Trump-Vance Project 2025 Agenda: A Threat to Latino Families and Their Pocketbooks
September 18, 2024
This election presents two starkly different paths for Latino families and our country. Donald Trump and JD Vance seek to pull us backward with their extreme Project 2025 agenda. Project 2025 is the blueprint for cutting access to reproductive care, reversing student debt relief efforts, and repealing the Affordable Care Act. We know this would disproportionately harm Latino families. In contrast, Vice President Harris and Governor Walz are fighting for a new way forward—one that protects our fundamental freedoms, strengthens our democracy, and ensures every community can not just get by, but thrive, in pursuit of the American Dream.
FACT: Project 2025 would cut off access to reproductive health care – including access to abortion medication – while Latinas are already disproportionately impacted by abortion bans across the nation.
Rolling Stone: “But it may not matter how the high court rules if Republicans win the presidency next November. That’s because GOP operatives have already crafted an expansive blueprint, 887 pages long, laying out in painstaking detail how they intend to govern, including plans to leverage virtually every arm, tool and agency of the federal government to attack abortion access. The document explicitly names their intention not just to rescind FDA approval for the abortion pill if they regain control of the White House in 2024, but to revive a 150-year-old law that criminalizes sending or receiving through the mail any ‘article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing’ that could be used to facilitate an abortion. That law, the Comstock Act, is viewed as a de facto federal abortion ban by reproductive rights advocates and anti-abortion activists alike.”
Associated Press: “Women of color advocating for abortion access pointed out that restricting access to mifepristone could worsen racial health disparities. They argue that individuals of color and pregnant people from marginalized communities are more likely to face systemic barriers that limit their access to abortion and other reproductive health care. As a result, they rely on methods like medication abortion.”
Intersections of Our Lives: “Access to birth control is the highest priority when it comes to reproductive health, with 78% of Latina/x women saying it is extremely or very important. 74% identified both maternal mortality for women of color and abortion legality, affordability, and access as extremely or very important. A strong majority (73%) of Latina/x women overall support abortion rights. While there is some variation in views on abortion across ethnicities, the majority supports abortion rights overall.”
NBC News: “Abortion bans affect Latinas the most among women of color, new report finds”
Donald Trump and JD Vance’s Project 2025 agenda would reverse the Biden-Harris administration’s student debt relief efforts, which would disproportionately harm Latino borrowers, and cut off funding to HSIs.
CNBC: “In October, when the Biden administration turns the $1.7 trillion federal student loan system — dormant for more than three years — back on, millions of people are expected to struggle financially. But the problems may be especially severe and long-lasting among Latino borrowers, who tend to earn less than non-Hispanic whites and fall behind on their loans at a higher rate, consumer advocates say.”
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: “Over 90 Percent Of African-American And 72 Percent Of Latino Students Leave College With Student Loan Debt, Compared To 66 Percent Of White Students.”
“We know that this debt burden continues to acutely affect students of color. The Great Recession hit African-American and Latino communities the hardest, with many families seeing their net worth nearly cut in half. This, combined with the rising cost of tuition and fees at public colleges and universities, and the large numbers of students of color enrolled in for-profit schools, has made a big impact on the amount of debt that these students and their families have taken on to finance their higher education. Recent research also further underscores the disproportionate impact of student debt on communities of color.”
Center for American Progress: “Project 2025 Would Increase Costs, Block Debt Cancellation for Student Loan Borrowers”
Project 2025: “The next Administration should work with Congress to eliminate or move OPE programs to ETA at the Department of Labor. Funding to institutions should be block-granted and narrowed to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and tribally controlled colleges.”
Department of Education: “The Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) Division is a component of the OPE Institutional Service program office. This division provides grant funding to institutions of higher education to assist with strengthening institutional programs, facilities, and services to expand the educational opportunities for Hispanic Americans and other underrepresented populations.”
Trump and Vance want to repeal the ACA and jeopardize health care for 15 million Latinos, including 1 in 3 Latinos receiving health care coverage from Medicaid or another public program.
Trump: “The cost of Obamacare is out of control, plus, it’s not good Healthcare. I’m seriously looking at alternatives. We had a couple of Republican Senators who campaigned for 6 years against it, and then raised their hands not to terminate it. It was a low point for the Republican Party, but we should never give up!”
New York Magazine: “Why a Second Trump Presidency Might Try Again to Repeal Obamacare”
KFF: An estimated 33.5% of Hispanics received health insurance coverage from Medicaid or another public program.
Health and Human Services Brief: “Latinos, who were most likely to be uninsured when the ACA was enacted experienced the largest percentage point decline in their uninsured rate after the law’s coverage expansions went into effect: from 32.7 percent in 2010 to 20.8 percent in 2015. By 2020, the uninsured rate among non-elderly Latinos was 18.6 percent and continued to fall to 18 percent in 2022. Between 2010 and 2022, the number of Latino Americans with health insurance increased by 15.6 million.”
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: “The Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) Medicaid expansion has helped narrow longstanding disparities in health coverage and access to care for people of color, and preliminary evidence suggests it is also improving their health outcomes. The 36 states (plus the District of Columbia) that have implemented expansion have made the greatest progress in increasing health coverage since the ACA’s major coverage provisions took effect in 2014, and these states have narrowed the gaps in uninsured rates between Black and Hispanic people and white people far more than states that haven’t expanded.”
Commonwealth Fund: “Medicaid expansion continues to be associated with greater coverage gains, better access, and narrower racial/ethnic disparities across states.”
The Trump-Vance Project 2025 agenda would also eliminate or cut a variety of programs that increase educational opportunities for Latino children, including CEP, Title I, and Head Start.
USDA: “The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) is a non-pricing meal service option for schools and school districts in low-income areas. CEP allows the nation’s highest poverty schools and districts to serve breakfast and lunch at no cost to all enrolled students without collecting household applications.”
Project 2025: “Congress should eliminate CEP. […] Currently, students can get meals from schools even if they are not in summer school, which has, in effect, turned school meals into a federal catering program.”
Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, University of Connecticut: Roughly A Quarter Of Kindergarteners Who Attended CEP Schools Were Black, While Over 38 Percent Were Hispanic.
“Hispanic children were shown to particularly gain from CEP by having higher reading scores, while children from low-income families had a lower risk of being overweight with the adoption of CEP in their schools.”
Brookings: “Project 2025 proposes to phase out federal spending on Title I over a 10-year period, with states left to decide whether and how to continue that funding.”
Brookings: “Overall, economically disadvantaged and Black and Hispanic students receive less education funding than economically advantaged or white students. […] For Hispanic students, the national gap is particularly stark: Hispanic students receive over a thousand dollars less per pupil than white students.”
Office of Head Start: “The Head Start program served a diverse group of children, families, and pregnant women and pregnant people. Thirty-seven percent identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino, and 28% were Black or African-American, non-Hispanic or Latino. Additionally, about 33% of children enrolled were dual language learners, of which nearly two-thirds were in families that primarily spoke Spanish at home.”
Project 2025: “Head Start, originally established and funded to support low-income families, is fraught with scandal and abuse. … this program should be eliminated along with the entire OHS.”