Politico Deep Dive Project 2025

 

The Friday Read

It Was Supposed to Be Trump’s Administration in Waiting. But Project 2025 Was a Mirage All Along.

The inside story of how Project 2025 fell apart.

Paul Dans is pictured in front of a Heritage Foundation sign.

Paul Dans, director of The Heritage Foundation's 2025 Presidential Transition Project is pictured at the Heritage Foundation headquarters on June 7. | Photos by Francis Chung/POLITICO

By Ian Ward

08/02/2024 05:00 AM EDT

Ian Ward is a reporter at POLITICO.

On a Thursday morning in early June, I hopped off a train at Washington’s Union Station and walked a few blocks east to get a glimpse into the headquarters of one of the most secretive — and most hyped — organizations in America: Project 2025, tucked away inside the main offices of the Heritage Foundation on Capitol Hill.

My visit came at an opportune moment: For months, journalists and liberal watchdog groups had been poring over Project 2025’s 900-page policy book — titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” — which purports to be a “comprehensive policy guide” for the next Republican administration, including recommendations to restrict access to medical abortion, remove civil service protections for some federal workers and banning pornography. If you’ve heard a Democrat talking apocalyptically about Project 2025 in the past few months, this document is probably what they have in mind.

I was there to spend two days shadowing the project’s leadership, focusing on the lesser-known aspects of the project’s four-part plan. In addition to the policy book, Project 2025 was also building a “conservative LinkedIn” — a database of fully vetted candidates who could fill jobs across future Republican administrations — and an online “training academy” to give job-seekers the ideological and practical chops to make the entire federal bureaucracy match Trump’s MAGA ambitions. (Project 2025’s final part, known as “Pillar IV,” involves the creation of an “180-day playbook” for implementing the policy agenda — but the playbook would be kept confidential.)

Project 2025 flyers, a Project 2025 mug, copies of the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, a copy of the 2020 Mandate, and other items are seen at Heritage Foundation headquarters.

Project 2025 flyers, a Project 2025 mug, copies of the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, a copy of the 2020 Mandate and other items are seen at Heritage Foundation headquarters.

I was met in the foundation’s marble-lined lobby by Ellie Keenan, a smiley communications staffer who was to serve as my handler. She got me a security pass, showed me to a nearby elevator and pressed the button for the sixth floor. We were headed straight to the nerve center of what The Wall Street Journal dubbed “the radical conservative plan to reshape America.”

The elevator doors opened onto a narrow hallway, which I walked down expecting to be greeted by a buzz of activity. Instead, I entered a silent, low-ceilinged room, filled by four empty cubicles, a copy machine and an empty desk covered in cardboard boxes and stray copies of the policy book. A half-eaten box of granola bars and a jar of candy on a nearby windowsill were the only signs that human beings occasionally occupied the space. Keenan gestured toward two adjacent offices belonging to two of the project’s seven full-time staffers.

This, I wondered, is it?

A mission statement is seen in an elevator (top); a person is seen in a hallway at Heritage Foundation headquarters.

Reporter Ian Ward entered the Heritage Foundation headquarters in June. "What I found was a low-budget operation, beset by internal dysfunction, political miscalculation and questionable leadership," he writes.

Over the course of my visit, I came to see that the emptiness of the Project 2025 offices at Heritage headquarters was a good metaphor for the project as whole. On both the left and the right, Project 2025 had been portrayed as a vast and well-orchestrated operation — either to rationalize and systematize Trumpism, according to some conservatives, or to undermine democracy and implement an ultra-disciplined reactionary regime, according to some liberals.

Instead, what I discovered — during my visit and in my conversations with conservatives involved in the project — was a shoestring operation struggling with internal disagreements, political miscalculation and questionable leadership. Project 2025 had set out to turn Trumpism into a well-oiled machine; instead, it had created an engine of the same sort of political disorder that defined the first Trump White House.

