Project 2025: Junk Food and Parents Rights

I can’t wait for the all-new Trumpalicious Chips, made with Alex Jones’ elixirs guaranteed to boost my manhood

For those of you who haven’t been following along, I am doing a deeper dive into Project 2025, covering each chapter in the 900 page document in the order that they appear. (At the end of this article there are links to previous essays.)

Today that means we’ll be looking at the chapters on the Department of Agriculture and Education, each summarizing years of quasi-libertarian and undercover theocratic rhetoric. As is true with every governmental department covered in Project 2025, they start with the premise of purging civil servants and installing loyalists.

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Department of Agriculture by Darren Bakst* This is the starting place for schemes to undermine policies put in place addressing the impacts and potential of climate change, along with any references to equity.

Efficiently producing safe food would be the new mantra, reshaping the Department to eliminate “government hurdles to food production,” by removing safety and regulatory controls on large-scale farming and producers of agricultural products. 

P2025 mandates an USDA exit from United Nations programs favoring sustainable development, repealing the Federal labeling law in favor of voluntary disclosures, and repealing or reforming USDA dietary guidelines. And let’s not forget an ‘America First’ campaign to lessen imports (Enjoy those avocados while you can)

Mmmmmm… I can’t wait for the all-new Trumpalicious Chips, made with Alex Jones’ elixirs guaranteed to boost my manhood…. 

USDA agricultural activities would be separated from nutritional undertakings covered in the always contentious Farm Bill , with programs like SNAP and the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) benefits program being handed off to Health and Human Services. Eligibility for school lunch programs would be tightened.

Hidden among all the scary stuff about Big Government trampling on poor farmers is the admission that US consumers currently spend about 10% of their personable disposable income on food, among the lowest worldwide.

There’s lots of language concerning subsidy and conservation programs and if I thought any farmers were among my readers, I’d dig deeper. Suffice it to say the USDA under Project 2025’s mandates would become even more of an enabler for corporate control of food production.

Daren Bakst is Deputy Director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Center for Energy and Environment. He is one of the people leading the fight against “climate tyranny,” including subsidies for refrigerators and dishwashers.  

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Department of Education by Leslie Burke* Ultra conservatives have always had an issue with public education. Government funded schools should be limited to workforces needing them for productivity. After all, slaves and women really don’t have any need to read and write. 

So it should surprise nobody that the first sentence in this chapter calls for the Department of Education to be eliminated. Getting the federal government out of book learning and stuff was revived from pre-Civil War tracts after the Supreme Court’s decision leading up to school desegregation.

Going beyond the usual call for Trumpy loyalists to boot out agents of the Deep State, P2025 has prescriptions for education policy just in case demolition isn’t practical at first.

In addition to sharply limiting government support for secular, public education, it advocates for increasing funding for “not only ‘traditional’ liberal arts colleges and research universities but also faith-based institutions, career schools, military academies, and lifelong learning programs.” States could opt out of federal education programs.

This amounts to a shopping cart of right wing ideas to protect children from impure facts and impulses. The states’ school choice and charter experiments have often been a disaster, both for the student learning and thrifty government elements baked in.

California’s capitulation to charter schools has led to massive corruption, with education funding being diverted into the pockets of system managers and fraudulent schools. Arizona’s voucher system for school choice has led to the children of the wealthy getting subsidized and the state budget being eaten away. Despite Texas’ authoritarian governance, Gov Abbott’s school voucher proposal hasn’t made it through the legislature thanks to Republican legislators from rural districts where public schools are the only viable choice.

“Solutions” for two of the right’s biggest fears, equity for historically disadvantaged students and non-majoritarian expressions of sexuality and gender are woven throughout the Project 2025 chapter on education.

Protections for those accused of sexual misconduct* is on the wishlist, along with shifting responsibility for education of “federal” children -- students in military families, D.C. residents, Native Americans -- to agencies serving these groups. Trust me, I went to an “American school” while living in Spain as a child. It was less than a desirable experience. .

(*The need for protections of sex offenders is obviously driven by the fact that so many religious leaders and Republican functionaries keep getting busted for molesting children and teenagers.)

Student loans have been in the forefront of public discourse for many years, mostly stories about difficulty in paying off balances and the adverse effects it has on people’s lives. Project 2025 addresses those concerns by rolling back President Biden’s forgiveness of student loans and making it harder to gain access.

