Would Project 2025 Sound a Death Knell for DEI?

In a heated exchange with members of the National Association of Black Journalists in late July, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump accused vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris of being a chameleon when it comes to racial identity. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black,” the former president scoffed. “Now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

Then he doubled down on the dig, adding, “She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and became a Black person.”

While Trump’s sarcasm stood out enough to make headlines, his racist rhetoric is not uncommon in MAGA circles. Rather, it reflects a pattern among Republican leaders who may see the vice president’s racial identity as a plus for the Democratic ticket but dismiss her as nothing more than a Biden administration “DEI hire,” using the acronym for the widespread “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs for marginalized groups. The obvious implication from these attacks is that Harris is unqualified for her position and has been elevated to the party’s presidential nominee only because of her gender and race rather than her qualifications, job performance, character, and competence.

Now that the Harris/Walz campaign has begun to shift the narrative of the 2024 presidential race, Democrats are continuing to focus intensely on Project 2025, a collaborative effort of more than 100 right-wing groups led by The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that has exercised political sway as far back as the Reagan presidency. The project produced a roughly 900-page blueprint for the next Trump administration that lays out a plan to completely overhaul the executive branch and much of the federal government, imbuing both with conservative Christian values and giving the president unprecedented powers to essentially rule rather than govern the country.

While Trump claims that he doesn’t know anything about Project 2025, Democrats point to the many close ties and clear connections between the think tank and their candidate of choice. The former president was photographed with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts on a private plane in April 2022, apparently en route to a Heritage conference where Trump appeared as a keynote speaker. In June, Roberts said on MSNBC that he sees the project as a way of “institutionalizing Trumpism,” and in April, he told the Washington Post that he had “personally… talked to President Trump about Project 2025” because he wanted “to make sure that all of the candidates who have responded to our offer for a briefing… get one from me.” Trump’s campaign team claims this briefing never happened.

Project 2025’s primary publication Mandate for Leadership — subtitled both The Conservative Promise and a Presidential Transition Project — gathered input from “more than 400 scholars and policy experts from across the conservative movement and around the country,” including Paul Dans, who stepped down from his position as project director in early August once Trump began to publicly distance himself from it. Many of these collaborators are associated with Trump and previously served in his administration, or have connections to his vice presidential running mate JD Vance, who has deep ties to Heritage, has endorsed elements of Project 2025, praised Roberts’ vision, and wrote the foreword to Roberts’ forthcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light. In fact, in addition to Vance, at least 140 people formerly involved in the Trump administration — including six of his former cabinet secretaries — contributed to Project 2025 in some way, with many working directly on the section delegating increased powers to the executive branch.

Despite Heritage’s claim that it would no longer pursue policy work related to Project 2025 after Dans resigned, the massive undertaking is clearly in the public eye and lays the groundwork for what a second Trump presidency might look like. “We have a great complement of people here that are extremely effective and who were in the prior administration,” Dans told Politico as he withdrew from the project, “and we have a hundred [allied] organizations with thousands of people at work. You can’t help but not use this work.”

Right-Wing Backlash Against Racial Progress

In light of Trump’s mockery of Harris and GOP attempts to discredit her as a DEI hire, it’s important to consider how Project 2025 seeks to eradicate DEI policies at all levels of government –– and what this would mean for Americans.

In the Project 2025 foreword written by Roberts, the fervor behind Heritage’s “promise” or “mandate” is clear. “The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors,” he writes. “This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

The document amplifies the criticisms levied on the so-called “woke agenda” of the Biden administration and Democrats more broadly. While Black Americans originally coined the word “woke” to describe people who are well-informed, socially conscious, and aware of the consequences of racial injustice, conservatives now use it to deride the efforts of progressives to remedy widespread discrimination through identity-based solutions such as affirmative action and legalizing same-sex marriage. Such bitter invective from the Right is a continuation of previous attacks on gender ideology and critical race theory (CRT), the academic concept that race is a social construct not only reflected through individual prejudices, but also systemically embedded throughout America’s institutions, from schools to hospitals, banks to bootcamps, courtrooms to prisons. It relies on a historical perspective that incorporates the violent history of slavery to provide context for present-day inequities in the U.S.

Project 2025 further details far-right plans to undo DEI policies that Heritage see as supporting a progressive “woke agenda” at the federal and state levels.

