The director of Project 2025, a controversial conservative playbook for a second Trump presidency that has stoked intense debate on the national political stage, is stepping down.
The departure Tuesday of attorney Paul Dans from his director role at the Heritage Foundation, which oversees Project 2025, was immediately welcomed by former President Trump’s campaign, which has been trying for months to distance the candidate from the plan.
“Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you,” said Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, two senior campaign advisors.
Dans could not immediately be reached for comment. But officials at the Heritage Foundation said his departure was expected and consistent with long-standing plans for the project to enter a different phase following the major party conventions.
“Paul, who built the project from scratch and bravely led this endeavor over the past two years, will be departing the team and moving up to the front where the fight remains,” said Heritage President Kevin D. Roberts.
Roberts said Project 2025 was “built for any future administration to use,” not specifically for Trump, and it was “NOT shutting down,” he said.
“Our collective efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels — federal, state, and local — will continue,” Roberts said.
Project 2025 calls for vastly more power to be consolidated with the president, for more federal employees to be appointees of the president and for less federal intervention in a range of areas, including education — where it calls for the elimination of the Department of Education.
It also calls for stricter enforcement of immigration and new rules that would empower mass deportations, and for the wall along the southern border to be completed. It rails against certain environmental protections, and the demolition of key environmental agencies such as NOAA and the National Weather Service.
It calls for much tighter restrictions on abortion, and for the federal government to collect data on the women who receive such procedures. It also supports a slew of ideas that are strongly anti-LGBTQ+. In order to “make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors,” Roberts wrote in an introduction to the plan, the federal government should delete all references to queer identities, “diversity, equity and inclusion,” abortion or “reproductive health” from federal legislation and rules.
In addition to staking out conservative policy positions, Project 2025 is working to build out a database of conservative personnel interested in jobs in government — ostensibly as a pool of right-wing candidates for Trump to fill his government with if he wins.
In addition to welcoming Project 2025’s demise, LaCivita and Wiles again stressed there is no connection between it and Trump.
“President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way,” they said.
Trump has previously said he knew “nothing about” the plan, but also that he found some of its ideas “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
Democrats, who have described Project 2025 as a far-right agenda that threatens basic American freedoms, have scoffed at Trump’s efforts to distance himself from the plan — noting that much of it was written by past Trump advisors or appointees.
Dans himself served in the Trump administration, including as chief of staff in the Office of Personnel Management. His biography on the Heritage Foundation’s website notes that he “also served as OPM’s White House liaison and worked integrally with the White House Office of Presidential Personnel to staff the approximately 4,000 presidential appointees across the federal government.”
It said Trump appointed Dans as chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission in January 2021.
Democrats on Tuesday continued to tie Trump and Project 2025 together.
“Trump and his extreme MAGA Republican sycophants can run from Project 2025. But they cannot hide,” said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.). “We will expose their diabolical plan to the American people.”
The campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumed Democratic candidate taking on Trump, pushed out video in which Dans is asked if he has a relationship with Trump.
Dans said he was a Trump supporter who had “been down to Mar-a-Lago many times,” a reference to Trump’s Florida club. He said the people behind Project 2025 “have integration with folks on the campaign,” and “often supply ideas,” and hoped to shape personnel decisions in the future.
“This is really going to be the engine room for the next administration,” Dans said. “Many of these folks served and will be called upon to serve again.”