Project 2025 looks to impose publicly-funded religious education on America. Ohio already has that.

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If you haven’t heard about Project 2025, the dystopian blueprint for a second Trump administration, Google it. There’s a reason the felon angling for a get-out-of-jail-free-card with another White House romp pretends ignorance about the Handmaid’s Tale regime his former senior officials and allies created for him. It’s straight up authoritarian rule under God.

Besides targeting women with no-exception abortion bans and prohibitions on contraceptives, the patriarchal, far-right manifesto for Trumpian tyranny includes ending civil rights, climate change protections, marriage equality, birthright citizenship, a federal government of civil servants (not fascist foot soldiers), and deploying the U.S. military against protesting U.S. citizens. The stuff of nightmares hiding in plain sight.

But, with regard to its extreme policy on faith-based schools financed by government, Ohio beat Project 2025 to the punch in 2024. The game plan leans heavily into the Christian right agenda with proposals for publicly-funded religious schools. Been there. Done that. Meet Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman.

The Lima Republican wrote the book on how to fund religious education at public expense with massive government handouts to every last affluent, private school family in Ohio. But universal vouchers to pay private school tuitions with tax dollars was only the initial salvo to undermine public school funding. The premier champion of Christian schools and privatized education wasn’t satisfied with just blowing a hole in the state’s education budget with an explosion of voucher payments.

In a little noticed government giveaway, tucked into the state’s recently passed capital budget, are general revenue grants awarded to a handful of Christian school construction projects.

Using a one-time fund (released alongside the capital appropriations bill) intended for local community investment, improved infrastructure, enhanced public services, etc., Huffman diverted $250,000 a piece for two private school expansions underway in his district.

While the grants are relatively small, compared to the state’s capital budget, they are hugely significant as the first government pay-out to build private school facilities. “The camel got his nose under the tent,” warned career public school educator and administrator William Phillis, whose Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding has partnered with school districts suing the state over its voucher system.

“This is how the Cleveland voucher started as sort of an innocuous 4 or 5 million dollar project funded by Cleveland City Schools that gradually grew into a billion dollar boondoggle taken from public school districts across Ohio.” Expanding religious school capacity with public money opened an alarming new frontier in government-subsidized private education.

Huffman, who declared necessity for new and expanded private education facilities “the next big issue” in the school choice movement, slyly advanced that agenda with half a dozen private school construction grants paid for by the state. Phillis predicted ten years from now taxpayers could be “fully funding the facilities of private schools both old and new.”

“Huffman’s been talking about how we need to be able to build [private] schools in so-called voucher deserts. It’s not good enough for him to have provided funds for all of his rich buddies in the universal voucher program. He wants to build a demand for vouchers by helping [construct] schools in areas where there are no private schools.”

Private school advocacy groups are champing at the bit to get their hands on government funds to offset projected capacity constraints — with so much voucher money for the taking. The Buckeye Institute even urged the state to spur private investment in religious schools with “a permanent revolving loan fund to increase student capacity at schools across Ohio,” given how voucher applications have skyrocketed in Huffman’s expansive scheme to defund public education.

Whoa. Religious schools want yet another piece of the finite state education pie. Hundreds of millions of education dollars already lopped off to subsidize private school tuitions could be topped by another boondoggle-in-the-making breaking ground on private school campuses with public cash. “Make no mistake about it,” said Phillis, “groups like the Buckeye Institute and the Koch brothers and Betsy DeVos and all who are pulling the strings” behind universal vouchers and private school construction on the public dime aim “to get rid of public school districts and privatize the whole system.”

Huffman’s Project 2024 plan to quietly dole out state funds to a few Christian schools constructing new facilities is way ahead of the Trump-aligned Project 2025 goal to “use public, taxpayer money for private religious schools” but not yet in sync with its theocratic dictate to “teach Christian religious beliefs in public schools.” Give it time.

Still, Phillis and his public education coalition are confident as more Ohioans become aware of what’s being done with their hard earned tax money (while their local schools suffer) public outrage will doom vouchers giveaways to the well off and government grants to construct their church or religious schools. “If they want to build this infrastructure for Christian education at the expense of the parents of the people who are using it,” the former public school teacher, principal and superintendent said, “that’s great. But don’t ask for money from the public treasury.”

Can’t pretend ignorance about this radical blueprint to supercharge school privatization in the state. It charts the beginning of the end of the public school system that serves a majority of Ohio students. The stuff of nightmares.

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