A Project 2025 author now sets policy at the agency she wrote a chapter to dismantle. The Pentagon has cut military fellowships at the “woke” schools the Defense Secretary attended. A federal investigation has opened at the country’s largest women’s college. The thread that ties them together runs through a 1975 evangelical doctrine and the advisory board of Project 2025.
What This Story Shows
- A federal Title IX investigation has opened at Smith College over its admission of transgender women. The complaint was filed by Defending Education, whose vice president is a former senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
- The author of Project 2025’s education chapter, which calls for abolishing the Department of Education, is now deputy chief of staff for policy and programs at the Department of Education.
- The Pentagon has cut Senior Service College Fellowships — the one-year program that sends senior officers to civilian universities in place of a war college — at 15 universities, including Princeton and Harvard, where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth earned his degrees. Liberty University and Hillsdale College, both members of the Project 2025 advisory board, are among the proposed replacements.
- Civil-rights enforcement at the Department of Education has collapsed. Federal investigators reached zero resolution agreements in K-12 sexual-harassment or sexual-violence cases in 2025, down from 23 the year before.
On the morning of May 5, 2026, chalk lay on the sidewalks around Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. You belong here. Trans women belong here. Pastel stripes of the trans pride flag ran beside the messages in pink, blue, and white. The chalk had gone down the night before, hours after the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education announced on May 4 that it was opening a Title IX investigation into the 155-year-old women’s college over a policy Smith has held since May 2015.
The Office for Civil Rights normally investigates schools that discriminate against students. This time, it was investigating a school for letting some of them in.
The complaint came from Defending Education, a right-wing, Virginia-based nonprofit run by Nicole Neily, a Koch network alumna. Defending Education’s vice president and legal fellow, Sarah Parshall Perry, is a former senior counsel at the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights and a former senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Perry has said the news that Smith awarded an honorary degree to former Biden administration official Rachel Levine, a transgender woman, was what “piqued my interest.” The group filed the complaint on June 20, 2025. The federal government opened its investigation 11 months later.
The Plan
The education chapter of Project 2025 opens with a single ambition: to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. The chapter’s author, Lindsey Burke, spent 17 years working on education policy at the Heritage Foundation. On June 9, 2025, she took the job of deputy chief of staff for policy and programs at the agency she had argued should not exist. Heritage President Kevin Roberts called the appointment “a landmark victory for American education, and for the millions of parents fighting to reclaim their God-given right to direct their children’s upbringing.”
The Mountain
The doctrine behind Roberts’ phrasing is the Seven Mountain Mandate. It dates to a 1975 vision claimed by evangelists Loren Cunningham and Bill Bright, who proposed that Christians should take dominion over seven spheres of culture: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government. Lance Wallnau and Bethel Church’s Bill Johnson turned the framework into a political program with their 2013 book Invading Babylon. The Seven Mountain Mandate is the operating doctrine of the New Apostolic Reformation, the charismatic network whose self-styled apostles and prophets ran the Jericho Marches around the Capitol on January 6, and 41 percent of American Christians say they agree with it. Christian nationalist Charlie Kirk, before he was assasinated at Utah Valley University in September 2025, told the 2020 Conservative Political Action Conference that “finally we have a president that understands the seven mountains of cultural influence.”
Burke’s Project 2025 chapter does not cite the Seven Mountain Mandate by name. It doesn’t need to. The chapter calls for parental control over schools, the elimination of the Department of Education, federal funding tied to ideological compliance, and the breaking of what it calls the “accreditation cartel.” It is what a dominionist would write to capture the education mountain through federal policy.
Dismantling
On March 20, 2025, Trump signed the executive order ordering the Education Department’s closure, although only Congress can shut it down entirely. Education Secretary Linda McMahon began dismantling it anyway, signing 10 interagency agreements by April 2026 that pushed 118 of the department’s programs out to other agencies. The $1.7 trillion student loan portfolio is moving to the Treasury. The department announced it was vacating its headquarters in the Lyndon B. Johnson building; the Energy Department was taking over the lease.
On April 11, 2025, the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism sent Harvard a letter setting the conditions for keeping the university’s federal grants. The government wanted outside auditors of its choosing to screen Harvard’s faculty, students, staff, and leadership for “viewpoint diversity” through 2028. It wanted the diversity offices closed. It wanted protesters who wore masks suspended. It wanted Harvard to stop admitting international students “hostile to American values.” Harvard president Alan Garber answered three days later in a public letter: no. That afternoon, the administration froze $2.2 billion in research grants and $60 million in contracts. The total eventually reached $2.6 billion.
On September 3, 2025, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs ruled for Harvard. The administration, she found, had used antisemitism as “a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.” Other schools paid rather than fight. Columbia paid the federal government $221 million. Brown committed $50 million over a decade to Rhode Island workforce development and adopted the administration’s definitions of “male” and “female.” The University of Pennsylvania, Trump’s alma mater, modified the records of a transgender swimmer who had competed there four years earlier.
