The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 has faced an upsurge in scrutiny for its blueprint to transform the entire federal government into a right-wing army to do Donald Trump's bidding, including ending the independence of the Justice Department and allowing any nonpartisan worker who won't back the agenda to be fired at will. But less attention has been focused on the project's detailed plans on race relations.
Journalist Michael Harriot took a deep dive into the plans in a lengthy thread on X — and what he found terrified him.
Among the proposals in Project 2025 relating to racial policy include stripping workforce protections from disproportionately Black federal workers; eliminating programs like minority business loans, and abolishing federal data collection on Black employment and discrimination.
But that's just the beginning, wrote Harriot: the criminal justice policy in Project 2025 can be best summed up as "Get tough on Black crime, go easy on white cops. They plan to end EVERY CONSENT DECREE filed against corrupt police agencies, undo bail reform, bring back 'stop and frisk' & use the death penalty 'when possible' — ESPECIALLY for drug dealers; Can you hear the dog whistles?"
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Additionally, he wrote, Project 2025 calls for delisting white supremacist groups as terrorist organizations for the sake of protecting "free speech," and enshrining a very specific version of Christian nationalism in law that caters to predominantly white evangelical churches on a broad range of policies, giving preference to these beliefs over the beliefs of Black churches as well as the nonreligious.
"If Project 2025 became law ... not only would it repeal FDA approval for abortion drugs & sue states that require employers to cover abortions, they would rescind federal funds from any company, contractor or healthcare institution that provides LEGAL abortions," he added.
And to top it all off, Project 2025 also calls for expanding school vouchers, which were originally devised as a tool to get around school integration mandates and to this day predominantly flow to white families; as well as eliminating programs for minority renters and homebuyers, ending oversight of racial bias in real estate appraisals, which are a key obstacle to Black families building generational wealth; defunding underperforming schools, which often underperform because of ongoing segregation; and eliminating any mention of "equity" or similar terms from federal regulations.
What makes all of this particularly frightening, Harriot concluded, is that Project 2025 "is NOT a Trump Plan; it is a CONSERVATIVE plan. Many of the Project 2025 appointees can be installed by a GOP Senate. The House controls the country's purse strings, and A GOP-majority in the House enact the program in these plans WITHOUT Trump. And because it embeds MAGA workers in the gov't, it could be GENERATIONS before" we can get rid of the "MAGA infestation of the federal government."
