Paul Dans, the director of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 blueprint for a GOP administration to overhaul the federal government and implement right-wing policies, is stepping down from his role — to much crowing from Donald Trump's campaign. The former president had run away from his embrace of the Heritage Foundation amid a wave of backlash, but despite his campaign's claims that Dans' departure marked the project's "demise" that should be "greatly welcomed," the architect of the whole agenda says it's not going anywhere.
“When we began Project 2025 in April 2022, we set a timeline for the project to conclude its policy drafting after the two party conventions this year, and we are sticking to that timeline,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said in a statement released to several news outlets, adding that Project 2025 had "completed exactly what it set out to do: bringing together over 110 leading conservative organizations to create a unified conservative vision, motivated to devolve power from the unelected administrative state, and returning it to the people. This tool was built for any future administration to use.”
Trump wasn't always so shy about his connections to the Heritage Foundation: his campaign press secretary stars in a Project 2025 recruitment ad; his former White House chief of staff promised on-camera to hand-deliver a Heritage Foundation policy blueprint for a second term; and Trump himself praised the Heritage Foundation's efforts at a 2022 dinner hosted by the think tank.
"This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America," he said at the time.
Hundreds of former Trump administration officials have contributed to the project's 900-page document, which lays out a vision for purging tens of thousands of civil servants, severely limiting access to abortion and birth control, pinning social services to "biblical" values, passing massive corporate tax cuts, and dismantling federal labor, housing and environmental protections. Many of them, including former Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson and former White House Deputy Chief-of-Staff Rick Dearborn might return to Trump's direct orbit if he is elected president again.
As Trump's improving prospects for a second term in office sent Republicans giddy, his allies' statements took on a bolder tone, with Roberts boasting that they were "in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be." But growing public attention on the once-obscure project invited a slew of attacks from Democrats and negative press. Amid polls showing that most Americans disapprove of Project 2025 the more they learn more about it, Trump's campaign seized on Dans' exit to reiterate the former president's apparent disavowal of the project.
“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,” the campaign said in an emailed statement.
The statement also seemed to imply that Trump or his allies had a hand in the leadership change.
“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," it continued.
Roberts told WRAL host Vince Coglianese in an early July interview that he's not offended by Trump's statements seeking to distance himself from Project 2025, noting that regardless of the former president's public comments, the "overlap is tremendous" between the Heritage Foundation document, the Republican Party platform and the policy agenda on Trump's own campaign website. "So no hard feelings from any of us at Project 2025 about the statement because we understand Trump is the standard bearer and he's making a political tactical decision there," Roberts said.
Many experts have noted their essential agreement with Roberts. "Project 2025 has become inconvenient for the Trump campaign but it has produced nearly all the policy it was ever going to & owns the central personnel database in the conservative movement," wrote New York Times reporter Jonathan Swan in a post on X. "Trump doesn’t yet have a functioning transition team & will likely need its resources."
Former Republican political consultant Stuart Stevens, meanwhile, told MSNBC host Symone Sanders that Trump crowing over Dans won't help in the way he thinks it will. "Donald Trump is proving that he doesn't have anything to do with Project 2025 by firing the head of Project 2025, it's really ridiculous," he said.
Trump's re-positioning is also be further complicated by his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, who boasts deep ties to the Heritage Foundation and publicly praised elements of Project 2025. On the same day Dans' exit was announced, The New Republic and the Associated Press reported that Vance wrote the forward to the upcoming book, "Dawn's Early Light," a manifesto by Roberts that, according to his publisher, provides a path for Americans to "take back their country."
"The Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill; it is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump,” Vance wrote in the forward.
But Trump may have picked Vance precisely because of those connections, even if he and the GOP might be feeling some buyer's remorse. "He just looked at everybody in America who's qualified to be Vice President legally, he picked the guy who's the biggest supporter of Project 2025, JD Vance," Stevens said. "So, you know, I would say this is the policy equivalent of 'I didn't inhale' and I just don't think that anybody's gonna buy it."
