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Project 2025’s Impact on Education, Books, & Reading

Rebecca Joines Schinsky

Chief of Staff

Rebecca Joines Schinsky is the executive director of product and ecommerce at Riot New Media Group. She co-hosts All the Books! and the Book Riot Podcast. Follow her on Twitter: @rebeccaschinsky.

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You’ve probably been hearing about Project 2025, the 920-page document outlining the “presidential transition plan” for the next Republican administration. Created by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation in partnership with hundreds of right-wing organizations, Project 2025 lays out a 180-day “playbook” for leveraging the full powers of the federal government—along with some powers these creeps only wish the federal government had—to “start undoing the damage the Left has wrought and build a better country for all Americans in 2025.” It is, in a word, batshit.

There’s not an aspect of public or private life that Project 2025 doesn’t touch on, and its aims are so extreme and out of step with what the vast majority of Americans want that Vice President Harris recently remarked, “Can you believe they put that in writing?” But put it in writing they did, and that means we don’t have to take their word for it when they say things like, “Project 2025’s policy reforms would strengthen our education system.”

Nine hundred pages of Make America Gilead Again1 is a lot to comb through, and the good folks at EveryLibrary have done just that. This week, they released a statement outlining Project 2025’s impact on education and libraries, noting that it “would dismantle important parts of how public libraries build communities, how schools support students and families, and how higher education supports the next generation of scholars.” Here’s just a taste of the plans:

  • eliminate the Department of Education
  • close the only source of federal funding for public libraries and state libraries (the Institute of Museums and Library Services)
  • phase out Title I support for the poorest schools
  • scale back Civil Rights enforcement in the name of parents’ rights
  • advocate for increased censorship and discourages educators from providing diverse materials, limiting students’ access to comprehensive educational resources
  • allege criminal conduct by librarians, publishers, authors, and educators
  • support criminal charges and incarceration of librarians, publishers, authors, and educators
  • make significant changes to higher education that would undermine academic freedom and restricting access to research and materials that are essential for higher education and critical inquiry

Convicted felon Donald Trump has been trying to distance himself from Project 2025 precisely because it is wildly unpopular with voters, but make no mistake: The Heritage Foundation and the coalition that created Project 2025 are filled with Trump’s associates, including former Trump administration senior officials, conservative Republican leaders, and friends and confidants of the once and hopefully-never-again president. Oh, and Trump’s own VP candidate JD Vance wrote the foreword for a new book by Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts.

This is terrifying stuff, and we have to fight back so we don’t go back. What can you do? Register to vote. Sign EveryLibrary’s petition to stop Project 2025. Subscribe to Book Riot’s Literary Activism newsletter to stay informed. Talk to your friends and family.

  1. Not a typo, go read The Handmaid’s Tale ↩︎

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