Project 2025 Is Here: The Blueprint Being Used Against Black America : And Why the Nagast Community Fund Is Our Answer

Project 2025 is not a rumor. It is not something people invented on social media. It is a published, 900-plus-page blueprint for reshaping the federal government: and much of it is now being carried out.

The document is called Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. The Heritage Foundation published it in April 2023 with contributions from more than 350 conservative writers and a coalition commonly described as involving more than 100 conservative organizations.

Its goal is clear:

• Expand presidential control over the federal government
• Remove career protections for civil servants
• Shrink or eliminate federal agencies
• Dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion programs
• Reduce federal involvement in housing, education, labor, and civil-rights enforcement
• Move power and resources away from public institutions and toward private interests

During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump publicly distanced himself from Project 2025. But after the administration took office, many of the blueprint’s recommendations began appearing in executive orders, agency directives, budget decisions, and personnel changes.

By early 2026, independent trackers estimated that roughly half of the plan’s domestic administrative actions had been initiated or completed.

That means we are no longer debating a document. We are watching a governing strategy unfold.

The receipts: How Project 2025 is hitting Black America

Black people are not starting from a position of equal wealth, equal access, or equal protection. We are entering this moment with a racial wealth gap, a nearly 30-point homeownership gap, and generations of discrimination already built into the economy.

When government protections are removed, the people carrying the heaviest historical burden feel the impact first.

1. DEI has been targeted across the federal government

One of the clearest parts of the blueprint is its attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Project 2025 calls DEI “state-sanctioned racism” and recommends eliminating:

• Federal DEI offices
• Chief diversity officer positions
• Equity action plans
• Diversity councils
• DEI-related grants and contracts
• Federal data collection used to measure workplace disparities

Executive Order 14151, issued in January 2025, directed agencies to terminate federal DEI programs, offices, positions, mandates, contracts, and activities.

The Department of Education eliminated its Diversity and Inclusion Council and other internal diversity structures. The Coast Guard canceled leadership and diversity councils, affinity-group programs, and diversity outreach initiatives.

The full dollar amount of canceled federal DEI contracts has not been comprehensively calculated. However, the Department of Education alone canceled more than $2.6 million in related contracts.

The issue is bigger than a training contract. DEI programs were imperfect, but they created systems for identifying discrimination, recruiting overlooked talent, and tracking whether institutions were serving everyone fairly.

When those systems disappear, discrimination does not disappear. The paperwork documenting it does.

2. Federal job cuts are landing heavily on Black workers

For generations, federal employment has been one of the strongest pathways into stable, middle-income work for Black Americans.

Black workers made up approximately 18.5% to 19% of the federal workforce: higher than our share of the overall population.

Then came the cuts.

The Joint Center’s State of the Dream 2026 report cites the elimination of approximately 271,000 federal jobs. Other analyses estimate federal employment fell by roughly 238,000 to 277,000 positions during 2025, depending on the methodology used.

A separate analysis estimated that Black women lost approximately 95,371 federal jobs.

That is not an abstract number. It represents rent payments, retirement plans, health insurance, college tuition, and family stability.

By December 2025, Black unemployment had risen to 7.5%, up from 6.2% in January. The Joint Center described the numbers as signs of a Black recession. Among Black youth, unemployment moved wildly: from 18.6% in September to 29.8% in November before falling back to 18.3% in December.

Black women carried much of the employment decline. The Joint Center estimated that if Black prime-age workers had maintained their 2024 employment rate, about 260,000 more Black people would have been working in 2025. Approximately 200,000 of that shortfall involved Black women.

3. Black businesses are being pushed away from federal opportunity

The federal government has historically used contracting goals to help small, minority-owned, women-owned, and disadvantaged businesses compete for public contracts.

Under the previous administration, the government-wide Small Disadvantaged Business goal was set to reach 15% for fiscal year 2025.

In January 2025, that goal was returned to the statutory minimum of 5%.

That is not a small adjustment. It changes the incentive structure for every federal agency buying goods and services.

The Joint Center also reported that the administration moved toward dismantling the Minority Business Development Agency: the only federal agency specifically dedicated to minority business development: and defunding the Treasury Department’s Community Development Financial Institutions Fund.

