Reading Project 2025, part 2: changing the military, Homeland Security, diplomacy, and higher education

How might a likely second Trump administration impact higher education? How can academics plan for and anticipate that major event, should it occur?

This week we continue our reading of Project 2025, a key document in understanding the near- and medium-term future of American politics. This is an online, open, and distributed reading and anyone can participate. Here’s a post explaining how it works. You can find all of our Project 2025 posts here.

Before we start, I wanted to thank John Warner for writing positively about our reading at Inside Higher Ed. Welcome, new readers!

In today’s post I’ll summarize this week’s reading, which is the section called “The Common Defense” in pages 87–199. I’ll draw out the bits which bear directly on higher education. Next I’ll add some reflections and then several discussion questions. At the end I’ll add some more resources. Please join in with comments below — for examples of that, you can see good comments at the end of our first post.

Summary overview

With this section the book turns to three major government agencies, the Departments of Defense, State, and Homeland Security, with an eye towards overhauling them.

In the first chapter former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller criticizes the DoD with being too concerned with equity and vaccines…