Project 2025, President Trump and the growing job losses among Black American women

By  Jeff Anthony

Novelist, Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative

What you need to know:

• Federal job cuts and the rollback of diversity programmes have disproportionately affected black women in the US labour market.
• The employment impact on black women has intensified amid federal layoffs, changes to DEI programmes and wider economic pressures.

Kevin Roberts, a white descendant of Lafayette in South Central Louisiana, earned his Bachelor’s degree in History in 1996 from the University of Louisiana. He specialised in black history and the kinship of Black Americans, completing his thesis and subsequent PhD dissertation on the transatlantic slave trade at the University of Texas. His prolonged study of the black race was a concealed affront against black people and a proclivity to disenfranchise the African American community.

In April 2023, Kevin collaborated with the Heritage Foundation to publish Project 2025, a 993-page manual based on his studies. It was dominated by bigoted ideas that emanated from his 30-year study, designed to provide America’s next president with a meticulous blueprint on how to dismantle the black community’s centuries-old historic accomplishments.

The manual proposed the destruction of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), a framework used in workplaces and schools to promote equity. It also advocated the abolition of the Federal Department of Education, the agency responsible for enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which includes policies against racial discrimination in institutions receiving federal financial assistance.

It subsequently recommended the discontinuation of Title I funding, a federal grant programme that provided essential billions to public schools in areas dominated by low-income black students. Project 2025 was unmistakably a defiant provocation, meant to subjugate a century of black achievements and innovations.

During Donald Trump’s first term (2017–20), his bigoted sanctions against blacks were erratic, prematurely conceived and recklessly steered by prejudiced, impulsive emotions. They had no foundation in structured, premeditated and preconceived policies and procedures. In January 2025, when he began his second stint in the White House, Trump was presented with Project 2025, the detailed playbook on how to effectively subdue the black community.

On the first day of his second term, Trump signed executive orders ending DEI programmes. This granted him the power to indiscriminately terminate prominent federally employed black employees, resulting in what the article describes as the most sweeping dismissal of blacks since President Woodrow Wilson segregated the federal workforce in 1913. Trump fired Glen Wilcox, the first black woman to serve on the National Labour Relations Board. She was replaced by Marvin E. Kaplan, a white man with no labour relations experience.

In February 2025, Trump dismissed CQ Brown Jr, a black man, from his role as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and replaced him with Lieutenant General Dan Caine, a retired white officer. Dan had no experience and had to be promoted to acquire four-star status and obtain a waiver signed by the president before his Senate confirmation to qualify for his new position.

Dr Carla Hayden, the first black person and first woman to serve as Librarian of Congress, was fired and replaced by Todd Blanche, a white man with no public background in library science, archival management or cataloguing. Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, the first black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, was also dismissed.

Project 2025 was in concert with Trump’s conviction that blacks should be relegated to servitude and subjected to subservient occupations regardless of their qualifications. He destroyed Affirmative Action and Federal Anti-Discrimination oversight and attacked the equality rights that blacks spent decades advancing. These sweeping biases hurt economic and career mobility for black women.

Thousands of federally employed black women received anonymous dismissal emails from the Department of Government Efficiency, a temporary institution that blatantly targeted qualified black employees for dismissal. The Department of Education, which had a workforce consisting of 28 per cent black women, faced an extremely high dismissal rate, with 95,371 black women losing their jobs.

Despite facing the worst dehumanising conditions since the transatlantic slave trade, black women have overcome insurmountable obstacles for centuries. According to the 2011 National Center for Education, black women are the most educated demographic in the US, with a 9.7 per cent college and graduate school enrolment rate. Despite being denied business loans from racist white- and Jewish-owned banks, they have contributed sufficiently to the American economy.

Marie Van Bittan Brown, a black nurse, invented the CCTV home security system. Black physicist Shirley Ann Jackson’s discoveries paved the way for DTMF button-operated phones, caller ID, call waiting and fibre-optic cables. Gladys West, a black mathematician, provided the foundational framework for GPS technology. Patricia Bath, a black ophthalmologist, invented laser cataract surgery, and Catherine Johnson, a black mathematician, calculated the trajectory for man’s first historic landing on the Moon.

All these inventions were achieved despite systemic discrimination and deprivation of benefits available to other demographics. In December 2024, black women constituted 12 per cent of the federal workforce, but had accounted for 35 per cent of federal job cuts since January 2025.

From February to July 2025, more than 319,000 black women were dismissed. Consequently, many private-sector organisations mirrored the administration’s federal actions by reneging on their own corporate diversity regulations. By 2026, the figure had accelerated to a staggering 600,000 black female job losses, with black women accounting for 54.7 per cent of all female job losses.

The unemployment rate for black women rose from 3.8 per cent before Trump took office in January 2025 to 7.5 per cent by September 2025, marking the highest rise within any demographic. The US has the largest black female unemployed population since the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by President Lyndon Johnson. The Trump administration has used “targeted harm” and systemic rollback policies disguised as “neutral downsizing” and “merit-based reform” to purge, disenfranchise and destroy black women’s economic progress.

The writer is a novelist, Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Centre; @jeffbigbrother.