Project 2025 March 13th Update

“Today’s reduction in force reflects the Department of Education’s commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon declared on March 11, 2025, her carefully scripted statement framing the termination of over 1,300 federal workers as a step toward “restoring the greatness of the United States education system.”

The bureaucratic drama unfolded with precision as the Trump administration hones its skills at clearing out federal offices. As afternoon shadows lengthened across Washington, employees were ordered to vacate the Department of Education headquarters by 6 p.m. for “security reasons,” according to internal communications obtained by news outlets. Guards stood watch as bewildered staff departed. By morning, what remained was a hollowed-out agency — its workforce halved since January, its future uncertain.

This wasn’t some improvised downsizing exercise. The mass terminations follow a script meticulously drafted in the pages of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative blueprint that has evolved from right-wing wish list to administrative playbook with remarkable speed.

Project 2025’s condemnation of the Department of Education was blatant, as were calls for its demolition:

• “Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms.”

• “The department is a convenient one-stop shop for the woke education cartel.”

• ”Ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.”

• “Setting education policy on the right track long term would require sunsetting the U.S. Department of Education altogether.”

Following Project 2025’s lead, McMahon told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Tuesday evening that this is “the first step to a total shutdown” of the department. The admission came after months of carefully orchestrated maneuvers — voluntary separations, buyouts, and probationary terminations — that steadily drained the department of institutional memory and operational capacity.

The educational philosophy underpinning these moves traces back through decades of conservative Christian activism, revealing an intellectual lineage that few administration officials willingly acknowledge. The opposition to federal education standards didn’t materialize in a vacuum — it germinated in the fertile soil of racial anxieties following the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, when federal interventions mandated the integration of American classrooms.

Religious historian Randall Balmer has documented how conservative Christian political engagement, which has evolved into today’s Christian Nationalism, initially coalesced not around abortion but in defense of racially segregated religious schools. When the IRS threatened tax exemptions for these segregation academies in the 1970s, conservative strategist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation Paul Weyrich — after years of unsuccessfully testing various issues to mobilize evangelicals — finally found his catalyst.

Finding segregation an unpopular rallying cry outside the South, these religious leaders pivoted strategically toward more palatable causes — first “religious freedom,” later abortion — to energize their constituencies and bring them to the polls. Abortion only emerged as their rallying cry in 1979, six years after Roe v. Wade, when it proved a more politically marketable vehicle for conservative organizing.

The pattern repeats throughout American history — religious conservatives rallying against educational inclusivity, from classroom prayer battles to evolution curriculum wars to more recent fights over comprehensive sex education and LGBTQ+ “grooming.”

McMahon is definitely a religious conservative but hardly a standard-bearer for educational transformation. The former World Wrestling Entertainment chief’s expertise lies in promoting and choreographing theatrical conflicts with predetermined outcomes.

For religious conservatives, particularly figures like Tony Perkins, who leads the Family Research Council (a Project 2025 advisor labeled an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group by civil rights monitors), the Department of Education has long symbolized secular overreach into what they consider sacred territory — the moral formation of young minds. In a recent email to supporters, Perkins celebrated the department’s dismantling as potentially transformative, characterizing federal education oversight as enforcing “policies that silence parents and flood schools with agendas hostile to biblical truth.”

The department’s Office for Civil Rights — once a robust defender of educational equity with nearly 600 employees and a dozen regional outposts nationwide — now stands as a hollowed husk. Tuesday’s cuts eviscerated more than half its field offices, shuttering locations in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Investigators who previously juggled around 60 discrimination cases simultaneously now face virtually impossible workloads, making on-site school inspections — once routine for assessing accessibility complaints and interviewing vulnerable students — logistically unfeasible across vast geographic territories. “OCR simply will not be investigating violations anymore,” an attorney still employed at the department told ProPublica. “It is not going to happen. They will not have the staff for it.” This decision follows the OCR acting director Craig Trainor’s internal directive in mid-February to process only disability-based discrimination complaints, leaving thousands of race and gender discrimination cases unaddressed.

“Every student will feel the impact,” warned democratic California Representative Mark Takano during protests outside the department’s headquarters on Tuesday. “Rural students will feel it. Students in poor communities will feel it. LGBTQ+ students and students of color will feel it. College students who rely on Pell Grants and Federal Student Aid will feel it. And students in special education all will be locked out.”

