Dear Reader,
Rarely is a battle plan so audaciously revealed to its targets as is Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. This 900+ page manifesto to dismantle American democracy has been made public for all to see and for the worst actors to potentially adopt. As stated on its website, “Project 2025 is not partisan” and “does not speak for any candidate or campaign, in any capacity.” It is, therefore, a universal risk that transcends party and politics.
As the first and foremost law organization that has fought for the rights, dignity, and power of Black communities since its inception nearly eighty-five years ago, LDF and its Thurgood Marshall Institute analyzed Project 2025 to determine its impact on Black communities and have concluded that it is a direct, boundless, pregnant threat to the interests and well-being of Black people and our democracy. Our report highlights some of the most alarming and destructive elements of Project 2025 for Black people in America and also offers an alternate vision for the future we are fighting for.
We invite you to read our report and assess Project 2025 on your own. Most important, we invite you to envision the dire consequences of Project 2025 on your life and the generations that will follow.
United in justice,
Janai S. Nelson
President and Director-Counsel, Legal Defense Fund
The tactics to obstruct and dismantle civil rights throughout this country’s history have followed a well-worn playbook. The faces of the actors may change, but the strategies remain strikingly familiar: to target core democratic and constitutional principles and structures to advance a culture of exclusion, inequality, and racial caste. Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise,2 more commonly known as “Project 2025,” is the latest and one of the most comprehensive efforts to turn back the clock and erase the hard-won progress of Black people in the United States that has strengthened U.S. democracy.
Since its founding nearly eighty-five years ago in 1940, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) has been fighting to protect the dignity and citizenship rights of Black people against efforts like Project 2025. In the decades after the Civil War, southern states enacted racial apartheid laws, also known as Jim Crow laws, to deprive Black people of their full citizenship and equal protection under the law, which they had been constitutionally granted under the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, also known as the Reconstruction Amendments. Thurgood Marshall founded LDF to challenge Jim Crow laws,3 which undermined the project of U.S. democracy. Those laws had to be replaced with affirmative civil rights protections in order for our multi-racial democracy to survive. Our democracy faces a similar crisis now.
Attack on Our Power and Dignity: What Project 2025 Means for Black Communities dissects Project 2025 and details how its radical proposals to restructure the federal government and increase the president’s authority will severely harm Black communities across the country. Specifically, this report explains how this extremist manifesto, which does not directly name Black people as targets, would nonetheless operate to attack and undermine Black communities’ political power, civil rights protections, and economic and educational opportunities. In direct contrast to the regressive agenda of Project 2025, this report offers an affirmative vision for how Black communities can thrive.
i. In 1940, the U.S. Census reported that Black people were the largest minority group. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Dep’t of Commerce, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940 Population Characteristics of the Nonwhite Population by Race (1943), https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1940/population-nonwhite/population-nonwhite.pdf.
In 2023, The Heritage Foundation, a think tank focused on promoting conservative public policies, published Project 2025 as a blueprint to consolidate power within the executive, or the office of the president, and weaken democratic structures. Project 2025 is a thirty-chapter, 900-page,4 radical, extremist playbook that details sweeping changes to give tremendous power to the executive branch, while discarding the checks and balances that were designed by the U.S. Constitution’s framers to prevent a single branch of government from obtaining too much power.
Project 2025’s proposal to radically expand the president’s authority will reverse the civil rights protections on which Black communities have relied for decades to exercise their full citizenship and to prevent a return to a repressive governmental authority. Under Project 2025’s policy agenda, any future president could consolidate executive powers to have unilateral control over all federal decision-making, with little regard to the laws passed by Congress or to the Supreme Court’s decisions interpreting those laws and the U.S. Constitution.ii Critics have warned that concentrating federal authority solely in the hands of the president could jeopardize basic rule-of-law principles, including that no one—including the president—is above the law.5
Project 2025 represents a direct and deliberate threat to Black communities across seven key areas addressed in this report: civil rights, education, political participation, the criminal legal system, housing, reproductive rights, and environmental protections. At its core, it aims to dismantle essential agencies and regulations that protect civil rights while promoting anti-democratic and anti-justice initiatives that will weaponize civil rights enforcement by federal agencies. These proposals are designed to erode the very principles of equality, justice, and fairness that form the foundation of our democracy—and the impact would be devastating.
ii. Executive powers are the president’s authority to run the federal government, which deals with national issues. When a president consolidates executive powers, it means they gain more control over the federal government’s decisions and can act independently, without needing approval from Congress or the federal courts.
Project 2025 will exacerbate the education and wealth gap for Black students and workers by dismantling the Department of Education,8 the agency responsible for ensuring civil rights protections in schools, which will allow discriminatory discipline practices to go unchecked.9 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,10 and eliminating student loan forgiveness programs and income-based repayment options.11
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, destabilizing the key foundations of our multiracial democracy.12
Project 2025 will likely increase the use of the racially discriminatory death penalty13 which is infected with racial bias and rife with wrongful convictions that disproportionately impact Black people.14 Additionally, it will endanger Black communities and roll back efforts to address police misconduct that violates the U.S. Constitution by abolishing federal consent decrees15 that hold law enforcement accountable for civil rights violations.16
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.17
Black pregnant women, who already face disproportionately high maternal mortality rates,18 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.21 Given that forty-two 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.22
By shutting down the Office of Environmental Justice,23 Project 2025 will allow the federal government to turn a blind eye to the persistent and increasing environmental racism24 that is causing severe health disparities in Black communities, leaving Black people even more vulnerable to pollution and hazardous living conditions.
As alarming as the threat of Project 2025 is, it does not have to be our destiny. LDF has long held an affirmative vision of this country as a multiracial, multiethnic democracy that provides equal opportunities for all. The United States has made great progress since the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-twentieth century but still has a long way to go to fully realize its promise. Attacks on the civil rights of Black and other marginalized communities weaken the fabric of our democracy and move us away from the fulfillment of our nation’s ideals. LDF’s founder Thurgood Marshall, who later became the first Black Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, believed that the job of civil rights lawyers was to fight for critical legal breakthroughs while also working toward long-term and lasting change.25 At this critical moment, when Project 2025 aims to reverse civil rights protections for Black people and concentrate power in the hands of the privileged few to the detriment of our democracy as a whole, all communities must come together to fight for truth, justice, and equality as the cornerstones of our shared future.
