Following Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Education quickly saw a sharp turn in direction under its new leadership made up of executives from the pro-Trump think tank America First Policy Institute (AFPI). AFPI is a far-right, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-woman think tank, often touted as a “White House in waiting,” which seeks to remove any notion of inclusivity in schools and ultimately degrade and dismantle the public education system as a whole. While many of Trump’s changes, such as dismantling USAID and purging FBI officials and inspectors general, have received considerable attention, the massive changes at DOE have gone largely unnoticed.
Following Trump’s 2020 loss to Joe Biden, AFPI quietly organized a “shadow transition operation” according to Forbes, that would promote the Trump agenda, vet far-right individuals to become a part of the incoming administration, and quietly carve out a similar agenda to the better-known, rights-stripping Project 2025 (GPAHE analysis of Project 2025 here). AFPI is rabidly anti-LGBTQ+, with associates having written op-eds against the appearance of Pride flags during Pride month, promoted fear of teachers and “gender theory activists” in schools, opposed state laws prohibiting “conversion therapy,” and referred to the increase in people identifying as trans in recent years as a “social contagion.”
AFPI’s Christian Nationalism is laid bare in their handbook “Biblical Foundations,” which refers to the U.S. as “a nation founded by people rooted in Biblical truth,” and claims they seek to “maintain the [country’s] foundational Judeo-Christian values.” AFPI calls on the Church to “engage in the issues of the day” to “bring the Kingdom of Heaven to Earth.” Out of the more than 17 appointees so far in the new Trump administration with ties to the AFPI, at least five have joined the Department of Education (DOE) in leadership positions, representing almost half of the current nominees to the department’s upper-management.
Only days after the inauguration, the Trump administration stacked the management of DOE with AFPI staffers. These include Rachel Oglesby (chosen to be DOE chief of staff), previously AFPI’s chief state action officer and director, Jonathan Pidluzny (chosen to be deputy chief of staff for policy and programs), previously AFPI’s director of the higher Education Reform initiative, Virginia “Chase” Forrester (chosen to be the deputy chief of staff for operations), previously the chief events officer at AFPI, and Craig Trainor (chosen for deputy assistant secretary for policy in the Office for Civil Rights), who served as senior litigation counsel at AFPI. In addition, the nomination to lead DOE is Linda McMahon, the chair of the board of the AFPI’s “Center for the American Worker” (for more on McMahon, see GPAHE’s profile of her here).
At AFPI, McMahon and her colleagues supported many of the policies that are now being rapidly put in place and can also be found in Project 2025. The first of these changes came on January 23, 2025, when the DOE issued a press release titled “U.S. Department of Education Takes Action to Eliminate DEI” (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) following Trump’s similar executive order. In it, the Department stated that they “removed or archived hundreds of guidance documents, reports, and training materials that include mentions of DEI,” “put employees charged with leading DEI initiatives on paid administrative leave,” cancelled $2.6 million worth of “ongoing DEI training and service contracts,” and dissolved the Department’s Diversity and Inclusion Council established by the Obama administration on August 18, 2011.
Bragging about these “accomplishments,” AFPI members in the Department published a press release with celebratory quotes from prominent figures in the anti-LGBTQ+ movement. These included anti-LGBTQ+ Moms for Liberty leader Tiffany Justice, responsible for many of the attempts to ban books in libraries around the country, AFPI’s Riley Gaines, whose activism seeks to deny trans people from participating in sports, and Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Christopher Rufo, known for leading campaigns against the university discipline of “critical race theory” (CRT) in public schools (even though CRT is not taught at the K-12 level).
AFPI has made opposition to DEI programs and “CRT” a core part of their mission, regularly producing guides for “dismantling campus DEI” in different states and producing “expert testimony” on bills proposed to state legislatures. Far from emphasizing the need for “meritocracy,” AFPI considers DEI programs to be a “radical and divisive offshoot of Critical Race Theory (CRT)” which “deepens divisions” on campuses, sets up “race-exclusionary programs,” and “indoctrinates students into a far-left political ideology.” Despite mountains of research demonstrating that concepts such as “structural racism” and “implicit bias” play a role in social relations, they claim that DEI policies are “highly ideological,” and restrict academic freedom and the diversity of views on campuses and “sow division and hate in society.” Trump used similar language in his recent executive order on January 29, 2025, called “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” where he referred to these programs as “anti-American, subversive, and harmful.”
