Ever since Jimmy Carter signed the law creating the Department of Education, Republicans have wanted to dismantle it and destroy the progress created by it. Project 2025 devotes over 40 pages to the Department of Education. That section starts off with: “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated” (p. 319). Early on, Project 2025 quotes Milton Friedman’s recommendation from 1955, “wherein education is publicly funded but education decisions are made by families” (p. 319).

America in the mid-2020s should not take 70-year-old conservative guidance based on opposing Brown v. Board of Education (1954) school integration. Republican opposition to the Department of Education is about integration, having children attend school with children who are different from them, racially, ethnically, economically, or in terms of gender. As a student who attended public school after integration, I saw incredible value in what the Republican Party wants to avoid: interacting with people from different backgrounds and beliefs than I and my family held.

Project 2025 then moves to the long-term Republican goal, taking public school funding and giving it directly to parents. They couch this in terms of freedom, but the real goal is to underfund public education so that the public schools are no longer functional.

For higher education, Project 2025 also looks to gut student loan programs, making it harder for lower- and middle-income students to attend college. It advocates canceling federal loan programs for students in any state where schools provide in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants. Under this proposal, students in 25 states and the District of Columbia would not be able to access federal loan programs because of a state policy of inclusion (Mandate for Leadership, p. 167; The People’s Guide to Project 2025, p. 38).

Project 2025 calls for regulations to “require the Secretary of Education to allocate at least 40 percent of funding to international business programs that teach about free markets and economics and require institutions, faculty, and fellowship recipients to certify that they intend to further the stated statutory goals of serving American interests” (p. 356). This is a direct attack on the concept of academic freedom and diversion of a huge percentage of funding to one subject (business and economics), pulling it from the arts, sciences, and other essential subjects. They want to dictate what universities teach and what professors believe.

These ideas have been at the core of the Republican Party for decades. Trump denies being involved in Project 2025, though many of its authors worked for him before and would likely work for him again, but he cannot plausibly deny that the goal of the Republican Party has long been to shutter the Department of Education and separate us by race and creed, force loyalty oaths on professors, and to indoctrinate instead of educate.

This is not the direction a free country should take. We are not going back!