Reporting from Axios this month revealed that one of the main goals of a second Trump administration would be to redirect the federal government’s focus to what the former president and his supporters believe is the problem afflicting our country: “anti-white racism.” In particular, they would seek to erode 1960s-era policies that have nourished economic opportunities for Black Americans, as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that have proliferated since the 2020 murder of George Floyd.
This is tactic happens to be one plank of Project 2025, a transition plan spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation — a right-wing think tank — for the next Republican president. Trump hasn’t co-signed, but many of his associates are authors.
The policy agenda is expansive, detailing how to use the federal apparatus to repeal gains made in a variety of arenas, from education and infrastructure to health care and LGBTQ issues.
These rollbacks would disproportionately harm Black Americans. This political vision only reaffirms how invested the conservative movement is in “normalizing white supremacy” and “standing close to people who espouse some of the worst rhetoric about Black people and race,” Marcia Chatelain, a professor of Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, told Capital B.
To understand more about what Project 2025 could mean for Black communities, read our breakdown.
What are the key elements of Project 2025?
Education: Project 2025 advocates for rolling back the Biden administration’s more recent student debt relief efforts, which are rooted in the power that the Higher Education Act of 1965 grants to the U.S. Department of Education to “compromise, waive, or release loans.” The policy agenda claims that the administration is “acting outside of statutory authority.”
The administration has eliminated some $138 billion worth of student loan debt so far. This month, it announced new plans that would target the “disproportionate debt burden” faced by Black borrowers, who also would bear the brunt of any large-scale debt regulation reversal. To learn more about the impact of student loan debt on marginalized communities, check out a recent article from Capital B’s Aallyah Wright, Adam Mahoney, and Margo Snipe that illuminates how Black Americans are navigating an uncertain economy.
Health care: Project 2025 mentions that states should have the ability to impose work requirements on Medicaid, which helps to cover medical costs for low-income people. Several Republican-led states, including Idaho, Missouri, and South Dakota, are already making plans to restructure their Medicaid programs — just in case Trump wins in November.
Research shows that mandating work requirements only fuels racial inequality, given the discrimination against Black Americans that exists in the low-wage market. Compared with white Americans, Black Americans are about half as likely to be called back for an entry-level job, meaning that they’d be disproportionately burdened by work requirements. Plus, reforms to Medicaid and other social safety net programs have long been tied to stereotypes that portray Black Americans as lazy or scheming — recall the “welfare queen” trope of the 1970s.
Abortion: Project 2025 presses for eliminating reproductive rights by excising the term “abortion” from all federal rules and regulations, denying federal funds to providers who offer reproductive care, and criminalizing the abortion pill through the Comstock Act — a 151-year-old law.
Black women are especially vulnerable in an anti-abortion landscape. They receive about one-third of all abortions in the country, and are far more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related issues. Some Republican-led states also are targeting in vitro fertilization as part of their wider struggle to limit reproductive rights, tearing open a “Pandora’s Box for Black women,” who are plagued by infertility more than other groups, as one organizer previously told Capital B.
LGBTQ issues: Project 2025 seeks to roll back civil rights for LGBTQ people, and wipe out certain federal protections for queer Americans. This entails, as the policy agenda puts it, ending the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ “foray into woke transgender activism” by scrubbing the acknowledgment of gender and sexual identity from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists,” criminalizing classroom instruction on LGBTQ experiences, and eroding vital medical coverage for transgender Americans.
These moves would further imperil LGBTQ Americans. Last June, the Human Rights Campaign declared a state of emergency for the group. This was in response to the avalanche of anti-LGBTQ legislation being introduced in Republican-led statehouses, and came after HRC’s announcement in 2022 that transgender Americans — specifically Black transgender women, who suffer the most from anti-LGBTQ opposition — are facing an “epidemic of violence.”
Civil rights: As mentioned above, Project 2025 calls for shifting the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice to quashing the supposed menace of “anti-white racism” by abolishing affirmative action policies. The policy agenda also calls for the next Republican administration to use the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to “prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers” with affirmative action or DEI policies. And it demands that “voter registration fraud and unlawful ballot correction” be investigated by the DOJ’s Criminal Division instead of by its Civil Rights Division.
As Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University, previously told Capital B of affirmative action, “it was probably the most effective social engineering experiment in dealing with the pernicious legacy of slavery.” Without it, Black Americans would lose a policy approach that has brought them into the middle class. And the emphasis on voter fraud, even though there’s no widespread evidence of it, amounts to voter intimidation that history tells us disproportionately disadvantages Black communities.
Climate: Project 2025 champions the gutting of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s wide-ranging law that would generate some 10 million climate-friendly jobs over the next 10 years. The policy agenda also advises eviscerating greenhouse gas regulations and clean energy programs.
The impact of these moves wouldn’t be felt evenly. Specifically, as Capital B’s Adam Mahoney has explained before, “low-income Black people are exposed to the most pollution from power plants and have the highest risk of death from such pollution.” He added that “nearly 80% of Black Americans live near a coal-fired power plant, compared with 56% of white people.”
This story has been updated.