Project 2025 Author to Work at Education Department

An influential conservative policy expert who has advocated for closing down the Education Department is joining the agency.

The Trump administration announced Friday that Lindsey Burke, the director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, will be the department’s deputy chief of staff for policy and programs. Burke also authored the Education Department chapter of Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint that called for sweeping changes to higher education policy, from privatizing student loans to rolling back LGBTQ+ protections in Title IX.

President Donald Trump denied involvement in Project 2025, but many of his administration’s early actions have closely mirrored the blueprint’s recommendations.

Burke worked for Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin’s landing team for education in 2021 and was later appointed to the George Mason University board. As of Friday, she was not listed as a board member.

In addition to Burke, several other appointees are joining the Education Department, according to Friday's announcement. The others are:

• Jason Delisle, chief economist and senior adviser in the Office of the Under Secretary. Delisle, an expert in higher ed finance and policy, has worked in Congress as an analyst and more recently was a nonresident senior fellow at the Urban Institute.
• Jeffrey Andrade, deputy assistant secretary for policy, planning and innovation in the Office of Postsecondary Education. Andrade spent 10 years as a civil servant at the Education Department in the early 1990s and then served in Congress as a senior Republican staffer on the House Education and Workforce Committee. The department’s release noted that he helped to write the legislation that created the U.S. Department of Education’s Federal Student Aid office.
• Christopher McCaghren, deputy assistant secretary for higher education programs in the Office of Postsecondary Education. McCaghren, who was a provost and professor at the University of Mobile, worked at the department during the first Trump administration as the acting assistant secretary for higher education programs. More recently, he was a consultant as the CEO of Higher Education Solutions. 
• Nick Moore, deputy assistant secretary for career, technical and adult education. Moore comes to the department from Alabama, where he was the director of the Governor’s Office of Education and Workforce Transformation and took the lead on creating a system to determine the quality of nondegree credentials and to support skills-based hiring.
• Casey Sacks, senior policy adviser on workforce and AI. Sacks, who is currently the president of BridgeValley Community and Technical College in West Virginia, previously worked at the department as deputy assistant secretary for community colleges.
• Meir Katz, senior adviser at the Office for Civil Rights. Katz, a lawyer, is returning to the Office for Civil Rights after serving as senior counsel during the first Trump administration. He recently was an administrative appeals judge in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.