Shortly after my visit, the signs of that disorder became visible to the world beyond the Heritage headquarters. In early July, the week before the Republican National Convention, former President Donald Trump — sensing the political liability that Project 2025 had become — took to social media to distance himself from the group, claiming (falsely, I learned) to “know nothing about Project 2025” and that he had “no idea who is behind it.” Three weeks later, on July 30, Heritage announced that the project’s director, Paul Dans, was stepping down amid increased pressure from the Trump campaign. Project 2025 will continue in a pared-down form under the leadership of Heritage President Kevin Roberts, but its relationship with Trump’s team appears to be seriously damaged.

Which isn’t to say that it will carry no influence with the next Trump administration. Dans may be gone, but the policy book will still be out there ready to be adopted, and the project can still turn over its personnel database and “180-day playbook” to Trump’s transition team. Many of the people who have been closely involved in the project — including Russell Vought, who is leading the work on Pillar IV, and Johnny McEntee, a former top aide to Trump — are likely to hold senior positions in the next Trump White House, and Trump’s vice presidential pick JD Vance remains close with Roberts, having authored the foreword to his new book. Out of sheer necessity, the Trump transition team may end up relying on the project’s resources, especially its personnel database, given Trump’s stated ambition to “dismantle the deep state” and replace it with conservative loyalists.

Kevin Roberts and JD Vance converse while sitting in an audience.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and Sen. JD Vance converse before a panel discussion on regime change and the future of liberalism at Catholic University on May 17, 2023.

But in the end, it may have been Heritage’s self-generated hype — which at times exaggerated Project 2025’s scope and overlooked internal fissures — that led to its sidelining.

Now, the escalating kerfuffle that culminated in Dans’ departure chips away at the sense of professionalization and newfound competence that both Project 2025 and the Trump campaign have been trying to convey about the next Trump administration. The former president and his allies may want to project the illusion of discipline, but the movement that fuels Trumpism still runs on chaos — and Project 2025 is no exception.

As things began to unravel in full public view, I thought back to an exchange that I’d had with Dans during my visit to Project 2025 headquarters in June. I had asked Dans how confident he was that, if Trump won in November, his transition and his administration would use the resources that Project 2025 had put together. His answer was entirely self-assured.

“We talk to President Trump, and we also talk to his team,” Dans told me. “The reality is that we have a great complement of people here that are extremely effective and who were in the prior administration, and we have a hundred [allied] organizations with thousands of people at work. You can’t help but not use this work.”

Dans may have been telling the truth about Heritage’s relationship with Trump, but he was overstating the extent of what his team had to offer. With Dans gone, Trump and his team may still rely on Project 2025 if they win in November — but they may be disappointed with what they find when they take a deeper look.

Paul Dans gives an interview in his office.

Paul Dans stepped down on July 30, 2024, amid increased pressure from the Trump campaign.

To hear Dans tell it, the motivations behind Project 2025 were a mix of the cinematic and the heroic.

“We kind of envision this project — as they do in Hollywood when they’re pitching a project — as the Manhattan Project meets the Empire State Building meets D-Day,” Dans said when I met him with in his office. A tall, broad-shouldered man with dark hair and a prominent chin, Dans has a habit of flitting back and forth between partisan red meat and folksy metaphorizing, and he has a knack for (almost) reciting famous quotations and aphorisms from memory.

On the second day of my visit, he was feeling especially grandiloquent: From the example of the Manhattan Project, he told me, his team derived the desire to “bring together the best and brightest to solve an existential crisis”; from the construction of the Empire State Building, the inspiration to build something that once seemed impossible; from D-Day, “the courage that they had … to get over the fear of the unknown.”

“We took our inspiration from Daniel Burnham, who is the great architect of the City Beautiful Movement,” he continued, reaching for one of his famous quotations. “‘Make no little plans. They have — they lack — the power to, you know, to inspire men — they lack that magic — but they also aren’t gonna get realized.’” (Close enough.)

Paul Dans wears a cufflink with the Seal of the President of the United States.

