The Trump Administration and Project 2025 as a Blueprint for a New Social Compact: Is This What You Voted For?
In the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, the Trump administration wasted no time unveiling Project 2025, a sweeping policy roadmap that lays out a vision for dramatic restructuring of American institutions. Marketed as a comprehensive agenda for national renewal, it promises to reassert “freedom” and “choice.” However, a closer examination reveals an agenda steeped in neoliberalism and neocolonialism—one designed to dismantle public goods, entrench inequalities, and consolidate power within the hands of the ruling class.
Trump’s narrow electoral victory, achieved through razor-thin margins in key “battleground states,” underscores a critical reality: this administration does not have a popular mandate for its radical proposals. In fact, Trump lost the popular vote by millions. Once again, the electoral college—a relic designed to protect the interests of wealthy landowners and capital—will enable a minority-backed administration to wield disproportionate power. By amplifying the weight of rural and conservative votes, this system skews election outcomes, creating the illusion of broad support for policies that often lack public backing.
This disconnect between governance and popular will is central to the story of Project 2025. Its proposals represent nothing less than a fundamental rewriting of the American social compact, executed without negotiation, public consensus, or even a meaningful vote. Under the guise of reform, the agenda seeks to privatise public goods like education, erode long-standing civil rights protections, and strip away the supports that have historically uplifted marginalised communities. At its heart lies a calculated effort to transform the relationship between citizens and their government—from one of shared responsibility to one where individuals must fend for themselves in an increasingly unequal society.
Far from being a neutral blueprint for reform, Project 2025 is an ideological manifesto crafted to serve the interests of capital and the ruling class. Its neoliberal policies and neocolonial overtones betray a sinister agenda: to dismantle public infrastructure, suppress dissent, and entrench systemic hierarchies that favour the few over the many. This is not reform—it is a blueprint for regression, and the stakes could not be higher.
The Neoliberal Framework: Education as a Commodity
At the heart of Project 2025 lies a central tenet of neoliberalism: the commodification of public goods. Nowhere is this clearer than in the proposals targeting education. Policies like “universal school choice” are framed as empowering families and increasing educational options, but this rhetoric masks a more insidious agenda. Far from fostering equity, these initiatives serve as a vehicle to defund public schools and divert taxpayer money into private institutions, many of which are religious. This is not “choice;” it is the dismantling of public education under the guise of reform.
Vouchers and Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) play a central role in this strategy. While presented as tools for parental empowerment, they exacerbate existing inequities by funnelling resources to families who are already privileged enough to afford private education. Meanwhile, public schools—already underfunded and tasked with educating the most vulnerable populations—are left to shoulder an even greater burden with fewer resources. By treating education as a marketable commodity rather than a public good, these policies reduce learning to a transaction, where quality and access are determined by a family’s wealth and geography.
This erosion of public goods is not new. Neoliberalism has long championed the dismantling of public institutions, from healthcare to utilities, replacing them with profit-driven models that prioritise efficiency over equity. The education proposals outlined in Project 2025 mirror these global trends, treating schools not as community pillars but as markets ripe for exploitation. This transformation shifts the purpose of education from fostering an informed and equitable society to reinforcing social hierarchies under the banner of competition and choice.
The consequences for marginalised communities are devastating. Students with disabilities, English learners, and children from low-income families are disproportionately harmed by policies that drain resources from the public schools they rely on. Without robust public funding, these students face larger class sizes, fewer specialised services, and diminished access to extracurricular opportunities. The ideological drive to privatise education ignores the lived realities of millions of children and families, treating their needs as collateral damage in the pursuit of profit. Far from empowering families, these proposals deepen disparities and ensure that the promise of a quality education remains out of reach for those who need it most.
Breaking Promises: Public Service Loan Forgiveness and Beyond
Among the many proposals in Project 2025, the plan to terminate the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) programme before many participants receive the forgiveness they were promised stands out as a stark betrayal. PSLF was created as a cornerstone of the social contract, encouraging public service by offering a pathway to financial relief for those who dedicate their careers to roles like teaching, social work, and healthcare. The decision to retroactively deny these benefits not only breaks trust but also undermines the fundamental idea that the government will honour agreements made in good faith.
For participants, this proposal is more than an inconvenience—it is a catastrophic reversal of their financial planning. Many have structured their lives around the promise that years of public service would lead to loan forgiveness, sacrificing higher salaries in the private sector for the chance to make a difference in their communities. Stripping this away midstream reflects a profound indifference to the commitments these individuals have made and the critical services they provide.
This move is emblematic of a broader pattern of policy betrayal. Neoliberalism thrives on eroding collective responsibility, shifting systemic burdens onto individuals whilst erasing public obligations. The student loan crisis is a direct result of policies that have commodified education, treating higher learning as a personal investment rather than a societal good. Proposals to eliminate PSLF and block broader student loan forgiveness signal an unwillingness to address the root causes of this crisis. Instead, they deepen the financial precarity of borrowers, reinforcing cycles of inequality.
