TrumpED 2025: School Choice Corporatization, Social Impact Finance, and the Dismantling of the Department of Education
In alignment with Project 2025, Trump pledges to eliminate the Dpt. of Ed and replace it with “school choice.”
President Donald Trump has publicly stated, “I know nothing about Project 2025,” and “I have nothing to do with Project 2025. . . . I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it purposely. I’m not going to read it.” Trump has also averred, “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying, and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” Obviously, these statements are contradictory, for if Trump is truly oblivious to the machinations of Project 2025, then how can he honestly disavow its policies, especially if he didn’t actually read the official “Playbook,” Mandate for Leadership: Project 2025?
While contemplating the answer to this question, consider that Project 2025 contributor Russell Vought was recorded with a hidden camera which caught him saying that Trump’s public distancing from Project 2025 is merely a feint intended to deflect and placate his opponents in media and politics. Meanwhile, at least 29 Project 2025 contributors, including Project 2025 Director Paul Dans, have served under Trump in official positions across various levels during his first presidential administration.
Moving forward into Trump’s second term, many of his picks for high-level officials in his executive branch are Project 2025 contributors. These include Cabinet appointments, such as John Ratcliffe, who is the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Russell Vought, who is the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Other appointments include Tom Homan, who is Trump’s Border Czar, and Brendan Carr, who is the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Altogether, this constellation of Project 2025 contributors orbiting Trump indicates that his administration will be adopting at least some of the Project 2025 directives, such as the mass deportation operation already being carried out by Homan.
Concerning education policy, Trump has nominated Linda McMahon to serve as the Secretary of Education. While McMahon did not contribute to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation, which oversaw the publication of Project 2025, has been funded by America First Works Inc. where McMahon serves as a “Board Member” and a “Senior Advisor.” McMahon, like Trump’s previous Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, has led several non-profit corporations, such as America First Works Inc. and the America First Policy Institute, which advocate for public-private “school choice” partnerships that are also championed in Project 2025.
In anticipation of her secretarial confirmation, McMahon has already met with multiple members of Congress, including Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), Senator Dave McCormick (R-PA), and Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), to get the ball rolling for corporatist school choice overhauls that align with Project 2025. Given McMahon’s pedigree, her nomination as Secretary of Education signals that the Trump administration will be going forward with Project 2025 plans for dismantling the Department of Education (ED) and expanding school choice corporatization.
Far from abolishing government control of schools, the Project 2025 plan to disband the ED would only restructure the bureaucracies involved in administering federal education entitlements. In the meantime, Project 2025’s school choice reforms, which include federal “Education Savings Accounts” (ESAs), will likely expand government control over private schools, including religious schools, and home schooling, while also publicly subsidizing ed-tech corporations. At the same time, Project 2025’s school choice tax credits are primed to expand the corporatization of education through public-private partnerships that leverage ed-tech to data-mine how “Pay for Success” (PFS) impact scholarships streamline student outcomes for the social credit economy of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR).
To be sure, as I have documented extensively in a litany of articles and my book, School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education, “school choice” is nothing more than a euphemism for an array of public-private partnerships that corporatize government education by funneling tax subsidies into private schools, charter school companies, and ed-tech businesses. Rather than foster curricular freedom independent of federal control, Project 2025’s menu of “school choices” is primed to restrict options to government-regulated private schools, charter edu-companies, and ed-tech corporations, or corporate-managed PFS scholarships, which data-mine students’ learning analytics for social credit commodification in the digital economy of the 4IR. In fact, key architects of Project 2025 are entrenched in the State Policy Network (SPN): an old swamp of neo-conservative and beltway-libertarian think tanks that has long been bankrolled by Koch Brothers philanthropy to push public-private “school choice” corporatization and social impact finance, which are integral to the planned stakeholder economy of the 4IR.
The Dpt. of Education Reorganization Act: Shuffling the Chalkboards on the Titanic
Mandate for Leadership: Project 2025 recommends that the Trump administration dissolve the ED by passing a “Department of Education Reorganization Act.” Trump himself has essentially concurred as he has pledged, “[o]ne other thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington D.C., and sending all education and education work and needs back to the states.” Keeping his promise, Trump is preparing to sign an executive order that “would shut down all functions of the department [of ED] that are not written explicitly into statute, or move certain functions to other departments,” according to Newsweek. In the meantime, the Department of Government Efficiency has cut nearly $1 billion worth of ED contracts and grants. Republican Congressmen have also introduced HR 369 and HR 899, which are bills to “[a]bolish” or “eliminat[e]” the ED.
While Trump may align with Project 2025’s plan to sunset the ED, whether he knows it or not, doing so by itself would not return “all education . . . back to the states.” Rather than terminate the government’s control of education, axing the ED by itself would only reshuffle the bureaucracies in charge of schools as the federal entitlements provided under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the Higher Education Act (HEA), the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) would still remain. Unless the Trump administration were to also pass bills to repeal the ESEA, the HEA, IDEA, and WIOA, the mandates for administering federal education entitlements would merely be shifted to other government departments. In fact, such a reallocation of federal education entitlements through a “reorganization” of government bureaucracies is precisely what is laid out in Project 2025.
According to the Project 2025 Playbook, the proposed “Department of Education Reorganization Act” would transfer the bulk of federal education entitlements to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Labor (DOL) while transferring other entitlements to the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Department of Commerce (DOC), and the Department of State (DOS).
For examples:
The Office of Post-Secondary Education, which administers HEA entitlements, would be transferred to HHS.
The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, which administers IDEA entitlements, would be transferred to HHS.
The Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education, which administers WIOA entitlements, would be transferred to the DOL.
