Project 2025 director leaves amid pushback from Trump

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Paul Dans, the director of “Project 2025,” is leaving his post as the program — intended as a road map to a MAGA American future — has instead become a major irritant to Donald Trump’s campaign for president.

“To every thing there is a season,” Dans wrote in a letter to staffers obtained by Semafor and first reported by The Daily Beast. “We completed what we set out to do, which was create a unified conservative vision, bringing together over 110 leading organizations, united behind the cause of deconstructing the administrative state. This tool was built for any administration, dedicated to conservative ideals, to utilize. The work of the project was due to wrap with the nominating conventions of the political parties. Our work is presently winding down, and I plan later in August to leave Heritage. Electoral season is upon us, and I want to direct all my efforts to winning, bigly!”

Developed under the Heritage Foundation with participation from major conservative groups, the multi-million dollar effort has spent the last few years building a “LinkedIn for conservatives” that an upcoming administration could tap into for hiring purposes.

Project 2025 also developed a hefty policy book, and has been working in recent months on putting together regulations and executive orders that could be implemented as soon as the next president takes office. Its policy recommendations have been a focus of Democratic messaging for months, with the Biden and now Harris campaign highlighting items like invoking the Comstock Act to restrict abortion access as examples of how a future Trump administration might govern.

In a statement, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts echoed Dans’ email, saying the project “completed exactly what it set out to do” under his leadership. That effort, he said, entailed getting various conservative organizations on board and building out the tools for “any future administration to use.” Roberts will be taking control of the project’s operations, a person familiar with the situation added.

“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,” Roberts said in his statement. “Our collective efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels – federal, state, and local — will continue.”

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Trump’s top campaign aides have pushed back on Project 2025 for months, frustrated by media reports that they believed conflated some of the project’s ideas with that of the campaign, and by growing attacks from the then-Biden campaign over the topic. But recently, that back-and-forth escalated when Trump himself began distancing himself from it in early July: He has since, on multiple occasions, disavowed the effort.

“I don’t know what the hell it is,” Trump said during a rally in Michigan last week. “They read some of the things, and they are extreme, I mean, they’re seriously extreme, but I don’t know anything about it, I don’t want to know anything about it.”

Even amid the drama, Project 2025 staffers and allies were briefly buoyed when Trump picked Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate — Vance wrote the forward to Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts’ upcoming book, after all. Others dismissed the warring as typical politics given the state of the race, and remained confident that Trump would end up tapping into their efforts should he take office. But some staffers are undeniably concerned about the project’s — and by extension, their own — future.

The View From The Trump Campaign

Trump campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles reiterated that Project 2025 “had nothing to do with the campaign” or Trump and said they celebrated any signs of turmoil around it.

“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,” their statement read.

The View From The Harris Campaign

Harris for President campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez sought to continue tying Trump to Project 2025, arguing that “this is his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country.”

“Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real – in fact, it should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding,” she said. “What remains clear is that Trump, Vance, and the Project 2025 agenda will take America backwards: more abortion bans, more suffering, higher costs for the middle class, cuts to Social Security and Medicare, repeal of the Affordable Care Act, dirtier air and water, and empowering Trump to destroy American democracy.”

Shelby’s view

The work of Project 2025 is well underway. They’ve gathered and vetted thousands of names, and received almost 20,000 in total so far. They’ve written a nearly 900-page policy book. They’ve begun drafting executive orders. All of this has already started to redefine a Republican Party toward more populist economic policies and combative stances on some social issues. And all of these people and ideas will remain ready for Trump and other Republicans in the future, should they choose to use them.

But Trump’s current rejection of Project 2025 reflects the reality that it remains hard to anticipate what Trump will do if he’s elected in November, particularly on policy. He was among the least traditionally conservative Republican candidates when he first ran for president in 2016, and he demonstrated in 2024 that the anti-abortion movement, in particular, needs him far more than he needs them.

This doesn’t mean Trump won’t end up relying on Project 2025, despite advisors currently claiming otherwise: Project 2025’s growing, fully-vetted database, for instance, is likely to be particularly helpful for someone like Trump, whose campaign was caught by surprise when they won in 2016 and remains a lean operation this time around. But both conservatives and Democrats are fooling themselves if they think there’s any guarantee of Trump’s policy choices, or any power center other than Trump himself.

Notable

• Back in February, Project 2025 officially reached its milestone of signing on over 100 coalition partners for its advisory board, Semafor reported at the time. These partners include major players in the conservative movement, like The Claremont Institute and Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.

• Project 2025 isn’t the only effort aimed at involving itself in an upcoming Republican administration: The America First Policy Institute has developed its own transition project in recent years. Both are filled with former Trump administration officials.