Project 2025, a 900-plus page authoritarian playbook for a future presidential administration, seeks to turn back the clock on many of these protections. If implemented, it would dilute or destroy several vital tools that are used to protect Americans from discrimination. This article outlines how this far-right agenda would lead to a resurgence of discrimination in public places, a rollback of employment protections, and the federal government being able to effectively sanction inequality and injustice.
Removing federal civil protections for millions of Americans
The Civil Rights Act ensures that people of color have access to integrated health care, desegregated education, and equal employment protections. And although a race and class divide still exists, the law made significant progress on equality in the United States. The far-right proposals in Project 2025—and in legislation already put forward in state legislatures around the country—strive to reverse much of that progress by drawing a bright line between Americans who their proponents deem worthy of full citizenship and those relegated to second-class status. These are well-coordinated, dangerous, and profoundly racist attempts to transform American life to match a vision rooted in a nationalist ideology that America was founded as a white nation and should remain so. Project 2025 would exempt entities such as religious colleges, employers, and health care providers from antidiscrimination laws and seek to regulate gender and family policies based on a conservative religious perspective.
Project 2025 would take America back in time by removing civil rights protections from anyone who its authors do not deem worthy of protection. The policy document opens with a call for the next president to delete terms such as sexual orientation; gender identity; diversity, equity, and inclusion; gender equity; reproductive health; and reproductive rights “out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists,” pushing Americans in those categories outside of the scope of federal protection.
This dangerous agenda is already playing out in state legislatures nationwide, where hundreds of bills reflecting the same active hostility toward people of color, LGBTQI+ individuals, women, and children have been introduced. Those that have become law are responsible for banning diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) policies; regulating access to bathrooms and locker rooms for transgender people; criminalizing homelessness; limiting what can be taught to K-12 and college students; and restricting access to best-practice health care. Many states have made the practice of book banning commonplace: Florida leads with the highest number of book bans, followed by Texas, Missouri, Utah, and Pennsylvania. Project 2025 would supercharge this regression and take it nationwide.
Weaponizing civil rights law and the Department of Justice
Project 2025 would direct the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to spearhead an equity purge in government, including in several key agencies such as the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the EEOC. This shift would be predicated on the backward notion that any work toward equity is so-called “affirmative discrimination” that “comes at the expense of other Americans” and “violates long-standing federal law.” The plan calls for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division—tasked with protecting Americans from civil rights violations—to reverse the Biden-Harris administration’s whole-of-government approach to equity and would eliminate agency equity action plans, which the Project 2025 authors dub “left-wing race and gender ideology.” Project 2025 would also defund DEIA policies and offices across every federal entity, and civil servants who participated in those initiatives would be identified and susceptible to potential sanction or termination. The Civil Rights Division would be unleashed against them “using the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers” who are engaged in equity work.
Sweeping changes would be made to the enforcement of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which specifically prohibits discrimination in employment based on race, color, religion, and national origin. Under Project 2025, the DOJ and EEOC would be tasked with enforcing Title VII against entities that promote critical race theory, equity, or any type of racial classification. This type of crackdown has already been seen in 567 anti-critical race theory bills that were introduced in state legislatures in 2023, with more across the country introduced in 2024. Additionally, research shows that major corporations such as Meta, Tesla, DoorDash, Lyft, Home Depot, Wayfair, and X have cut the size of their DEIA teams by 50 percent or more in 2023 alone. Other research has shown that while DEI job postings peaked in 2022, they had fallen by 43 percent as of July 2024. The threat of prosecution from the DOJ would worsen these trends, have a chilling effect on the commitment to DEIA in the private and public sectors, and result in more discrimination and a less equitable workforce.
Eliminating protections against discrimination for workers
The EEOC enforces federal laws prohibiting discrimination in the workplace and provides guidance and technical assistance to both employees and employers about how to safeguard against it. EEOC regulations and guidance are a critical tool for explaining and operationalizing antidiscrimination law, turning the promise on paper in statute into practical protections for workers.
In 2023, the EEOC’s focus areas included tackling systemic discrimination in all forms and bases, preventing and combating workplace harassment, advancing racial justice, preventing and remedying retaliation, advancing pay equity, and fostering DEIA in the workplace to promote equal opportunity. The most frequently filed claims with the EEOC are allegations of disability discrimination, harassment, or retaliation. In 2023 alone, it secured monetary relief for 22,000 victims of employment discrimination.
Project 2025 seeks to handcuff the EEOC and eliminate its ability to issue guidance, regulations, and technical assistance that protect workers of U.S.-based employers or companies on U.S. soil from discrimination. It also seeks to rescind existing regulations, calling on the EEOC to “disclaim its regulatory pretensions.” Additionally, under the plan, the EEOC would be barred from collecting and reporting annual employment statistics based on race/ethnicity, which would weaken worker discrimination protections. The plan rescinds protections against sex discrimination and prohibitions of discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and transgender status, while allowing enforcement of exemptions for religious organization so that they may make employment decisions “regardless of nondiscrimination laws.” As a result of these changes, the EEOC would lose much of the power it uses to protect American workers from sexual harassment and assault on the job, wrongful termination based on disability status, gender pay inequities, and more.
