U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans cosponsors bill to attack obscure target of Project 2025 advisor
H.R.881 would restrict federal funding for college programs defunded years ago
U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans, R-Colo., who represents Greeley and Evans in Congress, on Friday became a cosponsor for a bill that addresses a pet subject of one of the far-right groups that helped craft Project 2025, the much-maligned blueprint for a swift conservative power grab of government that was tailored exclusively for the second Trump administration.
Evans is one of just three original cosponsors of House Resolution 881, which was introduced in the House on Friday and referred to the Committee on Homeland Security, of which Evans and the other sponsors are members. The main sponsor of the bill is Rep. August Pfluger, R-Texas.1 The other original cosponsors are Rep. Andrew R. Garbarino, R-N.Y., and Rep. Dale W. Strong, R-Ala.2
There is not currently a scheduled date for a committee markup of the bill, which has no text at this point. But the official title reads, “To establish Department of Homeland Security funding restrictions on institutions of higher education that have a relationship with Confucius Institutes, and for other purposes.”
Wait, what are Confucius Institutes?
Confucius Institutes have been controversial for decades. They are "public educational and cultural promotion programs funded and arranged (by) ... the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China," according to the Wikipedia page for the organization. The Chinese government sees the groups, which opened its first installations in 2004 in South Korea and Uzbekistan, as a means of encouraging awareness of Chinese culture and a subsidized means of increasing offerings of Chinese language classes in schools and universities worldwide.
By 2018, there were about 100 institutes within the American educational system. But it didn’t take long before nations across the world, including the United States, came to see the institutes in a more nefarious light, with the primary drivers of the backlash being concerns about academic freedom and generalized suspicions of a Chinese state-backed influence campaign.
Criticism of the Confucius Institutes became so broad-based that by 2020, amid anti-China sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic, a ban on federal research dollars going to American universities that utilize the Institutes was packaged into the National Defense Authorization Act, an annual measure to fund the Defense Department. President Trump actually vetoed that NDAA, but an override of Trump’s veto quickly sailed through both chambers of Congress.
Leading the pushback
One of the most vocal opponents of the Institutes has been the National Association of Scholars, which despite its banal name is a far-right nonprofit that for decades has stoked the fires of a conservative backlash against diversity, progressivism and an amorphous notion of “Marxism” within higher education and academia. We now understand such movements as “anti-woke” advocacy.
The NAS was also one of more than 100 conservative organizations that from 2022-23 worked to craft Project 2025, according to the Heritage Foundation, which organized and published the blueprint — and worked hard to get its policy requests in front of the Trump campaign and eventually the presidential transition team.
Heritage president Kevin Ross in July 2024 said, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”3 He became the leader of Project 2025 the following month.
So why this House bill?
Ross, Project 2025, Heritage and the NAS are likely behind Friday’s filing of H.R.881 by Evans4 and his fellow Republican members, at least from a lobbying standpoint. But the push for such legislation is baffling.
According to the NAS’s own tracking data, just six Confucius Institutes were operating at American universities by 2023, with another three institutes operating at groups with loose ties to primary and secondary education. None of them are in Colorado.
And to reiterate, it’s already federal law that research dollars will be pulled from any colleges or universities that allow the Confucius Institutes to operate.
Evans and his fellow House Homeland Security Committee Republicans are laser-focused on fighting Colorado’s Eighth Congressional District’s least-pressing issue during one of the most dangerous geopolitical moments in history. Perhaps they’re jumping through hoops to prove to Heritage and other far-right kingmakers that they’re convenient patsies and thus are deserving of massive donations in 2026, in what’s sure to be a horrendous political environment for them.
Or, worse, perhaps they actually believe this sideshow is worth their time and effort.
Wikipedia notes Pfluger was first sworn into Congress on Jan. 3, 2021. Three days later, a Trump-directed mob stormed the U.S. Capitol. Pfluger was one of the Republicans who even after that insurrection attempt failed still voted to block certification of Biden's 2020 victory as part of Trump’s effort to overturn the election and cling to power.
Strong is also a cosponsor on a bill this session that would alter the federal government’s definition of “person” to include the unborn from the moment of conception, a notion widely known as “personhood” — and repeatedly rejected by Colorado voters.
Then-candidate Evans never responded to Ross’s inflammatory statement, despite numerous media requests for him to do so during the 2024 campaign.
Evans repeatedly parroted Heritage talking points during the 2024 campaign.