In the section on the Agency of International Development (USAID), Heritage Foundation Senior Research Fellow Max Primorac claims that USAID’s DEI committees were designed to “racialize the agency and create a hostile work environment for anyone who disagrees with the Biden Administration’s identity politics.”

The document calls on the next Trump administration to eliminate the agency’s chief diversity officer, DEI requirements and scorecards, the “bullying LGBTQ+ agenda,” and virtually every DEI initiative USAID has undertaken in recent years. Once all existing DEI initiatives have been gutted, employees working for the agency should direct any questions related to inequity, discrimination, or harassment to a single Office of Civil Rights. The plan also calls for terminating funding for any partners who refuse to fall in line and firing any employee who participates in a DEI initiative.

Project 2025 also recommends that the Department of Energy (DOE) “stop using energy policy to advance politicized social agendas.” It decries the “war” on natural oil and gas, and claims that the department’s scientists have been “too focused” on climate change to support true innovation. One of the proposed mission statements for an alternative DOE recommends an increased focus on nuclear weapons and naval nuclear reactors in place of further indulgence in environmentally sound or favorable policies.

One of Project 2025’s more expansive DEI attacks is concentrated in the Department of Justice (DOJ) section written by Jonathan Berry, former chief counsel for Trump’s presidential transition team. Labeling the DOJ a “massive administrative state,” he claims that it has imposed far-left agendas through labor policies that seek to strip workers of their rights. Heritage’s document presents conservative, religious, and pro-life perspectives as under attack in the U.S. “The Biden Administration has pushed ‘racial equity’ in every area of our national life, including in employment, and has condoned the use of racial classifications and racial preferences under the guise of DEI and critical race theory, which categorizes individuals as oppressors and victims based on race,” Berry contends.

In response, Project 2025 suggests that Trump issue an executive order prohibiting the use of tax dollars to fund so-called critical race theory training, delete the data systems used to measure racial discrimination, and amend Title VII’s protection of racial classifications in employment, among other things.

The blueprint also recommends eliminating the protections of disparate impact liability — a legal theory that holds employers, housing authorities, and others accountable for practices that have discriminatory effects on groups protected under anti-discrimination laws, even when the discrimination is unintentional. Curiously, the Project 2025 argument here is that due to the increase in interracial marriages in the U.S., many Americans don’t fit into a protected racial category. As the policy book posits, just because certain groups have specific advantages, disparate impact shouldn’t be viewed as a valid theory of discrimination because “all workplaces have disparities.” Berry also implies that purveyors of discriminatory practices should be further protected because it’s possible their actions aren’t intentionally discriminatory. He contends that racial and ethnic disparities don’t necessarily point to discrimination and adds that “under disparate impact theory, moreover, discriminatory motive or intent is irrelevant; the outcome is what matters.”

Project 2025 recommends barring discrimination protections meant for LGBTQ+ and transgender employees. Rather, it calls on the president to “direct agencies to focus their enforcement of sex discrimination laws on the biological binary meaning of ‘sex.’”

In addition, Project 2025 argues that DEI initiatives are a means of discriminating against individuals who don’t identify as people of color. Accusations of DEI policies that result in racial discrimination carry into the section on the Department of the Treasury (DT), with the authors advising that any participation in any DEI initiative or policy on behalf of the department be treated as grounds for termination, which echoes the USAID recommendations. They reiterate the need for harsh punishments for any employee caught supporting DEI ideals through their work, emphasizing that “the casual acceptance and rapid spread of racist policymaking in the federal government must be forcefully opposed and reversed.”

Project 2025 further claims — without providing any evidence — that DEI is being used by corporate powers and private entities to garner support from government actors, and that it is supposedly a means of reputational laundering to hide criminal activity within an agency or organization.

Even though Trump continues to try to distance himself from the project — and lied again on Truth Social when he wrote, “I have no idea who’s behind it” — many of his former colleagues participated in drafting the mandate. Certainly its far-right spirit of increased power for the next “conservative” president could influence Trump even before the recommended actions make their way into official policy.

Despite his wish to disassociate himself with Project 2025 until after the election, Trump said in January that when reelected, he will “terminate every diversity, equity, and inclusion program across the entire federal government.”

Even if the Heritage Foundation is laying low until after the election and the controversy over its radical blueprint dies down, the sentiments espoused by members of the think tank and their allies come from the same place as Trumpism. Paired with Trump’s ambition to “demolish the deep state,” a massive policy book detailing how to replace all federal and state employees with MAGA loyalists offers an enticing resource for a possible future administration.