Educational advocates predict cascading consequences. “The real victims will be our most vulnerable students,” said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association. “Gutting the Department of Education will send class sizes soaring, cut job training programs, make higher education more expensive and out of reach for middle-class families, take away special education services for students with disabilities, and gut student civil rights protections.”

Constitutional questions linger about whether a cabinet-level department established by Congress can be dismantled through executive action alone, and have already sparked legal challenges. On Thursday, a coalition of 21 Democratic attorneys general sued the Trump administration in federal court, arguing that the layoffs were “illegal and unconstitutional” and would cause delays in “nearly every aspect” of K-12 education in their states.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State, an organization that has battled religious encroachment in public education since 1947, dismisses the legal viability of Trump’s approach. “The stroke of a magic marker cannot take away those important functions and rights from American students,” said Rachel Laser, the organization’s president. Nevertheless, she acknowledges that even failed attempts advance the larger agenda by “toppling public education and plunging schools and families into a chaos that drives them into the arms of private Christian schools.”

As the department’s institutional capacity diminishes and its functions scatter across government, Project 2025’s policies and administrative actions are coming to life.

The Next Battleground: Conversion Therapy Returns to the Supreme Court

The Trump administration’s multi-pronged assault on LGBTQ+ Americans unfolds with startling velocity. Last week, the president amplified a Washington Times article on Truth Social featuring a pink triangle  —  the very symbol created and used by Nazis to mark gay men in concentration camps  —  overlaid with a prohibition symbol. Over the weekend, Texas Republicans introduced legislation that would criminalize transgender identity itself, making it a felony punishable by up to two years of imprisonment to “knowingly make a false or misleading verbal or written statement” by identifying one’s gender differently from one’s sex assigned at birth on official documents.

On March 10, against this backdrop of intensifying hostility toward the LGBTQ+ community, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Chiles v. Salazar. This is a case with ramifications far beyond the parties involved. It could dismantle decades of progress in protecting LGBTQ+ youth from conversion therapy, the false idea that a person’s orientation or identity can be changed, which medical authorities universally condemn as harmful pseudoscience. As Matt Ford of The New Republic incisively frames it, the case represents yet another instance of “the high court taking up fanciful claims that could do real harm to gay and trans Americans”  —  the latest chapter in a methodical campaign to roll back LGBTQ+ protections.

The blueprint is becoming disturbingly familiar for the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) an anti-LGBTQ+ Christian nationalist organization and supporter of Project 2025. As in previous lawsuits, ADF’s battle-tested formula is to find a plaintiff with a theoretical grievance and litigate based on hypothetical restrictions of religious liberty. The Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, will grant review and has a history of ruling along ideological lines to erode protections for marginalized groups.

Chiles follows this script. At its center stands Kaley Chiles, a Colorado Springs counselor who, according to court filings, “believes that people flourish when they live consistently with God’s design, including their biological sex.” This is an imagined harm, as Chiles, who is Christian, avows that she does not currently practice conversion therapy, which has been illegal in Colorado since 2019, nor has she faced any disciplinary action under the law she challenges. As Colorado officials told the justices, “Neither of the respondent Boards has received a complaint about [Chiles], much less taken any disciplinary action against her,” making this a pre-enforcement challenge filed “more than three years after the MCTL took effect.”

This phantom “injury” aspect mirrors what The New Republic identifies as the Court’s “unfortunate habit in recent religious freedom disputes of taking up cases with either underdeveloped records or nonexistent ones” to achieve predetermined outcomes favorable to religious claimants. The parallel to 303 Creative v. Elenis, also brought by ADF, is striking. In that case, “the plaintiff said that she wanted to be able to design wedding websites without offering them to same-sex couples, even though she had never designed wedding websites before the lawsuit.” The Supreme Court duly ruled in her favor along ideological lines, even though her business “does not list weddings as one of its offered services.”

The ADF is hoping that the Chiles case will set a precedent to litigate conversion therapy bans active in 20 states where the treatment is prohibited. However, the scientific consensus against conversion therapy is overwhelming. The American Medical Association opposes the practice, while the Human Rights Campaign states that “every mainstream medical and mental health organization” has rejected it for decades. The International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims categorizes conversion therapy as a form of torture, and every major medical organization in the United States has condemned conversion therapy as pseudoscientific and dangerous.

The Court will hear arguments beginning in October, with a decision likely by June 2026.

