Ex-prosecutor reveals how Project 2025 would leave Education Department a 'hollow shell'

A former federal prosecutor continued her crusade to expose Project 2025, writing Thursday the MAGA plan to overhaul the federal government would leave the Education Department a "hollow shell."

Joyce Vance, former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, took to her "Civil Discourse" newsletter to issue a searing takedown of the 900-plus page plan, setting her sights on the section that would dismantle America's public education system.

"The most important takeaway from the education chapter of Project 2025 is that the plan is to shut down the U.S. Department of Education," she wrote. "Donald Trump has been saying at recent rallies that it should be disbanded to 'move everything back to the states where it belongs.'"

The Education Chapter, she noted, is 44 pages long.

"They are counting on the fact that no one will read it. So we will," she wrote.

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Vance wrote that it would take Congressional approval to "abolish" the Education Department—but Project 2025 has a "workaround."

"The plan involves dismantling the Department so that all that is left is a hollow shell that can only gather statistics to disseminate. That’s the goal for an agency whose current mission is to 'to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.'"

That, she said, "seems like a good thing, something to improve upon. Not something to eliminate."

Vance shredded Lindsey Burke, the author of the Education Department chapter in the GOP playbook, noting Burke has said federal education policy "should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated."

Burkes' ideas, Vance added, spell "an end to everything we have sought to do with public education in this country."

"It spells the establishment of religion, even at the college level, in ways that are inimical to creating a population that is taught to think, not what to think," she wrote.

Vance argues conservatives wish to gut education because it has roots in the civil rights movement. The playbook specifically says that while the federal government played a small role in public education for most if its history, that changed in 1964.

"In July of that year, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, after Congress reached a consensus that the mistreatment of black Americans was no longer tolerable and merited a federal response," Project 2025 reads. "In the case of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA)2 and the Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA),3 Congress sought to improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged students by providing additional compensatory funding for low-income children and lower-income college students.”

"Now we understand why they want to end the Department of Education," jabbed Vance.