Among the things missing is an acknowledgement that school systems are largely a state and local responsibility. So, despite all the mutterings about parents rights (the term used by religious bigots) and school choice, enactment of P2025’s priorities would amount to a massive federal intervention in  education.

Critical thinking and civics? Nah. They’re looking to turn out good little soldiers and wives. 

Philosophically speaking, P2025 would minimize the role of education as public good by making it an individual “choice.”

*Leslie Burke is Director of the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation. She also serves as a fellow at EdChoice, the namesake foundation of Milton and Rose Friedman, on the national advisory board of Learn4Life, a network of public charter schools serving “opportunity youth,” on the board of the Educational Freedom Institute, on the advisory board of the Independent Women’s Forum’s Education Freedom Center, and as a Trustee of Choice Media.

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Tomorrow: Dirty Everything As Policy in Project 2025

Previously:

(Intro) Digging Deep into Project 2025 - (a multi-part Series)
Going Deep into Project 2025 - Partisan Priorities for Civil Servants
Project 2025: Christian Soldiers Marching Off to Land Wars
Homeland Security’s Authoritarian Role in Project 2025
What Can You Do For Trump Today? Project 2025’s Diplomats, Spies and Spokespersons
No Soup For You: Project 2025’s Foreign Aid Program
Project 2025’s National Nightmare for “The General Welfare”

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Tuesday’s Other News to Think About

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Cheatle: Gone But Not Forgotten by Jeff Stein at Spytalk

• But it will happen again, if chronic problems of understaffing, bad management and poor morale in the Secret Service aren’t fixed fast. Republican attacks on Kamala Harris, from Trump and J.D. Vance down to their shills on Fox News, are already so personal and incendiary that they’re bound to excite some MAGA hothead or a deranged kid like Thomas Crooks to take a shot.

• Former DHS chief of intelligence John Cohen warned last week that, thanks to administration bumbling, the security situation was rapidly unravelling at a time of maximum danger.

• “This is the most dangerous threat environment that I’ve experienced in the 40-plus years that I’ve been involved in law enforcement and homeland security,” Cohen told SpyTalk Contributing Editor Michael Isikoff on the Spytalk podcast.

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Conservatives want to give more votes to white families by Jordan Zakarin at Progress Report

• A new paper previewed in the Koch-owned, libertarian-flavored Reason Magazine advances the idea that parents should be able to cast votes on behalf of their children, and that states have the power to authorize it. Here’s a bit from the abstract:

• Children are 23% of all citizens; they have distinct interests; and they already count for electoral districting. But because they lack the maturity to vote for themselves, their interests don't count proportionally at the polls. The result is policy that observably disserves children's interests and violates a deep principle of democratic fairness: that citizens, through voting, can make political power respond to their interests.

• If this sounds ridiculous, the authors anticipated that you would say that and came up with an offensive rebuttal. From the intro:

• Today it's so unquestioned that even pointing it out can seem like a silly provocation rather than a serious policy proposal. Deep assumptions are like that: questioning them always seems crazy at first. The suggestion that women should be allowed to vote once spurred derision, until wave upon wave of challenging assumptions produced the Nineteenth Amendment. Of course, there's a crucial difference: unlike the women who demanded their right to vote, children really are incompetent to vote their interests, at least at a sufficiently young age. One might disagree whether 18 is the right line, but surely something is: 8-year-olds aren't competent to vote their interests.

• So our claim isn't that children should be able to vote from birth; our claim is that their parents should cast votes for them.

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Things That Matter, Desperately via Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance

• Kamala Harris is not officially in yet, but as of tonight, enough delegates have committed to her for her to become the Democratic nominee. She campaigned in earnest today, telling Americans, “I was a courtroom prosecutor. In those roles I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump's type.”

• We know what Trump thinks about women. He tells us all the time. Whether it’s the way he treats his wives, the sexual encounter with Stormy Daniels, the sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll, or the grotesque way he’s talked about he own daughter Ivanka. Women are sexualized. And women are stupid in his view. He did that today with Kamala Harris, calling her “dumb as a rock.”

• Today, it’s all fun and games, and we’re entitled to enjoy it, but we know what’s coming. So, get ready to vote. Democrats must make sure that neither Trump nor Vance has the chance to impose a national abortion ban. Democrats must win sufficient majorities in both houses of Congress if they intend to restore protections for abortion. Women and their allies need to vote like their lives depend on it this year, because quite literally, they do.