Federal support for Black-owned firms was estimated by the Joint Center to be at risk of declining by $10 billion to $15 billion.

For Black entrepreneurs, this is why ownership matters. A Black owned sneaker company is not just selling shoes. A black-owned boot company is not just selling boots. A Black-owned business is creating wages, building supplier relationships, circulating money, and proving that our communities can produce what we have been trained to consume from everyone else.

That is why buying black owned sneakers, red black and green sneakers, black owned running shoes, or a Marcus Garvey hoodie can be part of a larger economic decision. It is not about pretending every purchase will solve a system. It is about deciding where some of our money circulates.

Civil-rights enforcement is being weakened: even when the case numbers require precision

The blueprint calls for reducing the role of federal agencies that enforce civil-rights protections in education, housing, employment, and public accommodations.

Some claims circulating online need to be stated carefully.

Available Department of Education records do not show that the Office for Civil Rights completely stopped resolving cases in 2025. OCR continued publishing investigations and resolution materials, including cases involving race, color, and national-origin discrimination.

Likewise, HUD records do not confirm that exactly 115 fair-housing cases were halted. HUD reported continued fair-housing activity in 2025, including thousands of complaints processed and millions of dollars in monetary relief.

But that does not mean there is no danger.

The threat is also found in:

• Staff reductions and agency restructuring
• The cancellation of equity-focused guidance
• The weakening of proactive fair-housing planning
• The elimination of DEI infrastructure
• Attempts to redefine discrimination narrowly
• Proposed cuts to housing, education, and anti-poverty programs

A civil-rights office does not have to close its doors to become less effective. It can be understaffed, redirected, restricted, or made too slow for ordinary people to depend on.

For Black Americans, federal enforcement has often been the last available tool when employers, landlords, schools, banks, and local governments refuse to act fairly.

Education and HBCUs under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act

Another front in this attack is education.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, with major higher-education changes taking effect in July 2026, has created new financial barriers for Black students and for the institutions that have historically educated us when many others would not.

The changes are not small:

• GRAD PLUS loans are being eliminated
• Parent PLUS borrowing is being capped, with families facing far tighter limits than before
• Graduate and professional borrowing is being restricted in ways that leave major financing gaps
• Repayment changes are raising concern about higher long-term costs for borrowers already carrying debt
• Federal oversight and administrative responsibility around key support structures have been shifted in ways that raise questions about long-term stability

For many Black families, college was never funded by inherited wealth. It was funded by sacrifice, federal aid, church offerings, side jobs, overtime, and parents taking on debt so their children could reach a level they were denied.

That is why these borrowing caps hit differently.

HBCUs rely heavily on federal loan access because their students are more likely to come from families without generational wealth and more likely to need flexible financing to stay enrolled. Higher-education experts have warned that these new limits could open enrollment gaps, push students to stop out, reduce institutional revenue, and force difficult decisions around staffing, faculty retention, and basic campus operations.

Some schools are already seeing signs of student disenrollment and greater uncertainty around whether students can return or finish. Graduate and professional degrees are especially vulnerable because the financing gap gets larger exactly where tuition gets higher.

Black borrowers are also already carrying a disproportionate share of student debt. So when aid is restricted and repayment becomes more expensive, the burden does not land evenly. It lands on the same families who were told education was the ladder.

And that is the point we cannot miss.

Education has been one of the clearest ladders our families climbed. Not a perfect ladder. Not an easy ladder. But a real one.

When policymakers cap that ladder for the next generation, they are not making higher education “more efficient.” They are narrowing Black mobility on purpose or by effect: and for our communities, the effect is what shows up in real life.

This is also why the $2.1 trillion conversation matters. If our economic power remains mostly in consumption while the public ladder is being narrowed, then our children become more exposed. The Community Fund answer is not a substitute for Pell, loans, grants, or public investment. But it is exactly the kind of community-controlled protection we need when access to education is being squeezed.

The safety net is being pulled out from under us

The same pattern appears in food, health care, and housing.

The 2025 reconciliation package and the Big Beautiful Bill expand work requirements and cut core supports that millions of families depend on. Joint Center analysis warned that these cuts to the safety net would hit Black households especially hard, because Black families are more likely to rely on SNAP during periods of unstable work and more likely to depend on Medicaid for health coverage.

