Bryan Alexander

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.

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 under the header we’ve been working through for three weeks, “The General Welfare,” found on pages 517-617.    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 comments at the end of our first post.

Summary overview

With this section the book turns to the Departments of the Interior (DOI), Justice (DOJ), and Labor (DOL).

William Perry Pendley, who ran the DOI’s Bureau of Land Management for the Trump administration, fiercely criticizes the department for being openly partisan (“A department that has twice engaged in covert domestic election interference and propaganda operations—the Russian collusion hoax in 2016 and the Hunter Biden laptop suppression in 2020—is a threat to the Republic”). To undo that alleged damage, Pendley would cut back the Endangered Species Act, remove Biden’s 30×30 conservation plan, give some Alaskan lands to development, reduce judicial reviews of some regulations, and turn over publicly held land for logging and other commercial uses.

Next, Gene Hamilton tackles the Department of Justice, urging it to redouble efforts against violent crime.  This can lead to DOJ intervening in local and state jurisdictions:

Where warranted and proper under federal law, [DOJ should] initiate legal action against local officials—including District Attorneys—who deny American citizens the “equal protection of the laws” by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions. This holds true particularly for jurisdictions that refuse to enforce the law against criminals based on the Left’s favored defining characteristics of the would-be offender (race, so-called gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) or other political considerations (e.g., immigration status).

He wants the FBI to focus more on international crime and immigration, ending any work on misinformation, and to launched an overall assessment of just about everything the FBI does.  International topics include strengthening the Mexico border and ramping up efforts against China, including relaunching the first Trump administration’s China Initiative. On more domestic matters, Hamilton wants the DOJ to step back from scrutinizing abortion protestors, to devote more resources to going after protestors opposing anti-abortion projects, and to block abortion pills sent through the mail. He also wants the department to do more about voter fraud and illegal immigrants.

The third chapter in this week’s reading, written by Jonathan Berry, covers not only the Department of Labor, but also “the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the National Mediation Board (NMB), the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS), and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC).”  It is also perhaps the most religiously themed section of Project 2025, starting off with this in its first paragraph: “The Judeo-Christian tradition, stretching back to Genesis, has always recognized fruitful work as integral to human dignity, as service to God, neighbor, and family.”  The chapter includes a call to firm up overtime pay for work on the Sabbath: “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest, and until very recently the Judeo-Christian tradition sought to honor that mandate by moral and legal regulation of work on that day.”

At the same time, the texts wants to make it easier for employers to pay less overtime otherwise, especially “in lower-cost regions (e.g., the southeast United States”. (592). As 25andme summarizes this last point:

As with other chapters we’ve read, this one would end DEI training, practice, and data gathering for these agencies, including by “[e]liminat[ing] disparate impact as a valid theory of discrimination for race and other bases under Title VII and other laws”. Similarly, it would roll back Biden-era gender regulations, asking for a new president to ” [r]escind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.”  It would also seek to restrict employers’ support for employees’ abortion access.  Berry wants to expand religious belief protections in the commercial sphere.  He would also give states the ability to sidestep federal labor rulings.

What does this mean for higher education?

The DOJ section asks for colleges and universities to play a role in the anti-China push:

key goals for the China Initiative that included development of an enforcement strategy concerning researchers in labs and universities who were being coopted into stealing critical U.S. technologies, identification of opportunities to address supply-chain threats more effectively, and education of colleges and universities about potential threats from Chinese influence efforts on campus.

Further, there’s a research angle for the DOJ, an anti-academic one: “The National Institute of Justice… should fund high-quality, unbiased research on the topics of greatest interest to everyday Americans and policymakers rather than agenda-driven research desired by advocates or academics.”

The Department of Labor section might apply to higher education by reducing overtime regulations. At a broader level Berry’s chapter wants to boost apprenticeships, mostly likely in competition with college and university study. (594-5) This section also calls on Congress to end college degree requirements for federal positions. (597)

Reflections

These chapters carry on some consistent themes from the rest of the book, namely undoing Biden-era DEI measures, opposing China, and stopping illegal immigration.

Once more there’s the contradiction between devolving federal authority to states and localities, while at the same time calling for more federal power – most notably in asking for the DOJ to intervene in local authorities’ actions.

