Project 2025

Part 1: The Freedom to Read, Learn, and Teach

Free expression in public education is under threat. For four years, state legislators have passed educational gag orders and facilitated book bans, inflicting a considerable weakening of students’ freedoms to learn and read. This summer, new laws are taking effect in multiple states continuing the worrisome trend, leading to book bans from Utah to Tennessee, and the dismantling of DEI offices and programs from Kentucky to Texas. 

These attacks on the freedom to read, learn, and teach have largely occurred at the state level. But Project 2025, a set of policy proposals created by the Heritage Foundation, proposes to mimic these efforts federally, and to do so using as many levers of federal power as possible. 

Project 2025 makes major policy proposals in the education sphere–proposals that, if adopted, would dramatically reshape the landscape of American public education. Project 2025 actually proposes dismantling the Department of Education in its entirety, which would eliminate essential data on America’s public schools and related research – like student demographics and attainment or curricula effectiveness. Dismantling the Department of Education would also weaken the federal government’s capacity to focus national attention on key educational issues, like reading and censorship, and as well as address discrimination and ensure equal access to education.

Other groups in the education sphere have already shed light on what this would mean. But in this paper, PEN America focuses on Project 2025’s other proposals that would affect the country’s educational system–specifically, the proposals that would most affect the freedoms to read, learn, and teach. 

This effect would be a deeply negative, even a catastrophic, one. If adopted, Project 2025 would ramp up book banning, impose a greater climate of censorship and self-censorship on schools and college campuses, and silence educators and students–all on a national level.

While there’s much to be concerned about, here are 4 Key Threats Project 2025 Poses to the Freedom to Read, Learn, and Teach:

1. Project 2025 wants to enshrine educational censorship as federal policy

Project 2025 is clear in its intent to wield culture war politics in children’s classrooms. Heritage Foundation’s President Kevin Roberts writes in his Foreword, “Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms.” Project 2025 also posits that higher education has been “captured by woke ‘diversicrats’”. In particular, Roberts argues, “The noxious tenets of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’ should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children”.

We have seen these arguments before–as providing the rhetorical justification for state-level laws that silence educators, ban books, and chill honest classroom conversations around difficult subjects like racism and sexism in American history. Project 2025 is tripling down on the “Ed Scare”–a nationwide effort to foment anger and anxiety about public education.

Since 2021, PEN America has tracked dozens of bills that seek to ban “Critical Race Theory” or “divisive concepts” in schools. 28 of these bills have already become law, in 18 states. The result, as PEN America has amply reported, has been to effectively chill education about slavery, racism, or white supremacy, and to facilitate bans on thousands of books that touch on issues including race, sexuality, and gender. It is for this reason that we call such laws “educational gag orders”–because their true intent and effect is censorship. 

But what has been a disaster for the freedom to learn and teach in this country is apparently a victory in the eyes of the Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 heartily endorses a ban on “Critical Race Theory”, writing: “Lawmakers should design legislation that prevents [Critical Race] theory from spreading discrimination … school officials should not require students or teachers to believe that individuals are guilty or responsible for the actions of others based on race or ethnicity.” 

What Project 2025 envisions is a federal ban on Critical Race Theory–or what it defines as such–within K-12 schools controlled directly by the federal government. Federally-administered schools include Washington D.C. public schools, and schools administered by the military and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This means that a federal ideological ban will directly affect hundreds of thousands of families: the D.C. school system alone educates almost 100,000 children.

But the damage may not stop there. Project 2025’s expansive language indicates that its overall goal is a set of ideological bans that apply across the nation. A federal ban on Critical Race Theory would send the message to all censorship-minded state legislators that such bans are the new national norm, turbocharging efforts to impose ideological restrictions on teaching and learning. 

Project 2025 makes a set of additional proposals whose foreseeable effect would be to water down K-12 education. As PEN America has examined numerous times before, each of these proposals may sound reasonable on their face–particularly in their framing that they are in support of “transparency” or “prohibitions on compelled speech”. 

