Reading Project 2025, part 6: the interior, justice, and labor

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.

In today’s post I’ll summarize this week’s reading, which continues under the header we’ve been working through for three weeks, “The General Welfare,” found on pages 517–617. 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 the Departments of the Interior (DOI), Justice (DOJ), and Labor (DOL).

William Perry Pendley, who ran the DOI’s Bureau of Land Management for the Trump administration, fiercely criticizes the department for being openly partisan (“A department that has twice engaged in…