Dans wears a cufflink with the Seal of the President of the United States.

Dans was a reasonably safe choice to lead the project. A commercial litigator by training, Dans joined Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2019 before entering the U.S. Office of Personnel Management in February 2020, where — along with McEntee, Trump’s body man-turned-director of White House Office of Personnel Management — he waged a late-stage crusade to purge the administration of any disloyal elements, earning him a reputation as a committed Trump loyalist.

In April 2022, Roberts tapped Dans to oversee Heritage’s “2025 Presidential Transition Project” — or Project 2025, for short. At Heritage, he quickly moved to reconstruct what he called “the HUD mafia,” a core group of young and hyper-loyal advisers who had left that department to oversee personnel late in the Trump administration. Two of McEntee’s top aides — Spencer Chretien and James Bacon — both joined shortly thereafter, and McEntee came on in May 2023 as a senior adviser. A few months later, Dans poached another former McEntee aide, Troup Hemenway, from Heritage’s top rival in Washington’s MAGA universe, the America First Policy Institute’s “America First Transition Project,” sealing Project 2025’s reputation in conservative circles as the institutional home for Trump’s young and loyal coterie of personnel staffers.

One year later, in April 2023, Heritage published the 900-page “Mandate for Leadership.” This wasn’t an earth-shattering development by itself: Heritage has published policy manuals in elections years stretching back to Ronald Reagan’s run in 1980. But Heritage signaled that its ambitions for the project were more sweeping than in years past, announcing that it had gathered a coalition of over 50 conservative organizations to serve on the project’s advisory board, whose members had agreed to contribute to the project’s other pillars on a volunteer basis. (The coalition has now expanded to over 110 members.)

Clockwise from top left: Spencer Chretien speaks in his office at Heritage Foundation headquarters; James Bacon talks to fairgoers at the Iowa State Fair; Troup Hemenway speaks during a Project 2025 Advisory Board meeting; John McEntee walks to board Air Force One.

Fundamental disagreements have been simmering below the surface of Heritage’s coalition. | Francis Chung/POLITICO, Charlie Neibergall/AP; Francis Chung/POLITICO; Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

Yet the focus on building a united front around the project obscured fundamental disagreements simmering below the surface of Heritage’s coalition. In November 2022, Heritage hired Rick Dearborn, the executive director of Trump’s first transition team in 2016 who later served as White House deputy chief of staff, as a fellow advising the project. Dans then tasked Dearborn with writing the chapter about the White House Office, the innermost sanctum of the West Wing that’s led by the White House chief of staff and includes the president’s closest advisers.

To some of the people on the project’s advisory board, though, the elevation of Dearborn — who served in the White House for just over a year during the chaotic early days of the Trump presidency, and who many in the administration thought was responsible for the failures of the first transition team — severely undercut the project’s credibility. “It was essentially like asking an amputee sitting at home who’s never driven a car to comment on Formula One,” said a conservative who advised the project. “I thought this was a real thing, but Dearborn is drafting the section on [the White House Office]?”

Similar complaints were raised privately among some of the project’s partners about the inclusion of Steven Bradbury — one of the authors of the George W. Bush administration’s infamous legal memoranda authorizing the use of torture methods during the War on Terror — who wrote the Mandate’s chapter on the Department of Transportation, according to the adviser. (Bradbury served as the general counsel and later acting director of the Department of Transportation during the Trump administration.)

A spokesperson for Project 2025 rejected the idea that there had been complaints about either hire. “We’re not interested in anonymous pot shots from people who may or may not even have served on the transition.”

“How can we review a several-thousand-word document in an hour and make any substantive changes?”

More recently, members of the coalition have started to raise questions about Dans’ and Roberts’ stewardship of the project — and especially martial rhetoric that the two men have used to describe the project’s work. (Dans has termed the policy book a “battle plan” for the next administration, while Roberts has said that the country is in the middle of a “second American revolution” that will be “bloodless … if the left allows it to be.”)