Project 2025 proposes that 

• “Educators should not be forced to discuss contemporary political issues but neither should they refrain from discussing certain subjects in an attempt to protect students from ideas with which they disagree” 
• “At the state level, states should require schools to post classroom materials online to provide maximum transparency to parents.”
• “For K–12 systems under federal authority, Congress and the next Administration should support existing state and federal civil rights laws and add to such laws a prohibition on compelled speech.”

But federal law already provides transparency requirements and prohibitions on compelled speech. The way these proposed policies would actually be used–and in fact, have already been used in states that have adopted them–is as a means for enabling censors, and for prohibiting the inclusion of specific ideas in the classroom that are disfavored by the government.

2. Project 2025 Would Use “Parental Rights” Rhetoric to Target Specific Ideas in Education

In Chapter 11, its education section, Project 2025 leans heavily on a framing of “parental rights”, as a means of legitimizing school-wide restrictions on LGBTQ+ content. Project 2025 proposes that the next Administration work to pass a federal Parents’ Bill of Rights, and ensure that any education-related regulation contains similar “parental rights” protections. It even calls on Congress to give parents a “private right of action” against schools–in essence, enabling parents to sue public schools for including any curricular content that offends them. 

While this rhetoric may seem neutral on its face, PEN America and numerous other groups have repeatedly warned that such “parental rights” rhetoric has been weaponized to erase content in schools that includes LGBTQ+ people, or that involves depictions of race and racism that may be challenging but truthful. This framing of “parental rights” very explicitly prioritizes the rights of some parents, while running roughshod over the rights of others.

As we noted in our 2023 report Educational Intimidation: How “Parents’ Rights” Legislation Undermines the Freedom to Learn, these “parental rights” proposals largely “have an ulterior motive driving them: to empower a vocal and censorship-minded minority with greater opportunity to scrutinize public education and intimidate educators with threats of punishment. Introduced alongside educational gag orders and widespread efforts to ban books, these bills can limit educators’ ability to utilize their professional judgment and create an antagonistic learning environment that impedes children’s education.”  

This campaign has placed new pressures on educators. According to a January 2023 RAND / Center for Reinventing Public Education survey, 46 percent of school district leaders say that their ability to educate students has been compromised because of political polarization over LGBTQ+ issues, and 41 percent say the same about the debate over critical race theory.

Project 2025 seeks to replicate these alarming trends on a federal level, giving censorship-minded parents anywhere in the country the power to browbeat schools into withdrawing lessons that offend them personally or that they just disagree with–even by suing them. The result would likely be schools facing expensive lawsuits for teaching anything but the most watered-down, sanitized version of American history, civics, and literature. In practice, that lowest-common denominator approach to public education would likely lead schools and educators to pull back from or abandon altogether efforts to make their curricula more inclusive and representative, and could purge schools of entire areas of scholarship, inquiry, and debate. 

3. Project 2025 Wants to Define LGBTQ+ content as “Porn”–and Treat Librarians Like Criminals

Project 2025 is up-front about its intent to equate LGBTQ+ content in children’s books and in school curricula with pornography, and to treat making such content accessible as a crime. PEN America has repeatedly warned that this type of rhetoric directly facilitates book bans, many of which target books with LGBTQ+ characters or that tell LGBTQ+ stories. 

In the Foreword to the Project playbook, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts writes, “children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.” He goes on to say, even more explicitly, “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children … has no claim to First Amendment protection…. Pornography should be outlawed… Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.”

Already, three states have passed laws that would treat librarians as criminals for refusing to pull books from their shelves, and seventeen states are considering or have considered similar legislation this year. Meanwhile, PEN America has recorded thousands of instances of book bans since 2021, occurring in almost every state.

All of this has made life more dangerous for librarians. “I have been called a porn peddler in an open meeting,” one librarian told PEN America last year. “One person on Facebook has said I should be stoned to death.”

If Project 2025 has its way, these alarming trends would spread nationwide. While Project 2025 does not expand on Roberts’s proposal in its Education section, the Heritage Foundation President’s words in the Foreword are clear, calling for a clear policy position from the next Administration to treat at least a portion of LGBTQ+ content as pornography, and treat librarians as criminals if they keep such books on their shelves.

