The Real Dangers of Project 2025 for Black People

By Mary Alice Miller
When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, he had no transition plan. One week after the election, Trump removed former New Jersey governor Chris Christie as head of his transition team after Christie became embroiled in BridgeGate. Vice President Mike Pence replaced Christie, and Trump named his three children to the transition executive committee.
The disarray was stunning. The Heritage Foundation decided a future Trump administration would not be caught flat footed again. Hence, months before the election, in preparation for a potential second Trump term, Project 2025 – a conservative manifesto—was released.

Attack on Our Power and Dignity, a new report from the Thurgood Marshall Institute, lays out the detrimental impact of Project 2025 in detail. While not explicitly naming Black people as its target, Project 2025 would roll back every civil rights, political, and economic gain Black people have fought for since the Civil War.

According to the report, Project 2025 will harm Black communities by:
*Weakening anti-discrimination laws and cutting essential worker
protections: Project 2025 will eliminate key safeguards that protect Black workers and bar federal agencies from collecting racial demographic data, making it harder to enforce anti-discrimination laws and combat racial inequities, especially in the workplace.

*Limiting access to quality education for Black students: Project 2025 will
exacerbate the education and wealth gap for Black students and workers by dismantling the Department of Education, the agency responsible for ensuring civil rights protections in schools, which will allow discriminatory discipline practices to go unchecked.

Project 2025 will expand the ongoing, coordinated attack on truth in schools and libraries, which will further deny our nation’s shameful legacy of racism. It will also make higher education even more inaccessible for Black students by privatizing student loans and eliminating student loan forgiveness programs and income-based
repayment options.

*Undermining Black political power: By overhauling the U.S. Census Bureau and criminalizing election-related offenses, Project 2025 will weaken the political influence of Black communities by undercounting them and suppressing the Black vote through threats and intimidation, and destabilizing the key foundations of our multi-racial democracy.

*Promoting punitive criminal legal policies: Project 2025 will likely increase the use of the racially discriminatory death penalty, which is infected with racial bias and rife with wrongful convictions that disproportionately impact Black people. Additionally, it will endanger Black communities and roll back efforts to address police misconduct that violates the U.S. Constitution by abolishing federal consent decree that holds law enforcement accountable for civil rights violations.

*Jeopardizing Black families’ access to affordable housing: Project 2025 will transfer control of critical housing programs that expand access to affordable housing, like Section 8, to states—including those with a history of racial discrimination— threatening the housing stability of millions of Black low-income families.

*Threatening reproductive rights and the health of Black people: Black pregnant people, who already face disproportionately high maternal mortality rates, will be hit the hardest by Project 2025’s restrictions on reproductive health care,19 which include proposals to ban federal access to abortion care20 and criminalize health care providers. Given that forty-two percent of women seeking abortion care are Black, these proposals will have devastating consequences for their health and autonomy and the health and autonomy of their families.

*Exacerbating health disparities caused by environmental racism: By shutting down the Office of Environmental Justice, Project 2025 will allow the federal government to turn a blind eye to the persistent and increasing environmental racism that is causing severe health disparities in Black communities, leaving Black people even more vulnerable to pollution and hazardous living conditions.

*Project 2025 would dismantle Black people’s civil rights, prevent the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws by halting the collection of workforce data, eliminate policies that ensure equal employment opportunities at the federal level, curtail civil rights protections, making it harder to identify and remedy discrimination, and weaponize civil rights enforcement by the EEOC and the DOJ.

*Project 2025 Will Dismantle the Department of Education and Eliminate Civil Rights Protections for All Students, especially Black Students, by Ending the ED’s obligations under federal law to administer student discipline in a nondiscriminatory manner, eliminating Head Start and universal access to quality early childhood education, defunding public education and changing student loan policies to privilege wealthier families.

*Project 2025 Will Limit Black Communities’ Political Participation by Politicizing the Census Bureau’s operations to further partisan ends, Manipulating the census count, adding a citizenship question to the census, Weakening the DOJ’s ability to protect the nation’s multi-racial democracy.

*Project 2025 Will Weaponize the Department of Justice to Roll Back Public Safety Protections Within Black Communities by Dismantling law enforcement accountability measures by eliminating consent decrees, Increasing sentencing and pursuing mandatory minimums, and promoting xenophobic policies that increase anti-Black and other hate violence.

*Project 2025 Will Limit the Black Community’s Access to Safe and Affordable Housing by Destroying tools essential to combating housing discrimination and delegating housing enforcement to state and local governments, dismantling HUD’s rental assistance programs, limiting the Black community’s ability to build intergenerational wealth by eliminating homeownership assistance programs.

*Project 2025 Will Ban Abortions by Restricting access to medication abortions, Denying emergency abortion care in hospitals, and Surveilling and collecting data on Black pregnant people seeking abortion care, causing Negative impacts on health and economic opportunities.

*Project 2025 Will Weaken Black People’s Access to Safe Air, Clean Water, and Climate-Resilient Housing, reducing federal oversight and enforcement of environmental protections for clean air, land, and water, Decreasing the enforcement of environmental justice and civil rights.

protections, limiting the monitoring and regulation of harmful pollutants, and exacerbating climate change, which increases the risk of natural disasters that disproportionately impact Black communities.

If the 922-page Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise is too daunting to read, the 80-page Thurgood Marshall Institute report is more digestible. It includes supplemental data and visions for a better society for all.

The report notes that “the challenges presented by Project 2025 are not new; rather, they are part of a long history of attempts to undermine the rights and progress of Black communities. The report calls the “vision of an inclusive, multi-racial democracy that offers equal opportunities for all is not just a goal, but a mandate—one that requires vigilance, advocacy, and the same enduring strength and resilience that have guided previous generations.”