The ‘Project 2025’ push continues

Massie initiates the destruction of the Dept. of Education

As the Trump admin­is­tra­tion con­tin­ues its push to enact pro­vi­sions of Project 2025, anoth­er shoe dropped last week when Kentucky’s own Thomas Massie, 4^th District Congressional Representative, intro­duced House Resolution 899 to dis­man­tle the fed­er­al Department of Education. The res­o­lu­tion was co-spon­sored by 27 representatives—all Republicans.

Project 2025 rec­om­mend­ed strip­ping the fed­er­al role in edu­ca­tion down to “that of a sta­tis­tics-gath­er­ing agency that dis­sem­i­nates infor­ma­tion to the states.”  That doc­u­ment also calls for an end of the Head Start pro­gram, which served 833,000 stu­dents in 2022.  All this appears to be yet anoth­er effort to “dumb-down the population.”

When inter­viewed about HR 899, Massie stat­ed, “Unelected bureau­crats in Washington, D.C. should not be in charge of our children’s intel­lec­tu­al and moral (empha­sis added)development.  States and local com­mu­ni­ties are best posi­tioned to shape cur­ric­u­la that meet the needs of their stu­dents.  Schools should be account­able.  Parents have the right to choose the most appro­pri­ate edu­ca­tion­al oppor­tu­ni­ty for their chil­dren, includ­ing home school, pub­lic school, or pri­vate school.”

Apparently, Mr. Massie is toe­ing the line of Project 2025, just as the new admin­is­tra­tion is, one step at a time. It sure­ly begs the ques­tion as to whether “elect­ed” bureau­crats should have that role.

Okay, so Representative Massie believes that state bureau­crats are bet­ter able to direct edu­ca­tion­al deci­sions than those at the nation’s cap­i­tal. Most peo­ple prob­a­bly nev­er real­ized that the gov­ern­men­tal lev­el of a bureau­crat made him or her more or less capa­ble of deal­ing with the issues before them.  Apparently, it’s only at the local lev­el that those “bureau­crats” are elect­ed by the peo­ple to whom they are most responsible. 

But elim­i­nat­ing the fed­er­al Department of Education would most assured­ly mean that fund­ing avail­able for local school pro­grams, cur­ric­u­la, and mate­ri­als would be far less available.

As to “moral devel­op­ment,” one must cer­tain­ly won­der why this had to be a part of his state­ment.  Every time a politi­cian wants to make some sort of dra­mat­ic change, he or she seems to insert some­thing hav­ing to do with the morals of those affect­ed. It’s just a slack jaw way of “stir­ring the pot” and sug­gest­ing that peo­ple should believe that moral­i­ty will be pos­i­tive­ly affect­ed by the pro­posed change.

Yes, schools should be account­able!  Anyone who believes that Kentucky schools are not account­able hasn’t been pay­ing atten­tion.  Reports are con­stant about how our schools are per­form­ing and, inci­den­tal­ly, school per­for­mance in most of Kentucky is dra­mat­i­cal­ly improving.

Getting rid of the fed­er­al Department of Education will do nothing—absolutely noth­ing—to influ­ence or change the rights of par­ents to make the deci­sions about “choos­ing the most appro­pri­ate edu­ca­tion­al oppor­tu­ni­ty for their children.”

What it cer­tain­ly would do is reduce the “oppor­tu­ni­ties” in pub­lic edu­ca­tion, because fed­er­al funds would no longer be avail­able, unless of course some­thing in the enabling leg­is­la­tion stip­u­lates some lev­el of fund­ing through oth­er sources. But that’s not the goal of Project 2025, nor most like­ly, that of Mr. Massie—since his res­o­lu­tion was very suc­cinct and made no men­tion of any replace­ment strategy.

It is doubt­ful that any pub­lic edu­ca­tion offi­cial or staff mem­ber sup­ports this pro­pos­al, and why would log­ic sug­gest that a politi­cian is more capa­ble of mak­ing deci­sions about pub­lic edu­ca­tion than those who deal with it every day?

As with all these activ­i­ties from Project 2025, Mr. Massie and the White House ver­sus the Department of Education is sim­ply anoth­er part of the nation­wide effort of the ultra-rightwing to divert pub­lic dol­lars to pri­vate edu­ca­tion. A move­ment, it must be not­ed, that was sound­ly defeat­ed in November of 2024 in Kentucky.

For at least a year, we and many oth­ers have been warn­ing about the poten­tial of Project 2025 to cause great harm and much chaos with­in our state and nation. And despite Trump’s denials dur­ing the elec­tion, near­ly every action tak­en by this admin­is­tra­tion and con­gres­sion­al Republicans has indi­cat­ed a full-steam-ahead dri­ve to enact as much of it as pos­si­ble before the 2026 mid-term elections.

Perhaps then, Americans will show their dis­plea­sure with all this and put a stop to the shenanigans—before it’s too late.