This disregard for commitments like PSLF underscores a larger ideological agenda: to dismantle the very idea of a shared social contract. By prioritising individual responsibility over collective solutions, these policies reveal a neoliberal disdain for public obligations and a deliberate attempt to rewrite the rules in favour of capital, no matter the cost to the public.
Cultural Hegemony: The Neocolonial Agenda in Education
The education policies in Project 2025 are not just about shifting resources or redefining priorities—they are a deliberate attempt to impose cultural hegemony, reinforcing a worldview that prioritises conformity and suppresses dissent. These proposals reflect a neocolonial mindset, using education as a tool to erase diversity, undermine critical thinking, and entrench systemic hierarchies under the guise of reform. Lindsey Burke’s work in this arena exemplifies the Heritage Foundation’s broader mission: to dismantle public education as a public good and replace it with a system designed to perpetuate a singular, exclusionary cultural narrative.
Central to this effort is the attack on inclusive curricula. Project 2025 seeks to eliminate subjects like ethnic studies, gender studies, and LGBTQ+ perspectives, framing them as “divisive” rather than essential to understanding a diverse society. This erasure is not incidental—it is a continuation of neocolonial strategies to enforce cultural dominance. By narrowing the scope of what is taught, these policies reinforce a cis, white, male-dominated narrative of history and society, silencing the voices and experiences of marginalised communities. Just as colonial powers sought to erase Indigenous knowledge and replace it with Eurocentric ideologies, these proposals aim to suppress perspectives that challenge the status quo.
Religious education plays a key role in this agenda. Through policies like “universal school choice,” Project 2025 prioritises funding for religious schools, framing them as a solution to “declining moral values” and societal cohesion. However, this is not about choice—it is about ensuring conformity to conservative ideologies. The historical parallels are clear: colonial education systems were often religiously driven, designed to “civilise” Indigenous populations by eradicating their cultural identities. Similarly, today’s push for religious schooling undercuts public education’s role as a space for diverse ideas and critical engagement, instead promoting obedience, individualism, and deference to authority—values that align neatly with neoliberal capitalism.
Burke’s proposals do not stop at curricula; they extend to those who deliver and shape education. By eliminating teacher certification requirements and devaluing professional qualifications, this Heritage Foundation propagandist seeks to delegitimise expertise, making the field more susceptible to ideological infiltration. This mirrors broader neoliberal strategies to erode labour protections and devalue specialised skills, enabling greater control by those in power. Burke herself, a researcher with no teaching experience, exemplifies this dynamic. Her lack of expertise underscores the ideological rather than educational motivations behind these policies. They are not designed to serve students or communities but to reshape education into a mechanism for cultural and economic dominance.
Critical thinking is another casualty of this agenda. Educators and librarians who advocate for inclusive curricula and diverse materials are increasingly targeted as threats rather than stewards of knowledge. This suppression is intentional: the broader goal is to restrict access to perspectives that challenge the dominant narrative, maintaining cultural hegemony under the pretext of protecting traditional values. By erasing dissenting voices, the Heritage Foundation aims to create a generation of students less equipped to question systemic injustices and more inclined to accept the world as it is presented to them.
The Heritage Foundation’s agenda thus reflects a calculated effort to remake education as a tool of cultural control. This is not about reforming education to better serve students—it is about ensuring that the next generation is shaped by a narrow, exclusionary worldview that prioritises obedience and conformity over critical engagement and equity. The stakes are not just educational; they are societal, as these policies threaten to erode the foundational principles of diversity and democracy in favour of ideological dominance.
Economic Hierarchies: Debt, Credentialism, and Deprofessionalisation
The economic policies embedded in Project 2025 reveal a calculated effort to entrench hierarchies by leveraging debt, devaluing credentials, and undermining professional standards. These measures are not just about restructuring education and employment; they are designed to reinforce class divisions, limit upward mobility, and secure the dominance of the ruling class. By perpetuating economic precarity for working-class Americans, these policies transform public institutions into instruments of control rather than opportunities for empowerment.
Debt plays a central role in this strategy. The proposal to eliminate PLUS loan programmes and block student loan forgiveness ensures that higher education remains accessible only to the wealthy. For the millions of Americans who have taken on debt in good faith, including those enrolled in existing forgiveness programmes, the retroactive termination of these agreements represents a profound betrayal. The legal and ethical implications are staggering. Contracts like PSLF are meant to establish trust between individuals and their government. Yet, time and again, the U.S. government has rewritten these agreements midstream, leaving borrowers with no recourse. This pattern of broken promises highlights a broader disregard for the principle of good faith in governance. The result is a system that perpetuates economic dependency, as borrowers are trapped in cycles of debt that limit their financial and social mobility.
Credentialism is another tool used to reinforce economic hierarchies. Project 2025’s proposal to eliminate degree requirements for state government positions may seem like an egalitarian move, but it effectively undercuts professionalism whilst reinforcing class divisions. Privileged individuals can still leverage elite networks and private credentials to access high-paying positions, whilst working-class Americans are denied pathways to upward mobility. This double standard ensures that wealth and privilege remain concentrated at the top, even as the barriers for entry into the middle class become increasingly insurmountable.