A Tale of Two Manifestos: Heritage, Hungary, and the Remaking of Democracy

The Trump administration has implemented Project 2025’s blueprint for authoritarianism, and Central Europe is taking notice.

A February 2025 report entitled “The Great Reset: Restoring Member State Sovereignty in the European Union” reflects a years-long courtship between the Heritage Foundation and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. The report was produced by Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) and Poland’s Ordo Iuris Institute, both with significant ties to Project 2025 advisors MCC is a private Hungarian educational institution and think tank closely tied to Orbán’s government, while Poland’s Ordo Iuris is an ultra-conservative Catholic legal organization and think tank known for its anti-LGBT, anti-abortion, and anti-divorce activism.

The transatlantic relationship between Heritage and Hungary has transformed from diplomatic flirtation into an ideological partnership that has deepened, evolving into a symbiosis where Hungary’s political experiments now shape conservative American policy while Heritage provides international legitimacy to a regime frequently censured by the European Union for democratic backsliding.

As The Atlantic journalist Anne Applebaum told NPR in February 2025, Hungary has been somewhat of an incubator for authoritarianism, a real-world example of a country whose democratically elected leader eliminated checks and balances, solidifying his grasp on power.

“The Trump administration has absolutely taken actions from the Orbán playbook,” Applebaum affirmed. “We know, for example, Project 2025, which is  —  was a kind of blueprint written by the think tank The Heritage Foundation for some of what’s happening now, for the takeover of institutions of the state  —  we know that was heavily influenced by Hungarians.” The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism has written extensively about this relationship.

As Trump and his administration cronies advance Heritage’s Project 2025 agenda, the Christian nationalist think tank’s engagement with Europe’s illiberal vanguard has intensified. A closed-door workshop held at Heritage’s headquarters on March 11, 2025, underscored this deepening alliance, featuring presentations from both the MCC and Ordo Iuris. According to an invitation, Heritage’s James Carafano framed the gathering’s significance in carefully diplomatic language: “The future of EU Treaty Reform will greatly impact transatlantic relations. Understanding how that might unfold is critical for those invested in a Europe that is whole, free, at peace, and prosperous.”

The workshop centered on “The Great Reset” report, which presents two paths for fundamentally restructuring the European Union  —  specifically advocating for dismantling the European Commission and the European Court of Justice and even renaming the EU to the “European Community of Nations.” This framework aligns precisely with the long-standing campaign by Hungary’s Orbán government to hollow out EU institutions while retaining access to their financial benefits.

The Hungarian report similarly draws inspiration from the success of  Project 2025. “The Great Reset” proposes transforming the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, into “a General Secretariat operating in the service of and under the supervision and direction of Member States.” This policy seeks to wrest power from the EU in order to maintain Hungarian authoritarianism. Project 2025 also envisions reconfiguring federal agencies under enhanced presidential control and detailing plans for Schedule F reclassification, purging federal employees and replacing them with Trump loyalists in order to give him absolute control, similar to that wielded by Orbán. Different means to the same end.

Both reports target judicial constraint. The MCC report recommends “redefining the Court of Justice of the European Union” to eliminate its interpretive authority, while Project 2025 outlines strategies for curbing judicial review and expanding executive privilege. This goal of deconstructing the administrative state became attainable when the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron decision in 2024. Established in 1976, this precedent required courts to defer to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes.

The Hungarian blueprint advocates “a comprehensive audit of the EU budget and all publicly funded projects” with particular emphasis on identifying “DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) Advocacy.”  Project 2025 similarly targeted all things “woke,” which Trump has been vigorously battling since day one in the White House.

The relationship between the two was carefully cultivated over the past several years. In March 2023, Heritage formalized cooperation with the Danube Institute, a think tank funded through channels tied to Orbán’s government. This agreement established a rotating fellowship program that placed Heritage researchers in Budapest for extended residencies.

In October 2024, Heritage president Kevin Roberts received the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of Hungary. This honor came after Orbán’s March 2024 visit to the U.S., where he ignored President Biden and met with Trump and Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago. Orbán also addressed staff at Heritage’s headquarters in a closed-door meeting, solidifying their close relationship.

The Hungarian connection offers crucial context for understanding Project 2025’s broader implications; its policies were put to the test in Hungary and succeeded in toppling a government that once seemed firmly anchored in democracy. The United States, under Christian nationalism, may well be following suit.