Project 2025 director quits due to Trump campaign pressure

In a statement to news media, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, announced that Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025, will be “departing the team.”

Dans led the department spearheading the initiative to create a far-right government under a conservative president. It includes plans to fire as many as 50,000 career federal employees and replace them with people who have unquestionable loyalty to the president; restrict access to contraception; possibly implement a national abortion ban; cut federal health care programs; and much more, designed to make the U.S. an authoritarian nation. And LGBTQ+ people are directly in its crosshairs.

“Our work is presently winding down, and I plan later in August to leave Heritage,” he wrote in an email obtained by Semafor. “Electoral season is upon us, and I want to direct all my efforts to winning, bigly!”

However, the Daily Beast’s Roger Sollenberger said he was out “after pressure from Trump campaign leadership.” He added it was also due to “ongoing power rift over staffing control” for a potential second Trump term.

“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 the email. “Paul, who built the project from scratch and bravely led this endeavor over the past two years, will be departing the team and moving up to the front where the fight remains. We are extremely grateful for his and everyone’s work on Project 2025 and dedication to saving America. Our collective efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels – federal, state, and local – will continue.”

Trump has said he knows nothing of the project or “who is behind it.” His vice president pick JD Vance has strong ties to the Heritage Foundation.

His campaign has also tried to separate him from 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,” Trump campaign advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said in a statement to the Associated Press. “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.”

The Kamala Harris campaign noted that Trump’s backers drafted Project 2015.

“Project 2025 is on the ballot because Donald Trump is on the ballot. 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,” the Kamala Harris campaign said in a news release.