It was the sort of stomach-churning conspiracy you’d expect to find in a dystopian neo-Nazi novel.
A white Arizona man was indicted in June on firearms charges for allegedly plotting to shoot people in Atlanta in an effort to incite a race war before the 2024 presidential election.
He had been scheming for months, planning how he might haul firearms across the country, inflict the greatest amount of suffering on Black attendees at a rap concert, and then cover his tracks after turning a joyous gathering into a slaughterhouse. He thought that he had enlisted the help of “accomplices.” They turned out to be an FBI informant and an undercover agent.
It was a monthslong investigation that led to the man’s indictment, one of roughly 40 domestic terror plots that the FBI thwarts each year. As voters head to the polls in the final days before the presidential election, though, such law enforcement efforts face an uncertain future.
Should former President Donald Trump prevail, major changes could be coming to the FBI under The Heritage Foundation’s infamous Project 2025 — with dire consequences for vulnerable communities.
Project 2025 calls for the next Republican administration to hollow out the FBI and sap it of any independence, an aspect of the 900-page manifesto that has gone under-scrutinized. The result: Its director would report to a political functionary who may be more interested in doing Trump’s bidding than in quashing the ongoing menace of white nationalism.
Since the racist killings at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, in 2022; a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in 2019; a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018; and a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, many have criticized what they see as the FBI’s restrained response to this brand of domestic terrorism, even as the bureau has sought to address the issue.
When Trump was president, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that white nationalism is a “persistent” and “pervasive” threat on American soil. He broke from Trump, who had sidestepped questions about whether white nationalists present a growing problem.
“The danger, I think, of white supremacists, violent extremism, or another kind of extremism is of course significant,” Wray said at a House hearing in 2019.
Ultimately, what Project 2025 seeks to do is consolidate executive power and grant the president more authority, said Karla McKanders, the director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Thurgood Marshall Institute.
“This is very concerning, because [when it comes to the FBI and the wider U.S. Department of Justice] you want, as much as possible, to have some distance and neutrality between political actors and individuals who are looking to enforce the law,” she explained.
(The DOJ declined to comment when asked about Project 2025 and how it might affect its investigations.)
Trump has tried to downplay his connections to Project 2025, realizing how radioactive the conservative blueprint is to his reelection campaign. His transition team is reportedly drawing up a blacklist of political officials who would be shut out of a future administration, with special attention being paid to anyone with links to Project 2025.
And yet, news reports have closely tied Trump to Project 2025. In a July review, CNN found that “at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025.” The report went on to identify “nearly 240 people with ties to both Project 2025 and to Trump, covering nearly every aspect of his time in politics and the White House.”
Trump’s running mate, U.S. Senator JD Vance of Ohio, has also drawn scrutiny for his deep affiliation with The Heritage Foundation. He wrote an effusive forward to an upcoming book by its president, Kevin Roberts, showering the policy leader’s agenda with praise.
How does the FBI currently combat white nationalist violence?
To convey its political neutrality, the FBI avoids terms like “far right.” The bureau doesn’t track white nationalist violence as a stand-alone category either, preferring the catch-all term “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism,” or REMVE.
In 2021, shortly after insurrectionists laid siege to the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election, top law enforcement officials identified REMVE as the greatest domestic terror threat.
To address that threat, the bureau monitors hate groups under guidelines established by the attorney general. Additionally, the FBI has sought to beef up reporting of hate crimes, especially since 2021. That year, tapping dozens of field offices, it launched a first-of-its-kind multimillion-dollar campaign not only to boost public awareness of hate crimes but also to highlight services for victims and avenues for reporting crimes.
Though it’s taken more proactive steps in recent years, federal law enforcement has, on the whole, been dismissive of far-right extremist violence, particularly involving white nationalists, said Michael German, who was an FBI special agent before he became a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. German, who went undercover to take down extremist groups, said that the FBI’s enforcement priorities reflect its predominantly white male workforce.
“They are not worried about white supremacists gangs coming to their neighborhoods and harming their kids,” he said. “They want to prioritize threats that they perceive as dangerous to the social order, rather than actual violent crimes.”
This has led the FBI to hype Black identity extremism and ecoterrorism as threats, German explained, while the gang of white skinheads that beat somebody up, for instance, is “just seen as a local police issue.”
Under a provision of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security must provide Congress with an annual report that includes intelligence assessments and data on domestic terrorism. While the reports have been produced, the Government Accountability Office found in 2023 that they’re flawed and fall short of what the provision requires.
