Agenda 47: the bullet point replacement for Project 2025

Every four years during presidential campaigns, Republicans and Democrats release their Party Platforms.¹

Democrats released a draft of the their Platform in July, and it could easily be titled, “We’re not Donald Trump.” Trump’s name appears on 61 of the Platform’s 80 pages, totaling nearly 150 mentions. They’ll release the official version at there Convention, which begins next Monday in Chicago.

Republicans released their Platform a month ago at their Convention in Milwaukee. They took pains, as did candidate Trump, never to mention Project 2025, the 922 page manifesto written by the Heritage Foundation as a step by step guide to implementing extremist conservative policies in a second Trump administration. It took three years to write and cost $22 million to produce. Fifty-four of its contributing writers had high-ranking positions in the first Trump Administration, and all of them would most assuredly like to do the same if Trump wins in November. The authors include Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior advisor for policy and White House director of speechwriting, and Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget.

But because of a large helping of backlash stew, Project 2025 became the literary equivalent of Lord Voldemort at the Republican Convention, the plan that must not be named.

Trump says he “knew nothing about the document,” and doesn’t know the people who wrote it. This is absurd, given that so many of them worked for him, some, like Miller and Vought, with offices near the Oval. Also, in April of 2022 Trump flew to the Heritage Foundation’s annual meeting on a Heritage-chartered luxury jet sitting in a place of honor right beside Kevin Roberts, the Foundation’s president and chief creator of Project 2025.

Trump was the conference’s keynote speaker.

“They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do,” Trump said in his speech. And later in the month, Roberts told the Washington Post, “I personally have talked to President Trump about Project 2025.”

When the Republicans exiled Project 2025 from their Convention, they unveiled Agenda 47, their Platform, in its place, and, except for their names and lengths, there’s not much policy difference between the two. They took all 922 Project 2025 pages and whittled them down to Agenda 47, a 19-page bullet point presentation.

Oh, and by the way, a poorly written bullet point presentation. At least Project 2025 was well written extremism. In reading Agenda 47, I found grammatical errors any copy editor should have found.

Given that Party Platforms are usually full of enough hot air to float the Superdome, Agenda 47 stands out as a monumental achievement in hyperbolic bloviation. Finding lies and disinformation is about as easy as finding wind in a hurricane, but for now, I just want to focus on one remarkable statement Republicans are using to buttress their Agenda 47 (and Project 2025) plan to do away with the U.S. Department of Education, whose  origins go back to 1867, when President Andrew Johnson signed legislation creating the first Department of Education.

Found on Page 13 under the bullet-point heading, “Return education to the States,” this is the reasoning Agenda 47 gives for eliminating the Department:

The United States spends more money per pupil on Education than any other Country in the World, and yet we are at the bottom of every educational list in terms of results.

Both of these assertions are lies. The U.S. does not spend more money on education than any other Country in the World (their capitalizations, not mine), and we are not at the bottom of every educational list in terms of results.

Let me prove that to you.

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), coordinated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), has measured the performance of 15-year-old students in reading, mathematics, and science literacy every 3 years since 2000, except for a 1-year delay in the current cycle (from 2021 to 2022) due to the coronavirus pandemic. In 2022, PISA was administered in 81 countries and education systems, including 37 member countries of the OECD. These were PISA’s conclusions regarding the mathematics and science literacy of U.S. students:

The U.S. average mathematics literacy score (465) was not measurably different from the OECD average score. Compared with the 80 other education systems in PISA 2022, the U.S. average mathematics literacy score was:

• higher than the average in 43 education systems;

• lower than the average in 25 education systems; and

• not measurably different from the average in 12 education systems.

The U.S. average science literacy score (499) was higher than the OECD average score (485). Compared with the 80 other education systems in PISA 2022, the U.S. average science literacy score was

• higher than the average in 56 education systems;

• lower than the average in 9 education systems; and

• not measurably different from the average in 15 education systems.

While U. S. students certainly have room for a lot of improvement, they are no worse than average in mathematics and better than most in science.

Regarding the claim we spend more than any other country, I’m sorry, but that gold medal goes to Luxemburg, and the silver to Norway. True, we spend way more than most, but as a percentage of GDP, while America is at the high end of the scale, our spending is not outlandishly off the charts.

And yet, just like Project 2025, Agenda 47, the Republican Party Platform, “commits” to eliminating the U.S. Department of Education and, by the way, sacking the department’s 4,400 federal professionals.

Educational professionals should read this section of Agenda 47 (it’s one page out of 19). Then they should think about it. And then they should do all in their might to educate (that is what they do) all who will listen. Then, just possibly, they might marshal friends, neighbors and relatives into a movement to vote to defeat the educational plans of Agenda 47 and Project 2025.

Throughout American history, party platforms have been, to put it charitably, aspirational in nature, a means of revving up the faithful and energizing them to get out there and do the door to door work necessary to win the coming election. But Agenda 47 is different. It is not aspirational or hopeful. It is, instead, a dystopian, declaratory, total commitment to a cause, the abhorrent cause of MAGA and Donald Trump. In its Preamble (yes, it has a Preamble), it says, “We will be a Nation based on Truth, Justice, and Common Sense.”

“Common Sense” (initial caps, again) surprised me. I was waiting for “the American way,” and I was expecting to see a picture of Clark Kent, morphing into Superman, hands on hips, standing out in space in front of the rotating earth and a great big American Flag rippling in the nonexistent breeze.

Early Boomers know what I’m talking about. But it seems MAGA enthusiasts don’t.

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In the 2020 campaign, Republicans did not release a Platform.