Teaching, too, is targeted for deprofessionalisation. By removing certification requirements, Project 2025 reduces teaching to a transactional role rather than a skilled profession requiring pedagogical expertise. This shift has long-term implications for the quality of public education, particularly in underfunded schools that already struggle to attract and retain qualified educators. It also reflects a broader neoliberal strategy to weaken organised labour, as deprofessionalisation undermines the collective bargaining power of teachers and other skilled workers.
Together, these policies reveal a sinister agenda: to transform economic systems and public institutions into mechanisms for preserving inequality. Debt, credentialism, and deprofessionalisation are not incidental consequences but deliberate tools of control, ensuring that opportunities for social mobility remain out of reach for all but the most privileged.
Electoral College and the Manufactured Mandate
The 2024 presidential election highlighted once again the disconnect between the popular will and the mechanisms of power in the United States. Despite losing the popular vote, Donald Trump secured the presidency through the electoral college, a relic of American governance explicitly designed to amplify the influence of wealthy elites. Far from reflecting the democratic aspirations of the people, the electoral college operates as a safeguard for minority rule, protecting the interests of capital and the ruling class. As Robert Ovetz writes in We the Elites, “The Constitution was written to entrench a ruling oligarchy while providing the illusion of popular control.” Nowhere is this more evident than in the electoral college, which continues to distort the democratic process, ensuring that power remains concentrated in the hands of those least accountable to the majority.
This system is not a bug but a feature, deeply embedded in what Sal Mayweather calls “the American experiment,” an ongoing project to preserve the dominance of a privileged few under the guise of democratic governance. The electoral college inflates the political weight of rural and conservative states, allowing their preferences to override the will of voters in more populous, diverse regions. The result is a manufactured mandate that grants disproportionate power to administrations that do not represent the majority of Americans. The Trump victory in 2024 is not an anomaly but part of a broader pattern in which the electoral college serves as a tool for suppressing popular challenges to the established order.
This manufactured mandate has profound implications for democracy, particularly when paired with the sweeping ambitions of Project 2025. The proposals within this document represent a fundamental rewriting of the American social compact, yet they are being implemented without public vote, negotiation, or consensus. Policies that would reshape education, dismantle public services, and erode civil rights are being framed as reforms when, in reality, they are impositions. The absence of democratic input in crafting and advancing Project 2025 reveals the systemic indifference of the ruling class to the will of the people. It is governance by fiat, designed to further entrench inequality and suppress dissent.
By presenting Project 2025 as a roadmap for the future, the Trump administration is exploiting its tenuous hold on power to impose an agenda that prioritises the interests of the few over the needs of the many. As Ovetz reminds us, “The illusion of consent is the foundation of oligarchic control.” The electoral college, with its outsized influence on the political process, plays a central role in maintaining this illusion, allowing administrations like Trump’s to govern as though they have the backing of a majority they do not possess.
This rewriting of the social compact without democratic accountability is a stark reminder of the fragility of American democracy. When policies like those in Project 2025 are enacted without the legitimacy of public consensus, they become a tool for consolidating power rather than serving the common good. The disparity between the popular vote and the electoral outcome in 2024 is not just a quirk of the system—it is a warning of how far the nation has strayed from the ideals of self-governance and equity. If left unchecked, this manufactured mandate threatens to deepen the fractures in American society, creating a democracy in name only.
Final Thoughts …
Project 2025 represents a deliberate and far-reaching effort to rewrite the American social compact, privileging profit, ideology, and the consolidation of power over the public good, equity, and democratic principles. Under the guise of reform, it seeks to dismantle public education, erode civil rights protections, and deepen systemic inequalities, all whilst sidestepping the democratic process. This is not a roadmap for a brighter future—it is a blueprint for regression, one that serves the interests of the ruling class while leaving the majority of Americans increasingly disenfranchised and vulnerable.
The stakes could not be higher. If enacted, the policies outlined in Project 2025 will have generational consequences, transforming education into a “market-driven commodity,” hollowing out the protections that ensure equal opportunities for marginalised communities, and entrenching hierarchies that limit social mobility. The dismantling of public education alone threatens to undermine one of the few remaining institutions capable of fostering equity and community cohesion. Coupled with attacks on civil rights and the imposition of a narrow, exclusionary cultural agenda, these changes will leave an indelible mark on the nation’s social fabric.
Resisting this agenda requires urgent and sustained action. Advocacy, education, and coalition-building are essential to expose the true nature of Project 2025 and to mobilise against its implementation. Public education must be defended as a cornerstone of democracy and a vital tool for promoting social equity. It is imperative to challenge the neoliberal and neocolonial assumptions that underpin this agenda, reclaiming the social compact through policies that reflect the needs and values of the many, not the privileged few.
The fight against Project 2025 is not just about protecting specific programmes or policies—it is about safeguarding the principles of democracy, equity, and shared responsibility. The time to act is now, before these changes become entrenched, ensuring that the future reflects the aspirations of a diverse and inclusive society rather than the dictates of an unaccountable elite.