The director of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is stepping down in August.
The Daily Beast is reporting that the Trump campaign forced him out.
"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," said Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, senior advisers on the Trump campaign.
Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita “put the screws” to Project 2025 mastermind Paul Dans in an effort to force him out and shut down the right-wing shop behind a sprawling blueprint that sought to overhaul the federal government and implement an array of far-right policies for a potential second Trump administration, a well-placed source told the Daily Beast.
The Daily Beast source said the rift between the Trump campaign and the Heritage Foundation was not ideological, but rather was about power and who will ultimately control Trump World and make staffing decisions in a possible second Trump administration.
Dr. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, said in a statement that Dans, who previously served in the Trump administration, will be departing after having led the transition initiative for the past two years. He thanked Dans for his work on Project 2025.
Dans told his colleagues by e-mail that he was leaving in order to focus his energy on “winning bigly” for conservative candidates this election cycle.
- Trump’s campaign said again on Tuesday 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.”
However, JD Vance’s fingerprints remain all over the project.
Vance wrote the foreword to a forthcoming book based on Project 2025, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, which outlines a “second American revolution” written by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts.
In Vance’s words, “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”
Trump appointed Dans in January 2021 to serve as chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission, though President Biden removed him from the post after taking office, according to the Washington Post. Other former officials with the Trump administration who contributed to Project 2025’s policy guide include Russ Vought, who led the Office of Management and Budget; former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller; and Ben Carson, who led the Department of Housing and Urban Development.