By Adria R Walker

The Legal Defense Fund (LDF), an organization that fights for racial justice, recently released the most in-depth legal analysis of Project 2025’s impact on Black communities.
It highlights how Black Americans would be harmed due to policies that would weaken anti-discrimination laws; dismantle the Department of Education; threaten Black political power; increase the use of the death penalty (which disproportionately affects Black people); and exacerbate health disparities caused by environmental racism.
Karla McKanders, the director of the LDF’s Thurgood Marshall Institute (TMI), the in-house research think-tank that produced the report, said she wanted people to understand the “larger impact that Project 2025 will have on our democracy and undermining our democracy”.
The authors of Project 2025 recommend ways to increase funding for religious organizations by giving them more access to government programs.
The report is written in plain language and has been shared on social media, McKanders said, as the organization wants it to be available to a wide audience. “The most important part of the report is how Project 2025 will have an impact on individual lives and how those individual lives will be upended through the policy proposals.”
Of note, she said, are the report’s chapters on education equity and political participation.
“We look at the proposals for dismantling the Department of Education, [which] might be an abstract concept that people hear, but we bring it to a more concrete level in terms of how it will impact individual lives,” she said. “If we look at pre-K, Project 2025 proposes to dismantle the Head Start program for pre-K. In the report, we have statistics that show that 28% of the enrollees in Head Start are Black children. While it will undermine education efforts for all children, in particular it will disproportionately impact and widen achievement gaps for Black and Latinx students.”
The report says that the impact of Project 2025’s implementation would be felt by pre-K students all the way up through college.
“Project 2025 proposes to pull back Pell Grants, and Black students are overrepresented in terms of the beneficiaries of Pell Grant,” McKander said. “Project 2025 is thinking to put all of the responsibility for monitoring schools and discrimination that occurs in schools back on the state and local level.”
Additionally, McKanders highlighted the impacts that Project 2025, if implemented, would have on Black political participation and political power. The plan seeks to replace civil servants with political appointees, something that would likely eradicate nonpartisanship in existing federal positions. McKanders used the Census Bureau as an example of the consequences of such appointments.
“If the Census Bureau is dismantled, that will impact the undercounting of Black communities, and then that will trickle down to disproportionately impacting the allocation of both political seats and resources for the Black community through federal funding,” she said.
For the last decade or so, the TMI has conducted research on water rights and water equity. As natural disasters and man-made environmental disasters have a disproportionate impact on Black communities, the dismantling of existing federal agencies that aim to provide some relief from disaster victims would in turn have particularly harmful effects for Black and brown populations.
If Project 2025 were successful, agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) would be either dismantled or gutted. As the former is integral in setting environmental standards and the latter aids disaster victims, the loss of either, especially in the context of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, could be particularly disastrous.
“The resources that the federal government provides when there’s a natural disaster are instrumental in getting communities back on their feet,” McKanders said. “The report goes through what we’ve done so far in terms of ensuring that there is equal access to environmental resources and how Project 2025 is seeking to dismantle, to do away with some of those resources. The main point is how this exacerbates existing inequities for Black communities.”
Much of the existing focus on Project 2025 so far has been “abstract” or focused on the broader idea of undermining democracy, but McKanders believes it is important to highlight the direct effects it will have on people. Still, she acknowledges that people in some states such as Georgia, where at least two women died from restrictive abortion care, or Oklahoma, where diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are banned at public institutions, are already living with proto-Project 2025 policies.
“In certain areas [we] can already see how individual lives are upended and we really want this to be a tool for people to understand what this will do and how it will impact their individual lives.”