Pete Hegseth Bans Pete Hegseth’s Schools
On February 27, 2026, Hegseth’s Pentagon canceled 93 Senior Service College Fellowships. Since the 1980s, the fellowships have sent the military’s rising senior officers — colonels and lieutenant colonels on the track to general — to civilian campuses for a year of graduate study, in place of the war colleges. Princeton politics professor Jacob Shapiro, who brought the program to his university in 2018, told the Princeton Alumni Weekly the fellowships are “a long-run investment in our military’s ability to operate and develop relationships in the U.S. and overseas.” The schools losing fellowships are Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, MIT, Brown, Yale, Tufts, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Saint Louis University, George Washington, Carnegie Mellon, Middlebury, the College of William & Mary, and Queen’s University in Ontario. Seven Washington think tanks lost their fellowships too, including the Brookings Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Hegseth announced the cuts in a video posted to X, calling the Ivy League “factories of anti-American resentment and military disdain.” The memo behind the announcement was first reported by the Brown Daily Herald. The cuts take effect with the 2026–27 academic year; a separate Pentagon order on February 6 had already cut off Harvard.
Hegseth graduated from Princeton in 2003 and earned a master’s in public policy from Harvard in 2013. Both schools appear on the ban list he signed in February. Harvard alone lost 21 of the 93 canceled fellowships, the largest cohort at any school.
The Pentagon memo proposed replacement institutions, including Liberty University and Hillsdale College, both on the Project 2025 advisory board. Hillsdale, the Christian liberal-arts college that refuses federal funding to avoid federal rules and the civil-rights oversight that comes with it, including Title IX, Title VI, and disability protections, serves as the curricular partner of choice for Republican governors seeking to remake K-12 instruction. Its president, Larry Arnn, sits on the Heritage Foundation board and chaired the 1776 Commission Trump created in the final days of his first term.
The New Accreditor
In May 2023, Trump posted a campaign video. “Our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system,” he said. “When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics.” A year later, Burke’s Project 2025 chapter described a higher-education establishment “captured by woke ‘diversicrats’ and a de facto monopoly enforced by the federal accreditation cartel.” She wanted states to authorize their own accreditors and for the Department of Education to stop recognizing the rest. On April 23, 2025, Trump signed an executive order titled “Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education.”
DeSantis announced his answer at Florida Atlantic University on June 26, 2025. The Commission for Public Higher Education, he said, would replace the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, which accredits most public universities in the South and which had angered DeSantis by flagging a conflict of interest in Richard Corcoran’s candidacy for the Florida State University presidency. “The accreditation cartel,” he called the existing system from the podium — the same phrase Burke uses in her Project 2025 chapter. Five other Republican-led state systems signed on: Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas A&M. The Florida legislature contributed $4 million in startup funds. On July 11, 2025, the Florida Board of Governors approved the new accreditor. Some of its own members raised a conflict-of-interest question: Florida would be both the sole member and an accredited institution. Once McMahon’s department certifies it, the gatekeeper to federal student aid for any institution that joins will answer to six conservative state systems.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July 2025, contains a “Do No Harm” provision that strips federal aid from any program whose graduates fail to out-earn the median high-school graduate in their state. The same law imposed a lifetime federal student-loan cap of $257,500.
The Visa as a Speech Code
By late April 2025, more than 1,800 international students at over 280 colleges had seen their visas revoked or their Student Education Visa Information System records terminated in the government’s database, according to Inside Higher Ed’s tracking. On September 30, 2025, U.S. District Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee, issued a 161-page opinion finding that the administration had run “an unconstitutionally broad definition of Anti-Semitism” as cover for what he described as a “full-throated assault on the First Amendment.” International student arrivals fell 19 percent year-over-year in August 2025, with Indian arrivals down 45 percent, according to U.S. government data compiled by international-education researchers.
The Florida Beta Test
What the federal government is now doing to research universities, Florida had already done to a small public liberal-arts college. In early 2023, Governor Ron DeSantis appointed six conservative activists, including Christopher Rufo, to the 13-member board of the New College of Florida. Three weeks later the new trustees fired the school’s president. The gender-studies program did not survive the summer. A year later, the administration removed hundreds of books from the school’s Gender and Diversity Center.
Rufo posted about the disposal in real time: “We abolished the gender studies program. Now we are throwing out the trash.”
DeSantis’s relationship with Hillsdale dates to 2014, when he was still in the U.S. House. Investigative reporter Sommer Brugal of the Miami Herald traced the connection in 2022, finding that a 2019 Florida law authorized Hillsdale and a few similar groups to help the state rewrite its civics standards. Larry Arnn has described DeSantis as “one of the most important people living.”
Smith professor Carrie Baker, who chairs the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality at the college, now under federal investigation, reads the May 4 announcement as the federalization of the Florida method. In Ms. Magazine, Baker traced the same line from Hungary’s 2018 ban on gender studies under Viktor Orbán to Russia’s restrictions on the same field under Vladimir Putin. Hungarians voted Orbán out on April 12, 2026. The American version of the playbook arrived in Northampton three weeks later.
The First Mountain
This is what the federal approach to scaling the first mountain looks like. Burke’s chapter is in motion at the agency it called for abolishing. The Pentagon has cut elite universities from military officer training and named Project 2025 advisors, Liberty and Hillsdale, as replacements. A federal investigation is now open at the country’s largest women’s college over a policy that has been in place since 2015, and six mountains remain.
In a 2022 Fox & Friends segment, then-television host Hegseth wrote “return to sender” on his Harvard diploma on camera. A co-host asked whether the Princeton diploma would follow.
“Not yet, not yet, not yet,” Hegseth replied, laughing.