The Office for Civil Rights, which enforces Title IX of the ESEA and HEA Amendments of 1972, would be transferred to the DOJ.
The Institute of Education Sciences, which oversees the Regional Educational Laboratories provided under Title IV of the ESEA, would be transferred to the Census Bureau of the DOC.
Programs that are “important to national security” would be transferred to the DOS.
In these ways, Project 2025’s “Department of Education Reorganization Act” would actually expand, rather than diminish, government reaches into education as five different federal agencies, rather than a single department, would be permitted authority over school systems. Meanwhile, the ED “employees whose positions are determined to be essential to the mission would move with their constituent programs” to the newly appointed departments, so much of the bureaucratic personnel will remain the same.
At the same time, by yoking education to HHS and the DOL, Project 2025’s restructuring of the ED would basically revert the federal bureaucracy into a system that hearkens back the days of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), which implemented centralized “Planning, Programming, and Budgeting Systems (PPBS)” as the precursor to the ED and HHS. Whereas the 1979 “Department of Education Organization Act” broke up HEW and upgraded its Office of Education into the ED while upgrading its Offices of Health and Welfare into HHS, Project 2025’s “Department of Education Reorganization Act” would merely shift the Offices of the ED back to HHS and other departments, such as the DOL, which administers “Welfare-to-Work” grants. In brief, Project 2025’s disassembling of the ED would bundle together federal health and education bureaucracies under the same department of HHS, like they were bundled together under the same department of HEW, while other departments, such as the DOL, would administer school-to-work along with welfare-to-work programs.
In sum, the Project 2025 plan to dismantle the ED is just another contrivance to refurbish the labyrinth of federal bureaucracies which has always systematically reduced school learning outcomes to an aggregate of mental health and workforce competencies that determine student placement in the “human capital” supply chain of America’s planned economy. By scattering federal education entitlements to HHS and the DOL, data-tracking of students’ mental health and career pathways outcomes would be streamlined by HHS and the DOL respectively, thus magnifying the medicalization and corporatization of government schooling. In this redistributed bureaucracy, HHS and the DOL would also track student health and career outcomes linked with PFS scholarships subsidized by the school choice tax credits proposed in Project 2025.
School Choice, Social Impact Investing, and Government Control of Private, Religious, and Home Schools
There should be no doubt that Trump will greenlight the school choice reforms laid out in Project 2025. From his prior appointment of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, to his current nominations of Linda McMahon and Penny Schwinn for Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Ed respectively, Trump has consistently staffed the ED with champions of school choice. Picking up where his first term left off, President Trump has proclaimed that “universal school choice,” which is advocated in Project 2025, will be a cornerstone of his “Agenda 47” policy platform. Making good on his promise, Trump has signed Executive Order 14191 (“Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunity for Families”), which directs the Secretaries of Education and Labor to formulate “discretionary grant programs to expand education freedom” while directing the Secretary of HHS to formulate “block grants . . . to expand educational choice . . . , including private and faith-based options.”
The universal school choice reforms of Agenda 47 and Project 2025 will crest on the wave of Republican-led school choice bills that were legislated throughout 2023, which was dubbed the “Year of Educational Choice” after twenty states added or expanded school choice subsidies. Three more states joined the trend during the following election year of 2024. Preparing for the federal legislative sessions of 2025, Republican Governors, such as Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and Texas Governor Greg Abbott, paved the way for the passage of universal school choice bills by ousting 2024 Congressional candidates, whether incumbents or challengers, who would not pledge to go along with school choice reforms.
Now, with a Trump victory and a Republican mandate, there is an open lane for the Project 2025 expansion of school choice privatization through the deregulation of charter school corporations; the authorization of ESAs for dispersing ESEA Title I funds; and the subsidization of “Scholarship Granting Organizations” (SGOs) with federal tax credits provided under the “Educational Choice for Children Act” (ECCA). Taking the open lane, Trump has already gotten the Project 2025 ball rolling by convening a National School Choice Week Roundtable where he hosted Republican governors, including Lee and Abbott’s Lieutenant Governor Daniel Patrick, advising them on how they can capitalize on the school choice grants pending from his new EO 14191.
While the Project 2025 Playbook calls for “lessen[ing] the federal restrictions on charter schools,” the Playbook places a more ambitious emphasis on instituting ESAs and tax credits that funnel government subsidies not only into charter school companies, but also private schools, including religious schools, and home schools as well. To be sure, while both the ESA and tax-credit proposals of Project 2025 would siphon public tax dollars into private corporations, each entails different implications for expanding either the corporatization of public education or the federal regulation of private, religious, and homeschools. In particular, ESAs could expand the regulatory reaches of the federal government while the tax credits proposed by Project 2025 are primed to streamline “Pay for Success” (PFS) impact investments that turn profits based on whether student health and career outcomes conform to benchmarks standardized by ESG and other social credit indexes.
Concerning the prospects of ESAs, Project 2025 calls for a portion of each student’s ESEA Title I funding to be allocated for “education savings accounts . . . that parents can use to pay for personal tutors, education therapists, books and curricular materials, private school tuition, transportation and more.” Based on these stipulations, such ESA stipends could be used to subsidize not only “private school[s],” but also Big Tech corporations through the purchase of ed-tech products which are integral to the ubiquitous data-mining and omnipresent AI that are imperative in driving the social credit economy of the 4IR. For examples:
ESA funds for “curricular materials” could be used to buy Skinnerian adaptive-learning courseware, such as Clever and Knewton, which have been financed by Peter Thiel, along with Dreambox and Brightspace LeaP, all of which data-mine students’ cognitive-behavioral psychometrics.
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