Title IX protections that once shielded transgender students were reversed with the stroke of a pen. Gender identity was stripped from the definition of “sex,” permitting school districts and faith-based academies to refuse enrollment to LGBTQ youth and staff. And to ratchet up pressure, Project 2025 even endorsed federal criminal penalties for educators who “provide banned materials,” turning classrooms into legal minefields.
Behind the scenes, Heritage’s Presidential Administration Academy alumni filled key slots in the Office of Management and Budget, Justice Department, and Education Department. In one January budget meeting, former Project 2025 director Paul Dans watched his conservative wish list come alive.
“It’s actually way beyond my wildest dreams.”
— Paul Dans, former Project 2025 director
The administration’s personnel shuffle read like an index of the Heritage playbook. Russell Vought, author of the education chapter, returned as OMB director to oversee the unraveling of the Department of Education. A team led by veteran conservative lawyers now drafts memos instructing judges to defer to executive discretion at every turn. Meanwhile, a new “Department of Government Efficiency,” nicknamed DOGE and advised by private-sector donors, began reviewing which regulations and programs could be axed—in some cases before Congress even learned of the proposals.
Resistance has rallied in pockets of furious defiance. Civil-rights organizations and the ACLU filed suits to block library closures and funding cuts; PEN America warned that criminalizing library staff would “chill free expression” and violate First Amendment protections; student activists used social media to organize protests on college campuses. Parents, mobilized by local associations, packed school board meetings from Austin to Anchorage. Young voters, long viewed as apathetic, found fresh purpose in fights over community policy.
Yet by Day 98, the cost of this “restoration” was clear. Judicial checks lay dormant, public media outlets teetered on the edge, libraries stood deserted, and classrooms had become bastions of fear. Freedom, once a given, now hung by a tenuous thread.
On a crisp spring morning in Ohio, a first-grade teacher spoke to her students with tears in her voice: “We told you stories so you could imagine better worlds. Now we fight so you can still read them.” It was a reminder that the battle lines are no longer abstract debates in Washington—they run through every town and every family.
“This isn’t politics as usual. It’s a slow dismantling of American freedom.”