As he worked, over the past few weeks, to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Donald Trump announced that Senator J.D. Vance would be his running mate for the 2024 presidential election. Likewise, since his nomination, Vance has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, even though a month ago he posted about writing the foreword for the President of the Heritage Foundation Kevin Roberts’ new book, calling it “a bold vision for the future of conservatism in America.” The 900+ page Project 2025, titled Mandate for Leadership, takes aim at a plethora of democratic institutions and ideas, and over the course of the next few months, I will explore some of these. I can’t tackle everything because I do not have the expertise of time, but I want to provide some information on some of the topics, namely education, homeland security, and others, to inform you about what is at stake this November.

While many people say that The Heritage Foundation is not a legislative body and that the Trump administration would not have to take their guidance, it is worth noting that during Trump’s previous term the foundation boasted that his administration, as of 2018, enacted 64% of the policies they laid out in a blueprint for the Trump administration. As well, we know that six of Trump former cabinet secretaries, four individuals who nominated as ambassadors, at least 140 people who worked in his administration, and others connected with his administration worked on Project 2025, making Trump’s claims of not knowing anything about the project absurd.

Project 2025 contains a myriad of plans to dismantle democracy by expanding the power and reign of the executive branch. Numerous outlets have covered this, so I don’t want to do that here. Instead, I want to drill down, over the course of several posts scattered from here till November, on specific policy issues, and I want to start by looking at Lindsey Burke’s section on the Department of Education (DOE). The chapter covers a litany of issues covering P-12 education and higher education. At its core, though, Project 2025 seeks to dismantle the DOE. Roberts, in the project’s foreword, writes that the next administration “should promote educational opportunities outside the woke-dominated system of public schools and universities, including trade schools, apprenticeship programs, and student-loan alternatives that fund students’ dreams instead of Marxist academics.” While I agree that we need more trade schools and apprenticeship programs, what does he mean by the promotion of “educational opportunities outside the woke-dominated system” and providing “student-loan alternatives.”

Burkett covers these in her chapter on the DOE, and I want to focus, specifically, on what these “student-loan alternatives” would entail. Part of this focus has to do with the college accreditation system, the system that assures that colleges and universities maintain educational standards in their curriculum. Project 2025 seeks to make accreditation voluntary instead of mandatory and tying all of this to Title IV of the 1965 Higher Education Act (HEA) which is the section of the HEA that provides financial assistance to students and families acquiring a postsecondary education. By untethering Title IV from accreditation, Project 2025 seeks to “[p]rotect the sovereignty of the states to decide governance and leadership” instead of having federal agencies “intruding upon the governance of state-supported educational institutions.” As well, they argue that this linkage hinder “faith-based institutions” (which I will discuss in another post).

The move to voluntary accreditation would also lead to a shift in student loans overall. Instead of providing students with access to federal student loans, Project 2025 calls upon a new administration to privatize “all lending programs, including subsidized, unsubsidized, and PLUS loans” while maintaining Pell grants. This move, Burke writes, “would allow for market prices and signals to influence educational borrowing, introducing consumer-driven accountability into higher education.” Essentially, it would create a market system where the private companies would determine the loan amount, interest rates, repayment plans, and more. Thus, it would drastically limit who has access to higher education.

There are numerous differences between federal loans provided by the government and privatized loans. With federal loans, students do not begin repayment until graduation or six months after they leave a school, but a students, with a private loan, may have to make payments on the loan while still in school. Along with this, interest rates vary. The interest rates on federal loans remain fixed and are lower, in most cases, than private loans. Federal loans provide subsidies, where the government pays the interest on the loan while the student is in school while private loans, for the most part, are unsubsidized. Federal loans can be consolidated while priavte loans can’t be consolidated. Most importantly, federal loans can be forgiven while private loans can’t.

Project 2025 seeks to eliminate loan forgiveness in any form. The Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program provides loan forgiveness for indivduals who work 10 years in public or non-profit organizations. Project 2025 seeks to terminate the program because it, as Burke writes, “prioritizes government and public sector work over private sector employment.” The issue with this thinking, of course, is that private sector employees with college degrees make more than public sector workers. (You can see 2022 comparisons at the Congressional Budget Office.) Programs such as PSLF have a positive impact on the economy, and could, according to the White House, “increase consumption by several billions of dollars each year in the next five to ten years” because, as I can attest, individuals will not live paycheck to paycheck having to repay exorbitant student loan amounts.

The student-loan crisis has not always existed. It really started in the late 1960s while Ronald Reagan was governor of California and exploded under his presidential administration in the 1980s. Reagan’s move towards more student loans was a response to protests in California during the late 1960s and to the start of Black Studies and Chicano Studies departments. As David Love points out, “California Gov. Ronald Reagan fired the first shot by cutting funding to the University of California system and then for the first time making in-state students pay tuition as well as fees, as part of an effort to politicize education and make it a wedge issue.” He did this to squash the Free Speech Movement, Vietnam War protests, protests for racial equity, the founding of organizations such as the Black Panther Party on campuses, and more.

Regan’s impetus for having in-state students pay for higher eductaion, and thus take out student loans, was a way to curtail academic freedom and expression, the same ploy that Project 2025 seeks to do. By limiting access to higher education, Project 2025, just as Reagan’s administration sought to do, wants to ensure control over thought and ensure access to learning. Roger Freeman, Reagan’s education advisor, said as much when he stated, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college]. If not, we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people.” Freeman and others fear an educated populace, and this fear did not start with them or with Project 2025, but if the role of education is to instruct individuals in citizenship and to foster a lifelong engagement with the world around them, they why do individuals fear it so much? They fear it because an educated populace critically thinks about issues and pays attention.

I’ll pick up here in the next post, expanding upon the fear of an educated populace that Project 2025 contains throughout its plan for the DOE, specifically through its calls to overhaul Title IX investigations and eliminate DEI initiatives from higher education. What are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below, and make sure to follow me on Twitter at @silaslapham.