In a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington in July — where Dans also spoke about Project 2025 — the conservative economist Oren Cass, who contributed to Mandate’s chapter on the Department of Labor, indirectly chastised Roberts for his rhetoric, arguing that it undercut the project’s substantive policy goals. “Gaining productive power requires focusing on people’s problems and explaining how you are going to solve them, not pounding the table for Christian Nationalism or a second American revolution,” Cass said in his speech. (He declined a request to elaborate on his criticisms.)

In other instances, people involved with the project heard Dans talk about “keeping the cucks out” of the next administration or embracing a style of politics that “isn’t your grandpa’s conservatism.”

A copy of the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership is seen with other books and items on a bookshelf at Heritage Foundation headquarters.

A copy of the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership (right) is pictured on a bookshelf at the headquarters. Heritage traditionally does not publish its mandate until the summer before the election, but Project 2025 leadership moved up the publication date.

Even the policy book itself became a subject of controversy within parts of the coalition. Although Project 2025 claimed to be agnostic about which of the Republican primary candidates would claim the nomination, Trump loyalists suspected early in the drafting process that Roberts was throwing Heritage’s institutional weight behind Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. And while Roberts has since warmed to Trump, some people wondered whether his support for DeSantis informed the strategy behind the policy book — making it less tailored to a Trump nomination. “There were a lot of things in [the book] that were drafted potentially with DeSantis in mind,” said the adviser.

The frustrations extended through the drafting process and the roll-out. In at least one case, the project’s leadership asked for advisers’ input on a late-stage draft of one of the book’s chapters with less than two hours before the final publication deadline, according to a person involved. “So many people complained” about the quick turn-around, the person said. “How can we review a several-thousand-word document in an hour and make any substantive changes?” (A spokesperson for Heritage denied this account.)

The more fundamental disagreement, however, pertained to the question of whether Heritage should hold off on publishing the policy book until closer to the election, or whether it should consider not publishing it publicly at all. Internally, the project’s leadership took for granted that its policy recommendations would be public, pointing to the foundation’s long history of publishing a new edition of the Mandate during election years, dating back to 1980. Although Heritage had traditionally not published its Mandate until the summer before the election, the Project 2025 leadership had decided to move up the publication date to publicize its recommendations and preempt any future transition efforts.

But privately, some of the project’s partners wondered whether publishing the book so early — and promoting it so aggressively — would give Democrats unnecessary political ammunition and afford their opponents more time to devise legal strategies to counter conservatives’ plans.

“Was the goal to blueprint the Trump administration, or was the goal to increase the clout and power of the Heritage Foundation?”

“If you genuinely believe that there is like a powerful deep state that is inclined to work adverse to conservative interests or to harm average Americans, then you would think it would be a little bit more discreet and a little more careful,” the person said. “If you think you’re in occupied France and the Vichy regime and the Nazis are out to get you, then you would act like a real resistance. You wouldn’t publish Charles de Gaulle’s travel timetable for everyone to read.”

Over time, those fears have come true. On the campaign trail, Democrats have moved aggressively to tie Trump to the Project 2025 agenda, and House Democrats and other liberal groups have launched task forces to combat future efforts to enact the project’s recommendations. In the end, the episode left some involved with the project wondering whether Project 2025 had always been an elaborate vanity project for Heritage.

“What was the goal of all this?” said another person with direct knowledge of the project. “Was the goal to blueprint the Trump administration, or was the goal to increase the clout and power of the Heritage Foundation?”

Spencer Chretien, facing the camera, speaks with a reporter in his office while a communications staffer works on her laptop.

Spencer Chretien (center), associate director of the Heritage Foundation's 2025 Presidential Transition Project, told Ward that even if Trump lost, the organization's database could serve as a resource for the conservative movement for decades to come.

Chretien turned around his computer monitor to reveal his profile on Project 2025’s most cherished resource. The personnel database, Chretien told me, was a significant part of what distinguished Project 2025 from Heritage’s past transition efforts: The thi