DOE’s new leadership has not stopped at purging DEI. In only a week, they have expanded their mission to target initiatives promoting inclusivity in schools around the country. On January 24, AFPI’s Trainor published a statement saying that DOE had ended “Biden’s book ban hoax,” a reference to 11 complaints related to incidents around the country by far-right groups attempting to remove books involving inclusive themes of LGBTQ+ people or people of color, and eliminated the position of the “book ban coordinator” tasked with investigating them. Despite claiming to value academic freedom and the diversity of views, the new DOE leadership claimed that book bans were a “hoax.”
The American Library Association (ALA), which has documented thousands of instances of books targeted for censorship, released a statement in response to the move on January 26, saying: “In their cruel and headlong effort to terminate protections from discrimination for LGBTQIA+ students and students of color, the Department of Education advances the demonstrably false claim that book bans are not real. Book bans are real.”
On January 28, Trainor and the AFPI-led Department stated that they would be opening a federal investigation into the Denver Public School system for converting one of its restrooms at East High School for female students into an all-gender bathroom. Despite the fact that other female-only bathrooms exist at the school, and female students still had access to the all-gender bathroom, DOE claimed that the school had violated Title IX of the Education Amendment of 1972, which stipulates that “a recipient may provide separate toilet, locker room, and shower facilities on the basis of sex, but such facilities provided for students of one sex shall be comparable to such facilities provided for students of the other sex.”
Following the Trump administration’s executive order entitled “Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government,” issued on January 20, Trump’s new DOE effectively ended the Biden administration’s interpretation of the Title IX rule, which previously prevented discrimination against students based on their gender identity or sexual orientation. Writing on behalf of DOE, Trainor stated that this change “ends a serious threat campus free speech” and “protects women” by “protecting their right to safe and separate facilities and activities in schools, colleges, and universities,” a reference to a false, bigoted trope that trans women are more likely to perpetrate violent sexual assaults against other women if they use the same restroom facilities.
Finally, in a January 29 decision, the Trump administration resurrected “The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission,” a taskforce originally formed at the end of the first Trump administration, which sought to push back against “radical ideologies” in education, referring to curriculum that, among other things, accurately examines distressing aspects of American history such as enslavement and Jim Crow, and rather promote “patriotic education” in American public schools. Throughout Trump’s campaign, he and allies accused public schools of teaching white children to be ashamed of themselves and their ancestors in curriculum about slavery and discrimination.
Trump’s nominee for the Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins (see GPAHE’s profile of Rollins here), a co-founder of the AFPI, was a part of the commission, along with officials from the far-right university Hillsdale College, such as their President Larry P. Arnn and Vice-President of Washington Operations Matthew Spalding, which promotes “traditional, Christian values” and considers feminism and LGBTQ+ rights to be examples of “cultural Marxism” (see GPAHE’s profile of AFPI’s Brooke Rollins here). Hillsdale crafted the “1776 Curriculum” as a model of “patriotic” education for use in K-12 schools, which portrays the United States as an “an exceptionally good country” throughout history, downplays the role of slavery and racism, emphasizes the notion of American exceptionalism, and injects historically revisionist, ideological narratives into the curriculum (see GPAHE’s profile of Hillsdale College here).
In Trump’s executive action from January 29 entitled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” the 1776 Commission is to resume its activities in cooperation with an individual designated by the Secretary of Education. This commission is tasked with providing “patriotic” lectures on American Independence, promoting “patriotic” values at national parks, monuments, museums, and other public areas, and advising executive departments regarding efforts to ensure “patriotic education.” The executive order also ordered DOE offices to prioritize efforts on promoting “patriotic education” over other tasks, as well as ordering them to formulate an “Ending Indoctrination Strategy,” aimed at ceasing federal funding for “indoctrination in K-12 schools,” including based on “gender ideology,” codeword for anything that is respectful of LGBTQ+ people and history.
These efforts show that DOE has been taken over by far-right ideologues, and begins a radical reversal in the U.S. public education system away from historical facts to propaganda. Far-right cultural and religious views will be prioritized in public education policy, groups demonized by these movements such as the LGBTQ+ community will be erased, and inclusionary measures for students from marginalized communities, including the teaching of their community’s histories, abandoned.
Meanwhile, the administration is also instituting a more long-term strategy of undermining public, secular education by diverting funds from public schools to private “charter schools,” which are not required to abide by non-discrimination and other laws that apply to public schools. McMahon has previously shown an interest in either transferring public funds to private schools through voucher programs for schools centered around a curriculum based on Christianity, or eliminating the Department of Education in its entirety. DOE just announced that they would be celebrating “National School Choice Week” from January 26 – 31, 2025, and opening up millions of dollars in funding for charter schools. These efforts are clearly aimed at undermining the entire public school system at the expense of unaccountable educational institutions that promote Christian Nationalist values.
