A recent Thurgood Marshall Institute report, Attack on Our Power and Dignity: What Project 2025 Means for Black Communities, predicted the changes that we are in the midst of three weeks into a new Presidential administration. This episode of Justice Above All, recorded in December of 2024, dissects Project 2025 and forecasts how its radical proposals to restructure the federal government and increase the president’s authority are severely harming Black communities across the country. This episode of Justice Above All delves into Project 2025’s policy proposals in the realms of education and criminal legal system reforms, informing listeners on how these policies will impact their everyday lives.
Scholar-in-Residence, Constitutional Accountability Center, and Associate Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School
President and CEO, The Education Trust
President and Director-Counsel, Legal Defense Fund
Director, Thurgood Marshall Institute
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 institutions to advance a culture of exclusion, inequality, in furtherance of sustaining a racial caste system. Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise, 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.
Attack on Our Power and Dignity explains how the extremist Project 2025 conservative policy manifesto, which does not directly name Black people as targets, nonetheless operates 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.
Project 2025 will worsen existing school resource disparities. The most underfunded districts are found in ten states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Texas. Eight of these states (all aside from New Mexico and Texas) have adopted voucher policies. In Maryland, another state with school vouchers, Baltimore City Public Schools were underfunded by at least $342 million in 2017, not including the estimated more than $3 billion needed to renovate facilities. Project 2025’s call to double down on school privatization will heighten these racialized funding disparities.
Despite these existing disparities in school funding, President Trump signed an Executive Order compelling the Secretary of Education to issue guidance on how states can use federal funds to support school voucher and school choice policies. The Order further compelled the Secretary of Education to include “education freedom” as a priority in discretionary grant programs. These changes build an educational system that redirects taxpayer dollars away from public schools. They will significantly divest from public education, heighten school segregation, and increase the resources available to wealthy families to attend private schools, effectively denying low-income families an equal opportunity or access to quality education.
Racially inclusive school curricula improve the academic performance of Black students, other students of color, and white students alike. Research shows that students who see positive representations of themselves in their curriculum have improved educational outcomes. For students of color, as well as white students, culturally responsive education decreases dropout rates and suspensions while increasing student participation, confidence, academic achievement, and graduation rates.
On January 29, President Trump signed an Executive Order demanding that the Secretary of Education and other officials develop an “Ending Indoctrination Strategy,” including the removal of federal funding and support for K-12 schools that engage with “gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology.” This order explicitly targets the teaching of concepts such as structural racism and unconscious bias and prevents schools from recognizing transgender identities.
Many states have additionally passed laws that ban or restrict what students can learn about history, with the intention of silencing dissent and punishing those who speak the truth to counter whitewashed falsehoods. See Attack on Our Power and Dignity for source data and citations.
Project 2025’s call to eliminate Head Start and “prioritize funding for home-based childcare, not universal day care” will compound racial achievement gaps. Head Start is a federally funded program housed under the Department of Health and Human Services that provides early childhood education, health, and family support services to low-income children to promote school readiness. The national Head Start program has served approximately thirty-nine million children and families since it started in 1965. Between 2021 and 2022, the program enrolled over 800,000 students and pregnant people, with Black participants composing the second-largest share of enrollees at about twenty-eight percent.Although research illustrates that access to quality, federally supported early childhood education benefits both children and their families, Project 2025 will disrupt, rather than invest in, early childhood education programs.
Project 2025 calls on the Department of Justice to do “everything possible” to execute anyone currently held on federal death row. It will also expand the number of cases that qualify for a death sentence.
Sixteen people have been executed since the reinstatement of the federal death penalty in 1988. Thirteen of those individuals, including six Black people, were executed during the first Trump administration. (Source)
President Trump already issued an Executive Order titled “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety,” which contains multiple provisions on the use of the federal death penalty. The order urges the U.S. Attorney General to pursue the death penalty for individuals who murder a law enforcement officer or for people who are unlawfully present in the United States and commit a capital offense and orders the U.S. Attorney General to evaluate and ensure the conditions of all 37 men who received capital commutations from President Biden are consistent “with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose.” Read LDF’s full statement on President Trump’s Executive Order here. Read LDF’s statement on President Biden’s commutations for nearly all individuals on death row here.
For decades, LDF has been a pioneering voice in the fight to abolish the death penalty and eliminate racial discrimination from the courts. LDF issues a quarterly report entitled Death Row USA that contains information on the death penalty, death row populations by state, and other statistics on capital punishment in the United States. Read Death Row USA here.
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