Again I’m struck by the civics of Project 2025, the sheer detail and ambition of its efforts to revise government. This week includes an extensive amount of agency, policy, and legal wonkery.

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

• 25andme, How Will Project 2025 Affect Me? A very handy critical guide.
• “What Trump doesn’t want you to know about Project 2025” 
•  “Aftermath” (thanks to Chanda)

…and that’s it for this week’s reading.  For next Monday, September 2nd, we’ll finally conclude “The General Welfare” then dive into “The Economy,” all found on pages 619-715.

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.

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 under the header we’ve been working through for two weeks, “The General Welfare,” found on pages 417-516.    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 comments at the end of our first post.

Last week’s post, focused on Department of Education policy recommendations, elicited good conversation.  On Medium, Rob Vanwey argued that Project 2025’s education plan would reduce American research and teaching.

Summary overview

With this section the book turns to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),  the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Mandy M. Gunasekara begins her chapter on the EPA she once led by emphasizing what she sees as “the agency’s true function: protecting public health and the environment in cooperation with states.”
To this end, she would push some federal functions to states and local governments (“the primary role in making choices about the environment belongs to the people who live in it”) while adding political appointees to federal offices.

Gunasekara is strongly against climate action and the decarbonization agenda.  Here’s one sample passage:

Mischaracterizing the state of our environment generally and the actual harms reasonably attributable to climate change specifically is a favored tool that the Left uses to scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty-crushing regulations, diminished private property rights, and exorbitant costs.

Along those lines she would reduce support for electric vehicles and cut many climate regulations.  She also targets climate justice, calling for “eliminating the stand-alone Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights.”

There is some of Project 2025’s dislike of nonprofits in this chapter. For example, the text recommends this push away from both the federal government and nonprofits: “To the extent that the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)18 remains in place, ensure to the maximum extent possible that grants and funding are provided to state regulatory entities and not to nonprofits.”

The next chapter addresses the Department of Health and Human Services. Roger Severino, who once led its Office of Civil Rights, begins by drawing our attention to that division’s scope: “For good or ill, HHS activities personally impact the lives of more Americans than do those of any other federal agency.”  He later observes that “Medicare and Medicaid touch more American lives than does any other federal program.”

Severino charges HHS with being too concerned with social justice (in terms of race and gender), which he sees as leading to a life expectancy drop,

This chapter repeatedly makes clearly pro life, anti-LGBTQ+, and pro-nuclear family observations and recommendations.  For example, “From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth…Abortion and euthanasia are not health care.”  And “The Office of the Secretary should eliminate the HHS Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force and install a pro-life task force to ensure that all of the department’s divisions seek to use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children.” (489) The Centers for Disease Control plays a role here, as Severino would split CDC in two, then have one of the new entities gather detailed, national data about abortions.(455) He would withdraw federal approval for mifepristone and instruct the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to end fetal tissue work, while cutting Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood. (459-460; 471-2) A conservative administration should end regulations supporting same-sex couples from adopting children. (477)

On gender fluidity this chapter recalls the book’s introduction:

Radical actors inside and outside government are promoting harmful identity politics that replaces biological sex with subjective notions of “gender identity” and bases a person’s worth on his or her race, sex, or other identities. This destructive dogma, under the guise of “equity,” threatens American’s fundamental liberties as well as the health and well-being of children and adults alike.

Accordingly, Severino urges the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to undo pro-trans coverage support. (474) Interestingly, he backs more support for doulas. (486-7)

Severino specifically criticizes the Biden administration along these lines:

family policies and programs under President Biden’s HHS are fraught with agenda items focusing on “LGBTQ+ equity,” subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.

And “NIH has been at the forefront in pushing junk gender science.”

The chapter is openly for government support of religion: “how much risk mitigation is worth the price of shutting down churches on the holiest day of the Christian calendar and far beyond as happened in 2020? What is the proper balance of lives saved versus souls saved?”  Later, it asks for an HHS unit to “Protect faith-based grant recipients from religious liberty violations and maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family.”

Severino is very skeptical of drug companies, calling for more generics, yet also urging relaxation of some FDA rules.  He wants to reduce pharma influence on government work – for example,

The CDC and NIH Foundations, whose boards are populated with pharmaceutical company executives, need to be decommissioned. Private donations to these foundations—a majority of them from pharmaceutical companies—should not be permitted to influence government decisions about research funding or public health policy.

