Last spring and summer, The Fulcrum published a 30-part series on Project 2025. Now that Donald Trump’s second term has started, Part 2 of the series has commenced.
As I wrote in these pages last June, a leading indicator of our future prospects as a society is revealed by the size and scope of our current ambitions to educate the next generation. Not only is there demonstrable evidence that investments in education yield superb returns, but the broad economic consensus is that a more educated population produces higher GDP/capita largely through superior innovation, and more broad-based access to education lowers future safety net costs.
Less than two weeks after the release of new federal testing data showed that reading achievement is at historic lows, the New York Times reports that Elon Musk’s cost-cutting initiative announced $900 million of cuts at the Education Department, apparently aimed at hobbling the Institute of Education Sciences—the department’s research arm. In addition to terminating 89 contracts, 29 grants associated with diversity and equity were also axed.
Further, according to numerous sources, President Donald Trump may soon sign an executive order directing the secretary of education to dismantle the federal Department of Education, according to sources briefed on drafts of the order that have circulated among top administration officials.
Since closing the agency would require congressional approval, the new administration has clearly already begun the work of shrinking the agency and its budget, placing scores of employees on administrative leave, and as it is doing in other federal departments, attempting to induce education department employees to quit.
Nonetheless, at this juncture, it remains unclear how Trump’s education secretary choice, Linda McMahon, would handle plans to close the department and reallocate its functions. Assuming she gets confirmed, she will face the reality that a bill in the Senate to shut down the department would likely fail without the necessary 60 votes. It is also unclear how detailed the upcoming executive order will be. According to the Project 2025 blueprint, the agency should try to move various functions to other federal departments, but which pieces might land in which department is anyone’s guess at this point.
Given the poor and declining Americans’ educational rankings, it seems inarguable that reform is mandatory. But reform comes in different varieties and, historically, some have achieved swift and deep transformations. Think of how George C. Marshall, who served as chief of staff of the Army during World War II, was subsequently given the task of reforming the military after WWII by then-President Eisenhower. As David Brooks outlined in a recent piece, “Marshall used his vast skills to overhaul much of the stifling traditionalism that would stultify his institution.”
The dilemma is that the Trump team is made up of anti-institutionalists who are intent on tearing down structures, not reforming them. Considering that the U.S. education system’s performance has been nothing short of abysmal, it is a transformational revival and not a demolition that is warranted. My sense of a renewed DOE mission would focus on unleashing the innovative power of state and local programs. Key supporting objectives might include: ambitious but realistic target setting, funding and supporting local and state innovation and research, supercharging winning programs, and promulgating best practices across states. Given the current crisis in accessibility, ensuring educational equity would be an additional important objective.
The ironic, yet tragic, aspect of the first cuts announced yesterday is that they take aim at the very measuring stick used to identify such successful programs. For example, one of the programs cut is the What Works Clearinghouse, which produces and curates research on best practices in education. By shuttering the Institute of Education Sciences’ portfolio, including Education Innovation and Research grants, picking the winning programs from the various laboratories on the ground in the 50 states becomes impossible.
According to Chester E. Finn Jr., who served under President Ronald Reagan as the Education Department’s assistant secretary for research and improvement, the federal government has taken a leadership role in collecting data on education—and highlighting best practices—since the 1860s. Dr. Finn compared education research to medical research, pointing out that there is no equivalent to the role pharmaceutical companies play as a private sector funding source. Education research, he said, “is arguably the oldest and most central function of the federal government in education.”
Unsurprisingly, Democrats on Capitol Hill condemned the cuts. Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, was quoted as saying, “An unelected billionaire is now bulldozing the research arm of the Department of Education—taking a wrecking ball to high-quality research and basic data we need to improve our public schools.”
As most economists agree, the development of our collective human capital is a public good, meaning returns on its investment not only accrue to the individual but spill over to society as a whole. Like all public goods, left alone, this dynamic results in structural underinvestment. But rebuilding and reorienting is hard work, certainly more challenging than demolishing.
It is no wonder there are a thousand critics for every playwright.
Samples of Phase 1 articles about Project 2025
- A cross-partisan approach
- An Introduction
- Rumors of Project 2025’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
- Department of Education
- Managing the bureaucracy
- Department of Defense
- Department of Energy
- The Environmental Protection Agency
- Education Savings Accounts
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- The Department of Homeland Security
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Affirmative action
- A federal Parents' Bill of Rights
- Department of Labor
- Intelligence community
- Department of State
- Department of the Interior
- Federal Communications Commission
- A perspective from Europe
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Voting Rights Act
- Another look at the Federal Communications Commission
- A Christo-fascist manifesto designing a theocracy
- Voters oppose the far-right playbook
- The Schedule F threat to democracy
- The Department of Justice
- A blueprint for Christian nationalist regime change
- How anti-trans proposals could impact all families
- The Federal Reserve
- A threat to equitable education
Seth David Radwell is the author of “American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation ” and serves on the Advisory Councils at Business for America, RepresentUs, and The Grand Bargain Project. This is the second entry in a 10-part series on the American Schism in 2025.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.