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And now, on to the fourth installment on Project 2025.
I spoke with Project 2025 director Paul Dans, and asked him what kind of misconceptions people have about Project 2025.
Dans said: “The whole demagoguing of the thing is really kind of a pathetic exercise by the left in the sense that Joe Biden obviously doesn’t have any economy to run on. He’s running from it. And to kind of come after a bunch of public policy nerds and say that they’re building an authoritarian state is laughable.”
Ultimately, Project 2025 comes down to a political science concept known as unitary executive theory, in which the entirety of the executive branch, more than two million people (including the independent Department of Justice), would be controlled by one person, the president.
Kevin Roberts, the director of the Heritage Foundation, said in an interview with The New York Times Magazine that Heritage doesn’t just “agree” with unitary executive theory, they believe it’s the proper constitutional understanding of government.
He also said he doesn’t believe Joe Biden won the 2020 election. And that the authoritarian leader of Hungary, Viktor Orban, is admirable. (Orban believes in the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory and is openly a Christian nationalist.)
And in an interview with the Telegraph, Roberts said that Joseph McCarthy – and his reign of terror in the United States in which he corruptly ruined people’s lives, caused the suicide of closeted gays, and was secretly brought down by Dwight Eisenhower himself – got it right. In the NYTM, Roberts said that McCarthy’s motivation was good, even if some of his tactics were wrong.
I asked Paul Dans to describe Project 2025 to someone who didn’t know.
He said, “[Project 2025] wants to make sure that we’re ready to assist and take back the federal government in a way that returns it to the people and takes it away from what we now see as this permanent government in Washington, this administrative state that’s really, in essence, anti-democratic.”
It’s the view of Project 2025 that people who are hired because of merit, and go through the normal HR process to get their jobs, are not part of the democratic process. That what is democratic is politicizing these positions – which studies have found are more than 99% not political – and placing them under control of the president. The thinking is that the president is democratically elected, and thus, it’s more democratic if the people of civil service serve at the pleasure of the president.
Dans referenced how the federal government needs to be right-sized, citing the image of Elon Musk showing up to Twitter on day one carrying a sink and firing 80% of his workers, and “X still hums along today.”
But no one has been able to answer the question on my mind: what if a president wants their employees to do something illegal?
Dans immediately brushes this off, asserting that the Constitution gives all the executive power to the president.
But it actually doesn’t say that. It says that executive power shall be vested in a president, and later on in Article II, the Constitution says it is one of the jobs of the president to see that laws are faithfully executed.
When Congress passes laws like, “Make sure planes don’t hit each other in the sky,” they also use their lawmaking power to create and fund executive agencies who help create rules to uphold the law.
It’s part of a president’s job to faithfully execute the law, not to tell civil servants what the law is.
But I want to transition for a moment and talk about how Project 2025 views educators in the United states. Put simply, they don’t think much.
They say that the Department of Education is a “one stop shop for the woke education cartel, which is not particularly concerned with children’s education.”
They say that the next Department of Education secretary will have a lot to do, “hopefully culminating in the department’s closure.”
Student loans and grants should be eliminated, the responsibility relegated to the private sector.
And I found something curious on page 323 of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership. This is one of the Heritage Foundation’s stated principles when it comes to education: “Stopping executive overreach. Congress should set policy—not Presidents through pen-and-phone executive orders.”
Come again now? We shouldn’t have executive overreach? Isn’t that like… exactly the opposite of the unitary executive theory set forth in much of the rest of the document? So a president should be able to set policy when it comes to everything but education? I’m confused — Project 2025 is openly contradicting its stated principles.
I did find something that I, and most educators I know, would agree with. Project 2025 wants to reduce bureaucratic red tape and make it so educators can spend more time educating.
They cite one report that estimates that school staff (support staff, administration, and classroom educators) spend 50 million hours nationwide on paperwork just to get their federal education funding.
Freeing up the time of educators to actually do what they do best? I’m all for that.
Project 2025 calls the National Education Association (the largest teacher’s union in the country), a “radical special interest group” who should have its Congressional charter removed. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, nearly 70% of teachers belong to a union.
Calling educators the “woke education cartel” and a “radical special interest group,” when the overwhelming majority are working for a paltry sum under incredibly challenging conditions for the sole reason of caring about children is a slap in the face.
As a longtime classroom teacher, this is a topic with which I am intimately familiar.
The plan also calls for eliminating Public Service Loan Forgiveness and for taxpayer money being sent directly to private schools, including private religious schools.
Gutting public education is disrespectful to educators, because teacher working conditions are student learning conditions.
When you disrespect educators, you disrespect the children they teach.
There is no army of highly qualified teachers waiting in the wings, just crossing their fingers for tens of thousands of positions to open up when existing employees exit the profession from a lack of support and resources.
Listen, the proposals Project 2025 puts forward are sweeping. I’ve only covered about 25% of what is in this document, and we’re on our 4th installment.
I would love to hear from you in the comments: do you want more installments? Or are you at the point where you feel like, “I’ve seen what I needed to see, I get it, thank you.” We’re in this together. I want to make sure this newsletter is delivering content that is valuable to you.
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