What Project 2025 could mean for the DMV's Black middle class

When Ashaki Robinson moved to Bowie, Maryland, from Michigan, she could hardly believe all the concentrated Black wealth around her.

“Not just middle class but, like, rich Black people,” she said.

Like many in her community, Robinson is a federal worker. She’s a social science analyst for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and spoke with the News4 I-Team as a union representative. She said she feels lucky to have a job with strong meaning to her and knows many federal workers feel the same way.

HUD's mission is to ensure fair, safe and affordable housing for all Americans. Tucked inside the Project 2025 document of more than 900 pages, former HUD Secretary Ben Carson calls for putting political appointees in top positions and scaling back affordable housing.

The Project 2025 conservative plan for any incoming Republican president was penned by the right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation. The guidebook has been published every four years since President Ronald Reagan.

National civil rights organizations from the NAACP to the ACLU have spoken out against Project 2025 and the sweeping changes the document proposes for the federal government. The groups are opposed to calls to reverse civil rights protections and privatize or dismantle agencies including the Department of Education.

These groups also warn Project 2025 would have a disproportionate effect on African Americans.

The nation's largest population of wealthy Black people live in the D.C. area, especially in majority-Black Maryland counties such as Prince George's County and Charles County. Many of the region’s middle-class and upper-middle-class Black families have been built around federal work, and the government is the area’s largest employer.

Of more than 2 million full-time federal workers across the U.S., more than 300,000 are concentrated in the D.C. metro region.

The News4 I-Team asked experts on both sides of Project 2025 how the dismantling could affect the D.C. area’s Black middle class.

What Project 2025 could do to federal job protections

The document lays out the return of former President Donald Trump’s Schedule F executive order, which was reversed by President Joe Biden. It would strip job protections from career officials in policy roles, make it easier to fire civil servants and require loyalty to the president.

“People shouldn't have to sell their souls to do a job,” Robinson, the HUD employee, said.

Horace Cooper is chairman of Project 21, a program for Black conservatives at the National Center for Public Policy Research, which supports Project 2025.

“Prior to the adoption of these civil service rules, people were appointed and when elections changed, they lost their jobs,” he said.

Cooper said bringing back Schedule F would make Trump more effective if elected, even if that means some workers would lose their jobs.

“I watched in the first Trump term, seeing how many government employees announced that they did not agree with the priorities of this administration and stymied them as a consequence,” he said.

The Heritage Foundation declined the I-Team's request for an interview. The project's leader has since left the foundation.

‘What’s going to happen to my household?’

Though former Trump officials helped craft Project 2025 and the plan praises Trump’s administration, the former president has distanced himself from it. He said in his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris that he had not read the document and will not read it.

That hasn't washed away the concerns of unionized federal workers like Aleseia Saunders, a mother of three who works for the Department of Education – which Project 2025 says should be entirely dismantled.

“What's going to happen to my household? What's going to happen to my paycheck? What's going to happen to my career?” Saunders asked.

Many of Saunders’ relatives also work for the federal government, including her parents and siblings. She said they constantly worry and talk about what will happen.

How government jobs helped build the DMV’s Black middle class

Eric Bunn, the national secretary of AFGE, the largest union for federal employees, is fighting Project 2025 and informing members of potential job loss if the plan is implemented. He said government jobs helped build the Black middle class that thrives in the DMV.

“The migration of employed workers coming from the South to Washington, D.C., or this area here was to get a good government job, just like the migration to Detroit in that area was auto workers,” he said.

More than 18% of federal workers are Black, according to the most recent statistics from the Office of Personnel Management. That’s higher than the proportion of Black Americans that make up the country’s population, at just over 12%.

Black Americans have been drawn to federal jobs in part because of benefits that have often eluded Black employees in private workplaces, Howard University political science professor Marcus Board said.

“They have worker protections, federal worker protections, that are guaranteed by the federal government, and so it's one of the few places where they can be sure that they're going to be supported, protected and taken care of,” he said.

Some federal workers see Project 2025 as a direct attack on Black Americans and members of the Black middle class affiliated with the federal government.

“I think that’s an accurate read,” Board said.

Why Rep. Ayanna Pressley calls Project 2025 ‘policy violence’

Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts is a member of a Democratic-led task force that held hearings earlier this year challenging Project 2025.

“It is their pathway to enact widespread, wholesale policy violence,” she said.

In an interview with the I-Team, Pressley called federal jobs “a ladder up and a pathway to the middle class, to self-sufficiency and economic progress for Black Americans.”

Project 2025 threatens the lives many Black federal workers have built, Pressley said.

“You're talking about deep budget cuts, hiring freezes. It's just a damning document. And I have every reason to believe that they would make good on it,” she said.

Why a Black conservative says ‘Do not rely on the government’

Cooper, of Project 21, was senior counsel to former House majority leader Dick Armey. He argues African Americans can't rely on federal jobs and says more Black federal workers need to shift to the private sector.

“How can you count on government employment being around forever?” he asked.

“Do not rely on government. Why? Because you can't rely on government. Is it a decade? Is it a century? At some point, it's going to be government that you're sitting there relying on that pulls the rug right out from under your feet,” Cooper said.

Leaving the federal workforce is not an option some employees want to consider.

“It has created such a stability. People talk about my ‘good government job.’ My good government job has paid for a lot of things,” Robinson, the HUD worker, said.

Reported by Tracee Wilkins, produced by Caroline Tucker, shot by Jeff Piper and Steve Jones, and edited by Steve Jones