What is being pushed includes:

• Expanded SNAP work requirements
• Medicaid work requirements and added administrative barriers
• Pressure for similar work-first approaches across housing and other public benefits
• State-shifted responsibility for parts of the safety net, even in places with long histories of discriminatory administration

Research from the Joint Center and CBPP has already warned that millions could lose food assistance or health coverage under these changes. And we need to be honest about what “work requirements” often mean in practice.

They do not just test whether somebody works.

They test whether somebody can survive paperwork, unstable schedules, missing documents, caregiving burdens, transportation problems, and an economy that does not create enough steady jobs in the first place. A person can be working, looking for work, or one missed report away from losing food or coverage anyway.

That matters deeply for Black families because these are the programs that have kept working people fed and housed between paychecks. They have helped elders get medicine. They have helped mothers cover children during layoffs. They have helped families survive when hours were cut, rent went up, or the job disappeared.

Housing policy makes the threat even sharper. Project 2025’s approach would push more rental-assistance power to states and weaken federal guardrails. For Black communities, that raises an old fear with a new face: what happens when life-or-death housing decisions are pushed further into systems with documented histories of racial exclusion, underfunding, and unequal treatment?

And if all this happens during a rise in Black unemployment, then the blow is doubled.

First, the job market hits us harder. Then the programs built to help families survive the hit are weakened too.

That is not reform. That is exposure.

Again, this is where community-controlled economic defense matters. A $2.1 trillion Black economy should not leave our people one administrative cutoff away from hunger, eviction, or untreated illness. The Nagast Community Fund vision speaks directly to that gap by imagining emergency food support, housing relief, and crisis resources that do not disappear because a state office changed a form.

Housing: the roof over our heads is the next target

Housing deserves its own section because this is not a side issue. It is one of the clearest places where policy turns directly into displacement.

The administration has proposed housing cuts on the order of roughly 40% to 43%, targeting the federal rental-assistance system that keeps millions of people in Section 8, public housing, and other subsidized homes. At the same time, the broader direction of policy is to replace more direct federal protections with state-run block grants, two-year time limits, and potential work requirements that can reach 40 hours per week for able-bodied, non-elderly adults.

CBPP has warned that these kinds of housing proposals are not technical cleanup. They are mass instability by design.

Their analysis found that nearly 3.7 million people could be at risk of losing needed rental assistance under harsh time-limit and work-requirement proposals. About 1.9 million of them are children. That detail matters because when housing is cut, children do not just lose an address. They lose classroom continuity, neighborhood stability, routines, and safety.

Black renters are especially exposed here.

Black households are more likely to rent, more likely to face rent burden, and more likely to depend on subsidized housing when the market prices us out of stable shelter. Joint Center research has long shown how high the renter share is in Black America and how difficult the road to ownership remains. So when federal rental assistance is weakened, the pain does not spread evenly. It lands hardest on the very communities that were already boxed out of wealth on the front end.

The block-grant piece is especially dangerous. CBPP has documented what happens when low-income programs are block granted over time: funding erodes, protections weaken, and states gain more room to ration help. For Black renters, especially in states with long records of discrimination in housing and local administration, “state flexibility” can become another phrase for uneven protection, slower help, and easier exclusion.

And the work-requirement logic fails here for the same reason it fails in SNAP and Medicaid.

Many people receiving housing assistance are already working, cycling through low-wage jobs, caregiving, handling disability in the household, or surviving labor markets that do not provide stable hours. A 40-hour threshold is not a neutral standard when the jobs available are unstable, underpaid, and often deliberately structured below full-time hours.

This is the analytical bottom line: housing is the foundation of everything.

When the roof shakes:

• Kids change schools
• Parents lose jobs
• Health declines
• Transportation breaks down
• Family routines collapse
• Generations of hard-won stability evaporate

Displacement is not a side effect. For Black renters, pushing protections into block grants and time limits makes displacement more likely, more legal, and more administratively invisible.

