Lately I've been stumbling over references to something called Project 2025. I'm not big into conspiracy theories, so didn't pay much attention until I saw repeated mentions and warnings from columnists I respect. This week I tracked down the 900+ page Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, released in April,
2023. As the introduction explains:
The 2025 Presidential Transition Project is the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025. ...
History teaches that a President’s power to implement an agenda is at its apex during the Administration’s opening days. To execute requires a well-conceived, coordinated, unified plan and a trained and committed cadre of personnel to implement it...
For conservatives to have a fighting chance to take on the Administrative State and reform our federal government, the work must start now.
From start to finish, the Project 2025 mandate sets up an us-vs-them dynamic that mischaracterizes opponents and politicizes long-standing areas of settled bipartisan policy. The forward summary sets the tone:
Contemporary elites ... repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970s “radical chic” to build the totalitarian cult known today as “The Great Awokening" .... The bad news today is that our political establishment and cultural elite have once again driven America toward decline. The good news is that we know the way out even though the challenges today are not what they were in the 1970s. Conservatives should be confident that we can rescue our kids, reclaim our culture, revive our economy, and defeat the anti-American Left—at home and abroad. We did it before and will do it again.
Over 400 individuals, from dozens of conservative foundations and other institutions, contributed to detailed plans to dismantle federal infrastructure and roll back efforts to promote equity and inclusion. The word equity appears throughout the document as a prime indicator of "woke" agendas in schools, land conservation, military oversight, health care, even the Treasury Department.
I'm doubtful I'll read the entire 900 some pages, but the parts I have read suggest the authors believe "equity" is an anti-Christian, anti-conservative, radical, racist, destructive concept.
What's so bad about equity? Here's a derisive summary from one of the contributing organizations, the Center for Renewing America:
Equity: A forced equality of outcomes and a rejection of equality of opportunity. Equity contradicts the basic constitutional promise of equality under the law and instead requires identity-based prioritization (oppressed) or discrimination (oppressor) in hiring, distribution of benefits, services, government contracts, and any aspect of society where opportunity, resources, and power can be redistributed.
The document would suggest that equity was a fairly recent evil, launched in the radical seventies but brought to fruition by Barack Obama and, even more, by President Joe Biden.
But here's what I read in Psalm 99:4 this morning (scholar-endorsed NIV translation):
The King is mighty, he loves justice—
you have established equity;
in Jacob you have done
what is just and right.
The Hebrew word translated here as "equity" is meyshar (מֵישָׁר) an architectural term sometimes translated as level, at other times translated as fair.
It's hard to be 100% certain of the translation of ancient words from a culture far different from our own. But read the prophetic books with a halfway open mind and you'll see very quickly that part of God's covenant involves treating others as we would want to be treated and ensuring that the least among us are provided for.
Woe to those who mistreatment the poor, the defenseless, the needy, the stranger.
Woe to those who deprive workers their due, or hoard resources while others go hungry.
That sounds like equity to me. Yet any hint of a leveled playing field seems offensive to the authors of Project 2025.
I'll likely be writing more about Project 2025 and prophetic words that apply to current politics, but for today, to bring this closer to home: I've been grieving and praying this week about Pennsylvania budget discussions. The budget deadline was June 30. A final budget has yet to appear.
PA has had decades of inequitable, inadequate funding. A seven year school funding lawsuit ended over a year ago with a Commonwealth Court judge decision that current funding levels are inadequate and unlawful. A proposed budget would take partial steps toward a long-overdue remedy, but some PA leaders are holding out for a new voucher program, more money for tax credit scholarships, and a decrease in PA's flat income tax that would benefit PA's wealthiest earners while doing little to help lower wage earners.
Press statements and social media posts rejecting proposed increases in funding insist instead on school choice and parent empowerment.
Project 2025 lists that as the first agenda item in the section on education:
Advancing education freedom. Empowering families to choose among a diverse set of education options is key to reform and improved outcomes, and it can be achieved without establishing a new federal program. For example, portability of existing federal education spending to fund families directly or allowing federal tax credits to encourage voluntary contributions to K–12 education savings accounts managed by charitable nonprofits, could significantly advance education choice. (p322)
That all sounds great for hearts shaped by privilege and power.
My own heart was shaped by loss, need and a deep gratitude for God's love for the poor and powerless.
I know, from my own experience and that of low-income friends: public funding of school choice may work well for families with two educated parents, ability to research and choose the best (elite) options, and finances available to make up the difference between funds provided and total funds needed.
Choice doesn't work so well for poor rural families where even the local public schools are a long bus ride away.
Or in regions where the only "choices" are small religious schools taught by uncertified teachers.
Or for English language learners whose parents don't speak English.
Choice has little to offer special needs children rejected by private schools that can say "we don't serve kids like these."
It doesn't work well for children whose parents or guardians have no background or bandwidth to seek out options or fulfill private school requirements of volunteer hours.
There's plenty of evidence about the failures of vouchers and misuse of public dollars to provide parents with school choice.
And when it comes to budget bottom lines?
Every dollar spent on private school choice is a dollar less for Pennsylvania's hundreds of underfunded public schools. Many don't have libraries, auditoriums, music and art programs, full-time counselors or after school programs.
Parents, teachers and PA school boards have been crying out for years for adequate, equitable school funding. Will they be heard this year, after decades of being ignored?
For today, NOW, as budget discussions continue, I ask your prayer.
For wisdom for Pennsylvania's legislative leaders as they finalize the budget, for equity and justice in their school funding decisions, and, for us all, to see our own part in embracing equity and ensuring a more just future for every child, no matter who their parents are.
