Head of Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 Steps Down

Paul Dans, director of Project 2025, at the Heritage Foundation's leadership summit in National Harbor, Md., on April 20, 2023. Terri Wu/The Epoch Times

Paul Dans, director of the Heritage Foundation’s massive policy wish list known as Project 2025, is stepping down from the role.

Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, announced July 30 that Mr. Dans is departing after leading the initiative for the past two years.

“Under Paul Dans’ leadership, Project 2025 has 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,” Mr. Roberts said in a statement posted on X. “This tool was built for any future administration to use.”

Prior to joining Heritage, Mr. Dans served in the Trump administration as chief of staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management where he managed the federal agency in charge of human resources policy for the more than two million federal workers. In January 2021, he was appointed chairman to the National Capital Planning Commission, which licenses and coordinates all federal projects in the District of Columbia.

Mr. Dans’s departure does not mean the project, which provides policy suggestions on a wide range of issues, is shutting down. Instead, Mr. Roberts said the work will continue, with a focus to “build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels—federal, state, and local.”

“I look forward to leading this team to continued success,” he wrote.

Last year, the Heritage Foundation released Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, a 900-page policy road map the conservative think tank and many individuals and organizations it worked with hope an upcoming administration will follow.

The book features broad-brush recommendations such as eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, breaking up the U.S. Department of Homeland Security along its mission lines, and abolishing the Federal Reserve and returning to a commodity-backed currency. It also contains more specific proposals, such as criminalizing pornography, expediting capital punishment at the federal level, and restoring the remain-in-Mexico policy for people awaiting asylum claims.

Democrats, including President Joe Biden’s now-concluded re-election campaign, have focused on drawing attention to Project 2025 and attempting to link it to former President Donald Trump. The Trump campaign has repeatedly clarified that its official platform, Agenda 47, is the only policy plan a second Trump administration will follow.

“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,” Trump campaign advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said in a joint statement on July 30.

The 45th president has distanced himself from the project multiple times over the past months.

“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform. “By now, after all of these years, everyone knows where I stand on EVERYTHING!”

Project 2025 also clarified that it is not affiliated with the former president or any candidate or campaign.

Despite the disavowals, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s likely presidential nominee, continues to focus on the project as part of her effort to persuade voters to reject the Republican candidate at the polls in November.

“Trump’s Project 2025 plans to cut Medicare and roll back our progress on Medicaid,” she wrote on X on June 30. “As Vice President, I have worked to expand these programs—and we are not going back.”

Project 2025 said on its website it does not advocate cutting Medicare.