Rick Hess is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in D.C. that is underwritten in part by the billionaire DeVos family. I have always had very pleasant and rewarding exchanges with Rick, who is a very amiable guy. He often tries to stake out a middle ground on controversial issues, as he does here. He argues that he doesn’t know what Trump will do on education, if re-elected, and neither does anyone else. But he concludes that Trump is unikely to do anything radical in the way of defunding education programs or dismantling the Department. So, don’t believe what he says and disregard Project 2025.

Somehow I’m not assuaged.

Hess writes in Education Next:

This summer, musing on the Republican National Convention, I noted that the GOP has been fundamentally remade since 2016—a point deemed self-evident by right-leaning pundits (MAGA and Never-Trump alike) but that seems insufficiently appreciated by a whole lot of other observers.

This has yielded a lot of certainty in education circles as to what would happen under a Trump 2.0, much of which I find pretty dubious. I’ve done interviews with reporters who seem to take it as given that Trump would slash Title I, IDEA, and Pell Grants. One write-up after another has emphatically declared that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook is the blueprint for Trump 2.0. There’s a remarkable confidence that Trump’s administration would embrace budget-cutting, small-government, Mike Pence–Betsy DeVos conservatism, only far more aggressively than the last go-round.

Now, might they be right? Sure. But it’s not the way to bet. I want to take a moment to explain why.

For starters, keep in mind that Trump has never been a conservative in any traditional sense. He’s a showman, reality TV star, and longtime Democrat who stumbled into the presidency. In 2016, as the newbie in a party dominated by Tea Party and Reaganite conservatives, he was obligated to name Mike Pence VP and issue a list of Federalist Society–vetted Supreme Court nominees. Today, Trump is no longer so constrained: he is the Republican Party. Traditional conservatives—from Dick Cheney to Mitt Romney to Paul Ryan—have been purged. Trump’s VP pick is now J.D. Vance, a former Never-Trumper who subsequently bent the knee. Trump has thrown the pro-life wing of the GOP coalition under the bus, torn up a half-century of Republican foreign policy, and dumped those who advised him on judges last time.

The shift is only partly about Trump being unfettered. It’s also about the remaking of the Republican coalition. Republicans have bled socially moderate, fiscally conservative college grads while gaining working-class voters who kind of like New Deal/Great Society-type spending. Pence was a Reaganite, a small-government conservative who wanted to cut programs and reduce spending. Vance is a NatCon, an economic populist who greeted the news that Liz Cheney would be voting for Harris by denouncing the former member of the House Republican leadership as someone who gets “rich when America’s sons and daughters go off to die.” Where Reaganite conservatives talked about the need to reform Social Security and Medicare, Trump has promised he won’t touch them. This is decidedly not the Romney-Ryan Republican Party.

So, while it seems to elude much of the education commentariat, it should be regarded as an open question as to whether Trump 2.0 would actually commit to much budget-cutting or shrinking of the bureaucracy when it comes to education. Indeed, when asked about child care, Trump recently offered a word salad suggesting that his proposed tariffs would help fund a major expansion of federal programs. Last year, he pitched a federally-funded “American Academy,” which would open new vistas for Washington’s role in providing higher education. Trump has obviously promised aggressive action on key cultural hot points—from defunding anti-Semitic colleges to busting the higher-ed accreditation cartel—and such moves, while obviously right-leaning, imply a need for a robust federal presence.

As National Review’s Andy McCarthy observed in his debate postmortem last week, “Because he’s an opportunist with some conservative leanings, rather than a conservative in search of opportunities to advance the cause, Trump often can’t decide whether to deride Harris’s cynical policy shifts or try to get to her left.” Even in Trump’s first term, when he had an experienced team of small-government true believers, there was little cutting and a whole lot of deficit spending. Recall that it was Trump who supported the first big tranche of unconditional pandemic aid for schools, initiated the hugely expensive student loan pause, and spent his first term watching spending climb on programs he’d promised to cut.

Now, some readers may protest: “Yeah, but Trump told Elon Musk we should abolish the Department of Education, and Heritage’s Project 2025 calls for cutting education spending!” Fair points. Trump has made a slew of contradictory promises, and neither the GOP platform nor his track record offer much clarity as to what should be believed. After all, even as Trump was saying he’d like to abolish the Department, he was emphatically denouncing Project 2025 (written by first-term staff who may not be welcome back in a Trump 2.0) and insisting he hasn’t read it.

What’s the bottom line? The truth is that no one really knows how a Trump 2.0 would go. I’ll keep this simple: anyone who claims to know . . . doesn’t. It’s not clear who is advising Trump on education, who (other than his kids) would inhabit his inner circle, how much sway Vance will have, or who would make key calls on staffing. That said, it seems to me that there are three scenarios for a Trump 2.0 when it comes to education. Here they are, from least likely to most likely.

Trump Drains the Swamp. Trump governs as a Beltway-draining, government-cutting conservative, even after aggressively disavowing Heritage’s Project 2025, promising not to touch entitlements, and failing to downsize the federal education footprint in his first term. He goes after Title I, IDEA, and Pell, and he leans on Congress to dismantle the Department of Education. It’s doubtful he could convince centrist GOP senators like Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski to go along with it, though, meaning Republicans would need a stunningly good election night in the Senate contests to put any of this in play.

Trump Seeks Retribution. Trump devotes his energy to waging his war of “retribution” on his “enemies”—going after the press, Democrats, and any RINOs who’ve earned his ire. His White House spends its time seeking to pull the U.S. out of our international commitments and launching a federally organized deportation effort as part of an aggressive immigration strategy. Amidst the maelstrom, education gets left to the White House’s domestic policy team and whoever winds up staffing the Department of Education—but little happens because of the energy consumed by the tumult and its aftermath.

Trump Puts Trump First. Trump approaches education through the same Trump-first lens as most issues. Because Trump likes things that are popular, he’ll slam colleges, gesture towards school choice, and bark at wokeness but won’t put any meaningful effort into cutting education spending or downsizing the Department. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he emulates Biden-Harris by treating education as a pandering piñata. Rather than tough-minded budget cuts, I think he’s more likely to endorse universalizing free school lunch, tripling federal spending on IDEA (for “our very beautiful children with special needs”), or making college loans interest-free à la Sen. Rubio’s new bill.

Look, I’ll be the first to concede I could well be wrong. Trump’s an impulsive creature and, should he win, it’s a guessing game who’d wind up calling the shots on education in Trump 2.0. But if I had to bet, given what we know today, I strongly suspect the feverish talk of defunding and dismantling federal education will prove little more than a fever dream.