That is why the $2.1 trillion framing belongs here too. A people with that much buying power should not be this easy to uproot. And that is why the Community Fund answer still matters inside a housing crisis: emergency rent support, moving assistance, legal defense, and bridge funding can become the difference between a setback and a family losing its place in the world.

Health care and the maternal health crisis

Health care is another place where the policy language sounds bureaucratic until you follow it to the body.

Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, states must implement work reporting requirements for Medicaid expansion enrollees beginning January 1, 2027. On paper, pregnant and postpartum women are exempt. But Georgetown CCF and the Urban Institute have both warned that paper exemptions do not automatically produce real-world protection.

The problem is administration.

States still have to identify who is pregnant, who is postpartum, who is in the expansion category, and who should be shielded from reporting and disenrollment. When systems are rushed, data are incomplete, and notices are confusing, people who should be protected can still lose coverage by mistake. Urban Institute analysis warned that large numbers of pregnant and postpartum enrollees in the expansion category could be exposed to exactly that kind of administrative failure.

That danger is not abstract for Black families.

Medicaid covers a majority of births nationwide and well over two-thirds of births among Black and Indigenous women in many analyses and advocacy reports. Georgetown CCF has been clear that Medicaid is central to Black maternal health. So when the state plays games with Medicaid access, it is playing games with prenatal care, postpartum checkups, prescriptions, mental health care, and the survival of mothers and babies.

The broader coverage threat is massive. Analyses from CBPP and related policy researchers have warned that roughly 9.9 million to 14.9 million people could be at risk of losing Medicaid coverage under the new work-rule structure and related barriers. Black households are overrepresented among Medicaid enrollees, which means they are overrepresented among those living with the fear of paperwork-triggered loss.

And we do not have to guess how this can go.

Arkansas’s earlier work-rule experiment led to roughly 18,000 people losing coverage. The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and other Black policy voices have documented the structural barriers that make work requirements especially punishing for our people:

• Unstable schedules
• Caregiving burdens
• Transportation problems
• Documentation gaps
• Irregular internet access
• Employers who do not provide predictable hours or clean records

So even when someone qualifies, the system can still push them out.

That is what makes this section so urgent. Black women are already dying in childbirth at rates no serious nation should tolerate. Black maternal health has been in crisis for years. Cutting or destabilizing the coverage that carries most Black births is a direct threat to Black mothers and Black babies.

This is not an accident. It is what happens when austerity and administrative cruelty meet a population that already bears the highest risk.

And again, the $2.1 trillion question follows us here. What does buying power mean if Black mothers can still lose care because a state computer failed to code pregnancy fast enough? The Community Fund cannot replace Medicaid. But it can help fund transportation, postpartum supplies, emergency support, care navigation, and family relief when government systems fail at the exact moment life is entering the world.

Homeownership: the wealth gap grows wider

If renting is under attack, ownership is not being protected either.

Black homeownership remains far below White homeownership. Joint Center research has continued to show a wide national gap, with Black homeownership stuck around the mid-40s while White homeownership remains dramatically higher. Put plainly, White homeownership is still roughly 60% higher than Black homeownership by rate.

That gap is not just about preference or income. It is the living afterlife of policy.

NCRC and NFHA research both show that Black mortgage applicants are denied far more often than White applicants. NFHA’s 2025 equitable homeownership report put the Black denial rate at 27.11%, compared with 16.54% for White applicants. So even when Black families do what this country tells everybody to do — work, save, apply, and try to buy — the gate still closes more often on us.

That matters because homeownership is the most common way families build wealth across generations.

A home is where equity grows.
A home is what can be borrowed against in a crisis.
A home is what can be passed down.
A home is often the inheritance before there is any other inheritance.

The Community Reinvestment Act was supposed to help answer the damage of redlining by requiring banks to serve the communities where they do business. But more than 45 years later, Black homebuyers remain significantly underserved, and the market has shifted in ways that weaken even that incomplete protection.

NCRC’s mortgage-market research shows that fewer mortgages now come from CRA-covered banks, while mortgage companies without the same CRA obligations hold a larger share of the market. In that environment, the portion of the mortgage system operating under direct reinvestment expectations shrinks, leaving less protected access for lower-income and historically underserved borrowers, including Black applicants.