That same GAO report analyzed DHS data and determined that racially motivated and anti-government extremists had caused 109 deaths and 159 injuries from 2010 to 2021. By contrast, the analysis found, violent extremists motivated by concern for animals and the environment were responsible for zero deaths and injuries during the period.
In 2020, a top DHS official filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that agency leadership had directed him to distort intelligence and minimize the threat of white nationalist violence and Russian election interference, while amplifying the dangers of left-wing groups. That same year, the FBI declined to take part in a congressional hearing held by U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, on white nationalist infiltration of law enforcement, which the bureau had flagged as a danger as far back as 2006.
“The bureau refused to come,” Raskin said then, “claiming they have nothing to say because they have no evidence that this is a widespread problem demanding the FBI’s attention.”
German said he sees signs of hope in two recent cases. In September, the DOJ arrested leaders of the Terrorgram Collective, a transnational white terror group. They were charged with soliciting the murder of federal officials and hate crimes. Prosecutors linked the group to attacks, both planned and carried out, abroad and in the U.S.
The other case is the takedown this month of a white nationalist gang, the SFV Peckerwoods, which was allegedly involved in racketeering, drug trafficking, and loan fraud. German said he was pleased that a terrorism — rather than a violent crime — task force was behind the takedown.
Project 2025, would “very quickly” end cases like those targeting Terrorgram and the Peckerwoods, according to German.
“Whatever progress the FBI has made over the last three years will be lost,” he said, “and we will go back to the way it was under the previous Trump administration, only with a clearer directive from the White House to minimize the danger of far-right extremism.”
How would Project 2025 undermine these efforts?
The conservative blueprint drafted by The Heritage Foundation proposes a “top-to-bottom overhaul” of the FBI that would include purging it of “unwanted” personnel and draining it of independence that’s long been a cherished norm.
Project 2025 calls for Congress to get rid of the FBI head’s 10-year term — designed to be a check on executive power, since the director is appointed by the president — so that Trump can fire this person at will and replace them with someone to his liking.
“It would be a very scary agency if you ended up with someone who’s basically the investigative arm of the president,” said Asha Rangappa, a senior lecturer at Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs and a former FBI special agent. “What people I think need to understand is that you would essentially have a government that resembles the mob — the president is the mob boss, and law enforcement is his muscle.”
After turning the FBI, along with the wider DOJ, into a political cudgel, Trump would be free to radically shift the bureau’s priorities. One of the first steps, as the architects of Project 2025 see it, would be for a Trump administration to “conduct an immediate, comprehensive review of all major active FBI investigations and activities and terminate any that are unlawful or contrary to the national interest.”
What are the risks to Black Americans?
“For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.”
That quotation from Óscar Benavides, Peru’s authoritarian former president, is one way to think about what a Trump administration shaped by Project 2025 might mean for public safety, according to Omar Wasow, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley.
If Trump were to return to the White House, the country might move from a world based in theory on equal application of the law to one that’s organized around selective prosecution of Trump’s avowed foes.
“For Black Americans, this could mean that the DOJ or FBI stops inquiries into police departments that are seen to be violating civil rights,” Wasow explained. “It could also mean that their locally elected progressive prosecutor now has to tussle with the federal government — the kind of thing that comes up in Project 2025.”
McKanders, with the Thurgood Marshall Institute, shared a similar assessment. She lamented that Project 2025 calls for eliminating consent decrees, which the DOJ has used to dismantle racist and violent practices within law enforcement. McKanders worries that, without consent decrees, police departments will have even less incentive to modify behavior harmful to Black communities.
Trump has long been promising to prosecute his supposed opponents — whom he prefers to degrade as “the enemy within” — including racial justice organizers, an October NPR review of Trump’s media conferences, rallies, interviews, and social media posts found.
Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s opponent in the presidential election, has, for her part, stressed the importance of maintaining executive distance from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, responding to chants of “lock him up” at her campaign stops with some version of, “We’re gonna let the courts handle that.”
With the election mere days away, Wasow cautioned against a status quo bias, where people believe that the country can’t get more authoritarian. This is a common feeling, despite the fact that there’s much evidence from around the globe that demonstrates that democratic erosion does happen — and that things really can get worse.
“The people who catch hell are often the most vulnerable people. That would hit Black Americans hard,” he said. “And a politicized DOJ or FBI would be front and center. We would need to assume that any person who crosses Trump is at risk of being a target of the state.”
