We find ourselves in political climate fraught with chaos with a real threat to democracy. Project 2025, the blueprint for erasing the democratic government as we know it and replacing it with an authoritarian government where the executive branch has full control, contains information that we feel all Americans should know. Even now, many aspects of this plan are being pushed through on state/local levels.

Project 2025 is…

• A political initiative published by the Heritage Foundation that aims to promote conservative and right-wing policies to reshape the United States federal government and consolidate executive power if Republicans win the 2024 Presidential election. The goal is to implement policies in the plan within the first 180 days of a Republican/Conservative presidency.

• A plan to overhaul the federal government and targets progressive policies, including the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and policies that protect the LGBTQIA community. The ACLU recognizes that “…Project 2025 would erode our freedoms and democracy.”

• It targets all of the departments of the federal government, including:
  • The Department of Justice
  • The Department of Defense
  • The Department of Education
  • The Department of Health and Human Services

• The Charles F. Kettering Foundation stresses, “The implication is clear: The values of Christian fundamentalists would hold sway, not separation of church and state, secular science, or the current rule of law.”

(https://kettering.org/project-2025-the-blueprint-for-christian-nationalist-regime-change/)

• It threatens the economic stability of employees of the federal government. Schedule F, conceived during the first Trump administration, was canceled by the Biden administration. If MAGA/Republicanism wins the White House, an estimated 50-80,000 civil service employees could be fired within the first 180 days of a MAGA/Republican administration, replaced by persons appointed by the executive branch of the government, who would be hired specifically to be loyal to the executive branch and its policy/program demands.

• Other threats to full and fair citizenship for Black Americans, POC and women:
  • Elimination of Affirmative Action
  • Elimination of equity-based programs in universities and corporations
  • Reduction in the number of Black people able to get affordable health care
  • End of the Inflation Reduction Act, which promises 10 million climate/environmental jobs and also reduces the number of projects in Black communities that are most threatened by climate change and economic degradation.
  • Complete loss of privacy for women as the government assumes the right to gather health care data on women, specifically those of child-bearing age.

This toolkit contains information that we believe will assist religious leaders – particularly in the Black church – wrestling with the implications of Project 2025 for Americans who are not white, wealthy, male, and Christian. The policies proposed for a Conservative administration might be said to be in alignment with what the Founding Fathers intended when they wrote the United States Constitution, but that vision clashes with the fact that this country is “home” to the marginalized as well as to the privileged. It is our hope that the information contained in this toolkit will make it easier for clergy and community leaders to address and answer the questions that his plan evokes.

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