Moreover, Project 2025 calls for the elimination of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. This office ensures the U.S. Department of Labor enforces Executive Order 11246, which requires federal contractors and subcontractors to comply with nondiscrimination policies. It also seeks to end the EEOC’s power to enter into consent decrees that require employers to take corrective action to correct systemic discrimination. Without EEOC protection and guidance, discrimination in the workplace would be left unchecked.
Eradicating disparate impact
Disparate impact is a long-standing precedent under Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 that has been a central tool in the fight against discrimination toward protected classes in the courts and in administrative processes. Under this principle, proving discrimination does not require intent if the effect of a policy or practice on protected parties is negative. It is a lever widely used by various agencies to combat discrimination, and the Obama administration used it as a high-profile tool in holding big banks accountable for discriminating against homeowners of color during the foreclosure crisis in the early 2000s. Disparate impact has been repeatedly upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Project 2025 calls on the next president to sign an executive order forbidding its use and calls on Congress to end the practice altogether.
Perpetuating sex discrimination
Project 2025 seeks to remove LBGTQI+ Americans from the scope of federal nondiscrimination protections covering sex discrimination by weaponizing Title VII against them and undermining the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County. The landmark Bostock decision held that LGBTQI+ workers are protected from workplace discrimination and that gender identity and sexual orientation are a protected class under the sex discrimination protections outlined in Title VII. Project 2025 plans to restrict the application of Bostock; calls on the president to withdraw notices and guidance provided by the EEOC on sex discrimination; and directs agencies to “rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.” Furthermore, it calls on the president to enforce sex discrimination laws on the binary meaning of sex and supports the outward discrimination against LGBTQI+ employees throughout the federal government. Recommendations also include calling on the DOJ to notify states that their bans on abortion and medical services to transgender persons could violate federal law.
These plans are not limited to Project 2025: As of August 2024, 26 states had passed bans on gender-affirming care. Studies have shown that many LGBTQI+ people continue to face employment and housing discrimination in their personal lives, in addition to discrimination in accessing health care. As recently as June 2023, the Supreme Court ruled in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis in favor of a business owner who sought to discriminate against LGBTQI+ persons by refusing to create a customizable wedding website for LGBTQI+ couples. The ruling allows for open discrimination against LGBTQI+ individuals under the guise of First Amendment rights. Project 2025 would open the floodgates of this kind of discrimination to anyone, anywhere—especially in the workplace.
Elevating the nuclear family model at the expense of all others
Conservatives have tried to advance the 1960s-era ideology of the nuclear family since the Reagan administration. Project 2025 reintroduces this vision and recommends that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reverse its focus on LGBTQI+ equity and refocus efforts toward encouraging marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families. It pushes for replacing policies related to LGBTQI+ equity with those that “support the formation of stable, married nuclear families” and would protect adoption and foster care services that refuse to work with LGBTQI+ married couples. Furthermore, the plan pushes social welfare policies that promote and support traditional gender roles, stating that children should be raised by their biological fathers and mothers because “the male-female dyad is essential to human nature.” In keeping with restrictions against LGBTQI+ Americans, Project 2025 calls for abolishing the Gender Policy Council and that the DOD “reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military.” These are not just empty threats; in recent years, policies reflecting this discriminatory agenda have been introduced and implemented across the country in schools, health care facilities, places of work, and in the courtroom—all in the name of “life and strengthening the family.”
Bans on demographic data collection
While the United States is becoming a more multiracial nation, the far right has been pushing for a race-neutral or race-blind policy shift, and eliminating data collection on race and other demographics is central to this. Nearly every federal agency collects demographic data across categories that help observers examine trends and understand disparities. Project 2025’s plan to unwind this is simple but insidious: ban the federal government from collecting the data, kneecapping its ability to understand the whole picture of what’s happening in America. In addition to banning collection of race and ethnicity employment statistics, Project 2025 would prevent the Department of Education from tracking disparities in discipline and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act services by race. It would also prevent the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from collecting data on gender identity and stop the Department of Labor from helping collect data on the labor force participation of people with disabilities. Federal data collection allows government agencies to have a better understanding of diversity across classifications and better equips them to combat discrimination. Furthermore, these data drive the funding process for federal, state, and local programming across the nation. Project 2025 would make that work impossible to continue.
Conclusion
The far right has championed policies that restrict the government’s ability to combat discrimination for decades. These efforts have, at times, been subtle and sought to chip away at the edges of the frameworks that are in place. However, new legislation and policies have taken shape across the nation. Project 2025 is the next leap forward in that dark scheme. It is a very real plan to smash the bedrock protections Americans have relied upon for decades; stop the government from collecting critical demographic data; and make it far more likely that millions of Americans will face discrimination in everyday life based on their age, race, gender, disability status, or other characteristics.