As America counts down the days until November, Project 2025 is capturing widespread attention, and raising concerns about its potential impact on three pillars: education, public health and the economy. Some fear the agenda targets black, female, and LGBTQ+ communities.
Voters have much to consider before heading to the polls and ballot boxes to choose their next president. The emergence of the political text titled, “Project 2025” in particular has rocked the nation.
The 900-page document organized by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that promotes public policy, guides a future conservative administration.
The foundation’s goal is to promote policy based on free enterprise, traditional American values, and a strong national defense, according to the organization’s website.
While the battle for the Oval Office has kept tensions high, many have brought attention to the Project 2025 agenda for education, public health, and the economy.
Many Americans have pushed back against the project’s objectives, in part due to its projected outcomes on marginalized groups.
Before dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, President Joe Biden criticized Project 2025 at a campaign rally on July 12. The crowd booed as Biden began to speak about the agenda.
He described Project 2025 as the biggest attack on America’s system of government and the personal freedoms of Americans.
Project 2025 wants to ban teachings of critical race theory and gender ideology, defund abortion programs, and eradicate DEI and climate programs from the Department of the Treasury .
With the help of a coalition of over 100 conservative organizations, Project 2025 is an extension of the foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership”: a series of books that have influenced presidential administrations for the past four decades.
The Project 2025 website reported that the Trump administration utilized two-thirds of the proposals in the Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate” within a year of his term for policy guidance.
The project’s agendas for the three pillars represent its overarching goal to “address and reform the failings of big government and an undemocratic administrative state.”
The term “big government” refers to the amount of power the federal government holds over the people.
The document expressed a desire to cut the Department of Education and allocate its educational programs to other governmental agencies.
The Department of Education is a cabinet-level agency that enforces Title XI policies to prevent discrimination in education and coordinates financial assistance.
Project 2025 suggests that the Office for Civil Rights (OCR)—the department that enforces Title XI—be moved to the Department of Justice.
With this, the agenda wants to tweak the OCR’s data collection quotas, by eliminating the “non-binary” sex category within the organization’s gender research.
The document’s written desire for “academic freedom” is shown through a variety of proposed changes to be made within classrooms. This includes the rejection of teaching gender ideology and critical race theory.
Dr. Ayana Best is a professor in the department of political science at Howard University. She believes Project 2025’s plan to eliminate critical race theory from American curriculums is “coded language” for “eliminating the tolerance of cultures and histories of marginalized groups in this country.”
“Eliminating the knowledge about civil rights movements, feminist movements, immigrant rights and LGBTQ movements only further marginalizes these groups and allows for the continuation of systems of violence and oppression towards these communities,” Best said.
She explained that Project 2025 will create an unsafe learning environment for students of color, queer, and female students, as the agenda “would create a revisionist history that states that marginalized communities don’t matter and render their struggles for full citizenship invisible.”
Under Project 2025, public educational employees or contractors are not allowed to use a student’s preferred gender pronouns if it does not match the student’s biological sex at birth, without written permission from a parent or guardian.
Educators and contractors will not be required to use pronouns that do not match a person’s biological sex if it goes against their religious or moral convictions.
Da’Quan Cooney, a junior musical theater major and the president of CASCADE, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group on Howard University’s campus, shared his thoughts on the project.
“The removal of critical race theory and gender ideology in secondary education limits the knowledge of future generations of how to be progressive, and it kind of sets us back,” Cooney said.
Cooney also reflected on activism in the past, and the effects that Project 2025 will have on America’s social progression.
“Our predecessors have fought so much for us to gain these rights, and to be able to learn the information that we’re learning to be progressive,” he said. “I think one of the negative effects of Project 2025 is that we are essentially going back in time.”
In a speech addressing the American Federation of Teachers Conference on July 25, Democratic presidential nominee and the current vice president, Kamala Haris said, “Project 2025 is a plan to return America to a dark past.”
This remark referred to past economic policies such as trickle-down economics and union busting.
Harris also asserted to the audience of teachers, “while you teach students about our nation’s past, these extremists attack the freedom to learn and acknowledge our nation’s true and full history, including book bans.”
Jenich Manhertz, a senior criminology and political science double major and president of Black Girls Vote, described Project 2025’s educational agenda as a “broad coverup.”
“If we put this kind of broad coverup over education, we will see a lot of changes in how education is utilized in democracy and how democracy utilizes education,” Manhertz said.
She also gave her predictions about what the future could look like under Project 2025.
“I think we will see a lot of dangerous ideologies coming, and I definitely think it will change the perception on how children or even just people our age view the government,” she said.
Project 2025 also addresses public health, specifically its grievances with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
CDC is a national health organization overseen by HHS, and is characterized as incompetent by Project 2025.
The conservative agenda accuses the CDC of botching the development of COVID tests, placing two years of interference and regulations over American life.
According to Project 2025, the CDC’s legal authorities should be limited, meaning that it should act as a national health agency rather than a medical institution.
The document states that the CDC should not have the authority to say that children should wear masks and be vaccinated.
The agenda also states that the CDC should not promote abortion as public health care, or promote programs that “do not respect human life and conscience rights that undermine family formation.”
Proponents of Project 2025 also want HHS to prohibit both abortion travel funding, and cut off Medicaid funds for Planned Parenthood and all other abortion providers.
Project 2025 states that the CDC should be sure that “it corrects and does not promote misinformation regarding the comparative health and psychological benefits of childbirth versus the health and psychological risks of intentionally taking a human life through abortion.”
The Department of Treasury is another federal agency that Project 2025 aims to reform. The document claims that the department has lost its way due to a “woke agenda.”
Project 2025 calls to remove the Treasury’s Advisory Committee on Racial Equity, and the Office for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility—housed within the Advisory on Racial Equity.
Proponents of Project 2025 want to eradicate any practice of critical race theory DEI through the Department of Treasury because they believe that “equity” initiatives favor certain ethnicities over others. This includes the 25-member Treasury Advisory Committee on Racial Equity.
The “Climate Hub” is a departmental office of the Treasury that Project 2025 also criticizes.
The conservative agenda asserts that the Climate Hub is detrimental to the economic prosperity of America, and the next administration should invest in domestic energy, including oil and gas.
Despite the Heritage Foundation’s historical influence on presidential administrations, Project 2025 is not partisan. In a Michigan campaign speech, former President Donald Trump said he knew nothing about Project 2025, calling some of its ideas “seriously extreme.”
While Project 2025 does not speak for any candidate or campaign, all three of the project’s directors previously served in Trump’s administration.
Paul Dans, director of Project 2025, previously served as the Chief of Staff at the U.S Office of Personnel Management. Spencer Chretien and Troupe Hemenway, associate directors for Project 2025, both served as associate directors for the Office of Presidential Personnel.
Copy edited by Camiryn Stepteau