If Project 2025 is meant to be a policy “playbook” for the federal government, then presumably the vision laid out here is for a federal law or executive policy. That would be the culmination of a years-long campaign from some activists to ignore or broaden existing definitions of obscenity, paving the way to censor LGBTQ+ voices and stories, as well as a broader array of stories that contain sexual content, including those that tackle difficult issues such as sexual assault.

Such a law or policy would almost certainly be unconstitutional; but we have seen how it can take many years and legal challenges to unwind such pernicious laws once they are on the books. The victims won’t just be librarians, but authors who write–or hope to write–such stories, and LGBTQ+ kids and their families, who deserve to see themselves reflected in books available in schools and libraries.

4. Project 2025 wants to give politicians greater ideological control over universities, by stripping away guardrails 

Project 2025 also takes direct aim at colleges and universities, proposing to strip away the guardrails that help defend public colleges from the ideological whims of state politicians.

The first way Project 2025 seeks to do this is by significantly altering 

the system of university accreditation. Accreditation agencies establish professional standards to ensure that higher education institutions are doing their job. They are composed of nonpartisan educational professionals, who evaluate whether colleges and universities are meeting educational standards. Universities that lack accreditation lose access to federal student aid, which 55% of all students receive. 

Project 2025 alleges  that these agencies’ processes are too expensive and “stifle innovation,” that they are “unnecessarily focused on schools in a specific geographic region,”  and–most damningly in Project 2025’s eyes–that they are too concerned with promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.

So Project 2025 proposes a series of steps to eliminate these agencies’ oversight authority. First, it proposes new prohibitions on these agencies, designed to prohibit them from “intruding” on the governance of state-supported colleges. But it goes further, proposing that the next Administration authorize state governments to recognize and appoint their own accreditors, or serve as accreditors themselves.

As a whole, these changes would be catastrophic for academic freedom and higher education in the United States. Instead of nonpartisan accreditors applying impartial standards to determine access to federal student aid, accreditation would be controlled by a state government’s handpicked agency, or by the state itself. Governors who have built their political brand on attacking higher education–like Florida’s Ron DeSantis–would be handed a powerful new mechanism to punish universities whose faculty or academic programs they disapprove of, and to reward universities that promote their ideological preferences.

This would have disastrous effects. Many of the worst educational gag orders, along with DEI bans and faculty tenure bans, have been voted down or toned down because legislators realized they were putting their schools’ accreditation status in jeopardy. If Project 2025’s recommendations are adopted, that guardrail disappears, effectively eliminating accreditation agencies’ watchdog role as a bulwark against state actions or laws that intrude on university autonomy. 

Project 2025 would also substantially narrow the tools of the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), and move it out of its home in an education-focused agency to the Department of Justice. The OCR’s primary mechanism for enforcing civil rights law on college campuses is investigating specific complaints of civil rights abuses. From these investigations, the OCR often comes to an agreement with a school district or college or university to take corrective action. Project 2025 would strip the OCR of this power by mandating that it can only engage in litigation, removing the Office’s most effective tool for ensuring compliance with federal civil rights law. 

With both university accreditors and federal regulators out of the way, state governors and legislatures would be given drastically expanded powers to remake public universities in their image–including by favoring or disfavoring academic programs on ideological grounds. We have already seen how state officials like Florida’s Ron DeSantis have used such powers. The end result can only be injurious to the freedom to teach and to learn at the college level. 

This is a blueprint for handing elected state governments total ideological control over higher education, shifting power from professional educators and federal watchdogs to political actors at the state level.  The results would be deeply damaging–for academic freedom, the freedom to learn, and for American democracy overall.

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In sum, Project 2025 proposes a radical overhaul of the United States education system, with the foreseeable effect being a frontal assault on the freedoms to read, learn, and teach. If implemented, this slate of proposals would turbocharge the forces of censorship that have been running rampant in states across much of the country for the past four years.