He wants to reform Medicare and Medicaid in great detail.  It looks to me that the plan is to make it harder for people to enroll for Medicaid,  easier for state governments to deny care, and for both services to reflect private insurance more closely, but I’m not sure, not having a good grasp on the regulations here. (cf 465-7)

Severino would flat out end Head Start.(482)

The third chapter is much, much shorter than the other two.  In it Ben Carson, Jr. very quickly takes on the department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Many of the points echo themes we’ve seen through Project 2025, just situated in the HUD context.  There’s a characterization of China as leading global opponent, which means HUD should watch for”foreign ownership of real estate in both rental and ownership markets of single-family and multifamily housing, with trillions worth of real estate secured across HUD’s portfolio.”  Anti-anti-racism means ending Biden-era housing equity work, as opposition to climate change entails “[r]epeal[ing] climate change initiatives,” which are unspecified.

Carson keeps going.  Immigration?  “The Office of the Secretary should recommence proposed regulation put forward under the Trump Administration that would prohibit noncitizens, including all mixed-status families, from living in all federally assisted housing.” Devolving federal power?  “Local welfare organizations, not the federal government, should step up to provide welfare for the housing of noncitizens.”  Supporting the nuclear family?  “Where admissible in regulatory action, HUD should implement reforms reducing the implicit anti-marriage bias in housing assistance programs.”  More political appointees in charge?  Of course.

What might these three chapters’ contents mean for higher education?

Reducing EPA research will impact some academic researchers, including faculty, stufents, and staff.  Cutting EPA grants would do more, with calls to “[r]epeal Inflation Reduction Act programs providing grants for environmental science activities” or this assertion: “grant funds produce little to no meaningful improvements in the environment and public health and instead fund questionably relevant projects at elite, private academic institutions that invariably produce radical environmental research.” As part of this crack down on EPA research we see the request for “a Science Adviser reporting directly to the Administrator in addition to a substantial investment (no fewer than six senior political appointees) charged with overseeing and reforming EPA research and science activities.”   Assuming that’s a political appointee, which should see further negative effects on academic work.

A push for transparency might make more federal data accessible to academic uses.  One passage actually uses the language of open source: “True transparency will be a defining characteristic of a conservative EPA. This will be reflected in all agency work, including the establishment of opensource [sic] science, to build not only transparency and awareness among the public, but also trust.”

On the HHS side, Severino issues a range of research restrictions, particularly along lines of gender and race.  Additionally, his chapter wants to shift some research support from the federal to state governments: “Congress should consider block granting NIH’s grants budget to states to fund their own scientific research.” (462)

The proposed HHS and HUD changes might increase the amount of human needs colleges and universities may be called upon to assist.  Faculty, staff, and students with less medical care, being more likely to be housing insecure, losing access to abortion and gender-affirming care, and more, may turn to our campuses for assistance.

Reflections

Project 2025’s culture war theme really comes through in these chapters. The authors critique and seek to undo Biden administration policies about race, gender, sexuality, climate change, and abortion. It’s noteworthy to see one chapter openly call for the government to express religious points of view.

We continue to see a mixed approached to federal power, wanting to reduce it through shifting functions to the states or localities, while at the same time seeking to increase federal authority and actions.  For example, Severino wants to devolve federal medical oversight (“States should be the primary regulators of the medical profession”) while also arguing for the federal government to extensively surveill abortion practices.

We also see the book’s preference for some science and technology.  The HHS chapter, for instance, wants to “[r]educe [Medicare and Medicaid] waste, fraud, and abuse, including through the use of artificial intelligence for their detection.” (463). The same section also hopes for this: “Each state should be induced to implement a high-tech, easy-to-use application to centralize child support payments.” (479)

Questions

1. How might academic institutions – and individual academics – respond to the humanitarian fallout from this section?
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 three 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?

Resources

None to add this time.

…and that’s it for this week’s reading.  For next Monday, August 26, we’ll steadfastly continue with “The General Welfare,” advancing to pages 517-617.

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.

PS: my apologies if this week’s installment is sketchy, but I’ve had an extremely busy week.  Hope to catch up with the next one.

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)