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.
