researchers, and recruitment” (673). In other words, academic research and teaching would fall under closer government scrutiny and, presumably, the threat of sanctions.

Moreover, the Treasury discussion calls for the creation of a new academic unit:

Treasury should examine creating a school of financial warfare jointly with DOD. If the U.S. is to rely on financial weapons, tools, and strategies to prosecute international defensive and offensive objectives, it must create a specially trained group of experts dedicated to the study, training, testing, and preparedness of these deterrents. (704)

There are no further details about such a financial war school. I can imagine some academics engaging with it in various ways: university professors becoming faculty or administration, undergraduates heading to FinWar.edu for graduate school, research partnerships, internships, etc.  Business and economics departments would be foremost here.

Reflections

As we’ve seen in our reading so far, Project 2025 is well edited to maintain consistent themes. This week’s chapters continue such persistent lines of thought as reducing federal spending, leaning into new technologies, undoing Biden-era equity measures, ditto for climate change, opposing China on multiple levels, and having loyal people ready to put into leadership roles (for example, “identifying a fully vetted roster of candidates to assume all key positions at VA well ahead of formal nominations”, 652).

Leaning into new tech is partly to improve governmental operations as well as to increase American technological capacities, as when Gilman asks for a new administration to do more with commercial space work. (677) The Treasury authors celebrate technology in one area: “history shows that economic growth and technological/scientific advance through human ingenuity are by far the best ways to prevent and mitigate extreme weather events.” (709)

On a personal level, I find reaching 700+ pages of this to be… draining and depressing. I can see so much human and natural wreckage occurring should a second Trump administration implement these recommendations.  Some of that hits my family, friends, and close colleagues. I try to write these posts with a sense of dispassionate analysis and inquiry, but at times it’s hard to do so.

Questions

1. How would the policy changes expressed in this week’s chapters impact your professional and personal lives?
2. Do you see Trump as likely to attempt what this week’s reading describes?
3. How might the world change if these global policies take effect?
4. If you oppose what these three chapters call for, what opposition strategy and tactics would best resist it?
5. Having read this far, what do you anticipate from the rest of the book?

Resources

• Defeat Project 2025 has some good resources, including biographies of contributors and quick summaries of issues.

…and that’s it for this week’s reading.  For next Monday, September 9, we’ll read further into “The Economy,” pages 717-823.

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.  A hearty thanks to all readers and commentators.