That trend matters because a shrinking CRA footprint means fewer strong levers for demanding equitable service, branch presence, outreach, and investment in communities long denied credit. And when fair-housing enforcement is also being weakened, the combined effect is predictable: more denial, less accountability, and a wider wealth gap.

This is the broader pattern the housing data points to.

Every barrier to the mortgage:

• Delays wealth building

Every weakened anti-redlining tool:

• Protects exclusion

Every cut to fair-housing enforcement:

• Expands impunity

Every lending shift away from public accountability:

• Leaves Black borrowers more exposed

A family’s home is not just a house. It is the inheritance.

That is why this section cannot be disconnected from the $2.1 trillion argument or the Community Fund answer. If our communities cannot fully rely on the mortgage market to treat us fairly, then we need our own organized pools of capital, down-payment support, legal advocacy, and community-based ownership strategies. Buying power alone does not close a mortgage denial gap. Organized capital can start to.

The vote is under attack again

We have seen this pattern before too.

Project 2025 proposes reshaping federal election enforcement in ways that would move election-related criminal prosecutions away from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and toward a more punitive framework in the Criminal Division, while putting more emphasis on aggressive voter-fraud investigations.

That matters because “voter fraud” has often been used as the excuse, while Black political power is the real target.

Brennan Center research has repeatedly warned that false fraud narratives are being used to justify stricter voting requirements, broader voter-file surveillance, and citizenship-based barriers that can lock eligible people out of the process. The same body of research warns that politicizing election enforcement can intimidate election workers, chill pro-voter administration, and create new barriers long before anybody gets to a ballot box.

There is also the census threat.

If a citizenship question is revived, and if career civil servants are replaced with more political appointees across key systems, Black communities face a real risk of undercount. And when Black people are undercounted, we do not just lose a statistic. We lose federal resources, program dollars, and congressional representation.

The broader democracy picture is already bad. Research has found that nearly half of Black adults, about 48%, now live in states with low or negative democracy policy scores: places where strict voter ID laws, limited early voting, and restricted mail voting are becoming normal.

Then came another major blow in April 2026, when the Supreme Court further limited Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in ways that civil-rights advocates warned would make it harder to challenge racially discriminatory redistricting. The result is simple even if the doctrine gets technical: weaker tools to fight dilution of Black political representation.

And we should say the quiet part out loud.

They fear the unified Black vote.

Every attempt to restrict the vote is an admission that our vote is the threat. Every new barrier says the same thing in policy language: if Black people are fully counted, fully registered, and fully mobilized, power shifts.

That is why this section belongs in the same article as the $2.1 trillion framing and the Community Fund vision. Economic power without political protection gets picked apart. Political participation without economic organization gets manipulated. We need both.

The criminal legal system is being weaponized again

Project 2025 also reaches directly into the criminal legal system: one of the oldest sites of damage in Black life.

Its approach includes:

• Expanding use of the death penalty despite longstanding evidence of racial bias in charging, sentencing, and jury selection
• Terminating federal consent decrees, which are among the main tools used to force police departments and jail systems to address constitutional violations
• Pursuing mandatory minimum sentencing policies that research shows fall heavily on Black defendants
• Reversing accountability reforms and reopening the door to more profit-driven detention systems, including private prison arrangements

Brennan Center analysis has warned that ending consent decrees would strip away one of the few mechanisms the federal government has to compel change when local departments repeatedly violate people’s rights. Those decrees are not symbolic. They are often the difference between documented abuse continuing in the dark and abuse being forced into public oversight.

The same goes for mandatory minimums. Sentencing research has shown again and again that these laws do not fall neutrally. They increase prosecutorial leverage, reduce judicial discretion, and produce harsher outcomes that Black defendants experience at higher rates.

And when private-prison incentives expand while accountability tools shrink, we already know the direction of travel.

More detention.
More profit.
Less oversight.
More families broken apart.

This is the pipeline that damaged our families before. Profit-incentivized confinement plus fewer accountability tools equals more Black mothers with sons buried in paperwork, more children visiting parents through glass, and more communities expected to normalize disappearance as policy.

That is why this cannot be treated as separate from economics. When the state destabilizes Black employment, weakens education, cuts the safety net, constrains voting, and expands punitive systems at the same time, it is not random. It is a full-spectrum pressure campaign.

