Project 2025 Targets the Department of Education for Dismantling Public Input and Privatizing Student Loans
Project 2025 calls for eliminating negotiated rulemaking for the Department of Education under the Higher Education Act, rescinding the NEA's federal charter, and privatizing federal student loans. These proposals would gut public participation in education regulation, weaken teacher unions, and shift risk onto students and taxpayers.
Project 2025's Chapter 12 targets the Department of Education with proposals that would dismantle public input mechanisms and privatize the federal student loan system. The chapter calls for eliminating the negotiated rulemaking requirement under the Higher Education Act, which is the primary process through which stakeholders—including students, parents, educators, and civil rights advocates—have a formal seat at the table when federal education regulations are written. The source text dismisses this process as a 'three-ring circus' and suggests replacing it with public hearings, which offer far less opportunity for meaningful deliberation. As of this writing, the administration has not yet proposed legislation to eliminate negotiated rulemaking, but the January 20, 2025 executive order declaring a national energy emergency and the broader pattern of deregulatory action signal that the administration is willing to bypass democratic processes to achieve its aims. If enacted, this change would concentrate power in the hands of political appointees and industry lobbyists, stripping communities—especially low-income and rural families who rely on federal student aid—of their voice in education policy.
The chapter also proposes rescinding the National Education Association's federal charter and privatizing federal student loans, returning to a system where private lenders backed by government guarantees compete to offer loans. This would reintroduce the same conflicts of interest that led to the 2008 financial crisis and the student debt crisis—private lenders profiting while taxpayers bear the risk. The chapter frames teacher unions as 'radical special interest groups' and the NEA's charter as a 'false impression' of federal support, ignoring the fact that unions are democratic organizations representing millions of educators. Rescinding the charter would not save taxpayer money—it would silence the largest professional organization of teachers, making it harder for educators to advocate for smaller class sizes, fair pay, and safe schools. Combined with the elimination of negotiated rulemaking, these proposals would effectively remove educators, students, and families from any meaningful role in shaping education policy.
The humanitarian alternative
Congress should reject the repeal of negotiated rulemaking and instead strengthen it with binding timelines and transparency requirements. At the same time, the administration should immediately halt new oil and gas leases on public lands, reinstate the Paris Agreement, and redirect subsidies to clean energy, with a just transition for workers and frontline communities.
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 12: Department of Energy (pp 373-375)"— 340 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise published by October 1 if they are to be implemented by July 1st of the subsequent year) compounds the problem, making it unduly challenging to update regulations as needed to keep pace with changes in education, finance, accounting, pedagogy, and student assessment. In recent decades, negotiated rulemaking has become a veritable three-ring circus, replete with negotiators who use their Twitter accounts and other social media feeds during negotiations to denigrate the process and their peer negoti - ators in real time. A few Members of Congress use the public comment process to deliver political speeches, apparently to raise their own profiles but without adding any new information to the process. Some advocacy groups have latched onto the process for fundraising purposes, sometimes misrepresenting negotiation language to agitate followers and supporters and encourage them to make financial contributions. At times, the department itself has appeared to sabotage consensus, which enables them to write the regulation as they wish and without regard to the concerns raised by negotiators. l The Department of Educati…"