Class Dismissed: Project 2025's Education Endgame Arrives [View all]

https://globalextremism.org/post/project-2025-december-4th-update/



Lindsey Burke ran the Heritage Foundation’s education policy center for 17 years, writing papers, testifying before Congress, and pushing for the dismantling of federal involvement in schools. In 2021, she co-authored a paper calling for “allowing families an escape hatch from government schools pushing an agenda that runs counter to their values, like critical race theory and ‘transgender ideology.'” When Representative Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) asked her at a House Education Committee hearing in April 2024 whether she supported the Department of Education, Burke leaned into the microphone: “No — dissolve it.”

Fourteen months later, with Trump in office, she joined the agency as deputy chief of staff for policy and programs. On November 18, Burke led the briefing announcing six interagency agreements that move billions of dollars in education programs to four other federal agencies. The 44-page chapter she wrote for Project 2025 declared that the department “should be eliminated.” She is now overseeing that work from the inside.

The Trump administration is executing Project 2025’s vision for federal education by dismantling the Department of Education. Already, Title I funding for low-income students has moved to the Labor Department, and Native American education has shifted to the Interior. After eliminating half the agency’s workforce since January, Education Secretary Linda McMahon has imploded her department in what she calls a “hard reset.” Congress, which alone has the constitutional authority to abolish a cabinet department, has yet to act — leaving millions of students, educators, and nonprofits caught between a policy manifesto and an uncertain future.

Burke’s chapter provided the roadmap. “The next Administration will need a plan to redistribute the various congressionally approved federal education programs across the government,” she wrote, “eliminate those that are ineffective or duplicative, and then eliminate the unproductive red tape and rules by entrusting states and districts with flexible, formula-driven block grants.” The November 18 agreements follow her Project 2025 directives almost verbatim. The Labor Department assumes operational control of most K-12 and postsecondary programs. Health and Human Services absorbs child care and foreign medical accreditation. The State Department inherits international education and foreign language studies.

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