The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that would go on to draft Trump’s Project 2025 policies, held a meeting on disaster relief in New Orleans just two weeks after the storm in 2005. The group recommended suspending wage laws for recovery contractors, replacing public schools with privately managed charter schools, and halting environmental regulations to reestablish oil and gas production that had been stalled by the storm. The vision they set forth would shape disaster recovery for decades. In New Orleans, public housing was demolished, the public hospital was shuttered, and the federal government rapidly took over the public school system and set about turning it over to a charter network funded largely through private philanthropy. Over 7,000 teachers and staff members were fired, forcing veteran educators to reapply for their jobs, competing against a flood of Teach for America recruits who were largely whiter, less experienced, and from outside the city.