The head of Project 2025, a controversial conservative plan for a second Trump presidency that has fueled intense debate on the national political stage, is resigning.
The departure on Tuesday of attorney Paul Dans from his position as director of 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 the demise of Project 2025 would be most welcome and should serve as a warning to any person or group attempting to misrepresent its influence over President Trump and his campaign: It will not end well for you,” said Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, two senior advisers to the campaign.
Dans could not immediately be reached for comment, but Heritage Foundation officials said his departure was expected and consistent with longstanding plans for the project to enter a different phase after the party's main conventions.
“Paul, who built the project from the ground up and courageously led this effort over the past two years, will be leaving the team and moving to the front where the fight continues,” said Heritage President Kevin D. Roberts.
Roberts said Project 2025 was “built for use by any future administration,” not specifically for Trump, and “was NOT being shut down,” he said.
“Our collective efforts to build a staffing apparatus for policymakers at all levels (federal, state and local) will continue,” Roberts said.
Project 2025 calls for consolidating much more power in the president, for more federal employees to be appointed by the president, and for less federal intervention in a number of areas, including education, where it calls for eliminating the Department of Education.
He also calls for stricter enforcement of immigration laws and new rules allowing mass deportations, as well as the completion of the wall along the southern border. He opposes certain environmental protections and the demolition of key environmental agencies such as NOAA and the National Weather Service.
The plan calls for much tighter restrictions on abortion and for the federal government to collect data on women who undergo such procedures. It also endorses a number of ideas that are strongly anti-LGBTQ+. To “make American civil society institutions hard targets for progressive culture warriors,” Roberts wrote in an introduction to the plan, the federal government should remove all references to queer identities, “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” abortion, or “reproductive health” from federal law and rules.
In addition to defining conservative policy positions, Project 2025 is working to build a database of conservative personnel interested in government jobs, ostensibly as a pool of right-wing candidates Trump could fill his administration with if he wins.
In addition to welcoming the end of Project 2025, LaCivita and Wiles again emphasized that 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 on behalf of 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 liberties, have derided Trump's efforts to distance himself from the plan, pointing out that much of it was written by former advisers or Trump appointees.
Dans himself worked in the Trump administration, including as chief of staff for the Office of Personnel Management. His bio on the Heritage Foundation website notes that he “also served as OPM’s White House liaison and worked closely with the White House Office of Presidential Personnel to recruit the approximately 4,000 presidential appointees across the federal government.”
He said Trump appointed Dans as chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission in January 2021.
On Tuesday, Democrats continued to link Trump to Project 2025.
“Trump and his radical MAGA Republican sycophants can run from Project 2025, but they can’t 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 presumptive Democratic nominee to challenge Trump, released a video in which Dans is asked if she has a relationship with Trump.
Dans said he was a Trump supporter and had “been to Mar-a-Lago many times,” referring to Trump’s club in Florida. He said the people behind Project 2025 “have a good relationship with the campaign people” and “often bring ideas to the table,” and hoped to influence personnel decisions in the future.
“This will really be the engine room of the next administration,” Dans said. “A lot of these people served and will be called to serve again.”