Which brings us back to the same answer running through this piece: if our $2.1 trillion economy is ever going to protect us, it has to become organized enough to support legal defense, emergency family relief, reentry support, housing protection, and community institutions strong enough to interrupt the damage.

This fits an old pattern: but the weapon is different

Our history teaches us to pay attention when Black people begin organizing across lines of region, profession, and class.

COINTELPRO targeted Black political organizations and community leadership. The MOVE bombing showed what can happen when a Black liberation movement is treated as an enemy. The assassinations of leaders who organized people around economic and political independence left communities fractured and afraid.

We should not flatten every historical event into one conspiracy or pretend the methods are identical.

But there is a recurring lesson: when Black people organize power, powerful institutions often respond by disrupting the organization.

This time, the weapon is policy.

The attack does not always arrive with soldiers in the street. Sometimes it arrives as:

• A canceled contract
• A closed agency
• A laid-off federal worker
• A lower business goal
• A missing civil-rights investigator
• A housing program cut
• A school losing federal support
• A family pushed out of homeownership

Black America represents an economy often estimated at approximately $2.1 trillion in annual buying power. Yet our buying power has not translated into unified ownership, political leverage, or control over the institutions that shape our lives.

They see the money. They do not want us organized around it.

The answer is collective economic protection

This is exactly why the Nagast Community Fund vision matters.

Government contracts can be pulled. Agencies can be gutted. Workers can be laid off. But no administration can stop 42 million Black people from deciding to pool a small amount of money to protect one another.

A monthly contribution model could help build resources for:

• Emergency layoff relief
• Housing assistance
• Food security
• Legal defense
• Black-owned business grants
• Education and workforce development
• Land and community development
• Support for families facing sudden crisis

The fund is not a replacement for voting, lawsuits, public policy, or federal protections. It is a community-controlled layer of defense.

The broader Black Community Endowment Engine lays out a long-term vision built around land, capital, legal protection, transparency, and community governance.

And A Dollar for the Fallen reminds us that community responsibility does not stop when someone dies. We have to care for the living and honor the fallen. We have to turn grief into protection, memory into structure, and anger into ownership.

Prayer has a place in this work. The National Day of Prayer on May 7, 2026, called people across the country toward unity. But prayer without organization leaves the door open for someone else to decide our future.

We need prayer. We also need bank accounts, cooperatives, legal teams, business networks, land strategies, voter registration, and transparent institutions.

What we can do right now

• Learn about and support the Nagast Community Fund. Follow the project as its legal and governance structure develops.
• Support Black-owned businesses. Buy from Black-owned footwear, apparel, food, media, finance, and service companies.
• Register to vote and help someone else register. Policy determines who gets protected, funded, hired, housed, and heard.
• Track what is happening locally. Attend school board, city council, housing authority, and county meetings.
• Build an emergency fund. Even small, consistent contributions can create options during a crisis.
• Share reliable information. Use primary sources and documented reporting, not rumors that make our movement easier to dismiss.
• Organize across generations. Young people bring energy and technology. Elders carry memory, strategy, and institutional knowledge.
• Turn consumer power into ownership. Do not only ask which brand looks good. Ask who owns it, who profits, and where the money goes.

The takeaway

Project 2025 is a documented blueprint, and major portions of its agenda are already being implemented. The results are visible in federal job losses, rising Black unemployment, attacks on DEI, reduced contracting goals, threats to minority-business support, and a shrinking public infrastructure for civil-rights enforcement.

We should be honest about the receipts. We should correct claims that cannot be verified. Accuracy is not weakness: it is how movements protect their credibility.

But precision must not become paralysis.

The response is not only to protest what is being taken away. The response is to build what cannot be taken away so easily.

They can reduce the contract. We can create our own market.

They can close the office. We can build a legal network.

They can lay off the worker. We can create an emergency fund.

They can attack the business. We can become its customers, investors, suppliers, and advocates.

The moment is serious. But it is also an opening.

Our $2.1 trillion economy must become more than purchasing power. It must become organized power, protected power, and inherited power.

We do not have to wait for permission to begin building.