The Project

The Project

Section I

The Ways and Means

When the public first learned about Project 2025, most of the attention focused on the specific policy ideas it laid out—plans that would upend many aspects of life in the United States, from bedrock rights to the structure of the economy. These proposals are radical and sweeping, and they deserve close attention, but without the ability to make them happen, they’re only worth the pixels they’re published in. What sets Project 2025 apart from so many campaign promises and makes it important to take seriously and comprehend is its detailed scheme for execution.

The concept of a policy blueprint for a future presidency is not novel. As the federal government has become larger and more complex, administrations of both parties have relied on outside groups to create frameworks for governing—useful information so that when a president actually takes the Oath of Office on January 20, they can spend the first hundred days of their term getting things done instead of staffing up and figuring out priorities.

The prototype for this kind of project was created prior to Ronald Reagan’s administration. The Heritage Foundation, which had launched in 1973 to marry pro-business, small-government views with cultural conservatism, published a document in 1980, also called Mandate for Leadership. Aimed at the people who would work for the next Republican president, it envisioned how he might abandon the moderate politics of the post–World War II GOP in favor of something more conservative. It worked: Mandate for Leadership was embraced by aides to President-elect Reagan and became, as The New York Times put it, “the manifesto of the Reagan revolution.” By Heritage’s count, 60 percent of its recommendations became policy within Reagan’s first year in office.

Heritage has continued to produce policy agendas, and although none has had the same impact as the first, other organizations have taken notice. In September 2000, the neoconservative think tank Project for a New American Century published “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.” After the September 11 attacks a year later, the document’s ideas and contributors became central to the George W. Bush administration’s Global War on Terror. When Barack Obama was elected, in 2008, he was still new to Washington, and the Center for American Progress helped provide staffers and ideas for his administration. “Not since the Heritage Foundation helped guide Ronald Reagan’s transition in 1981 has a single outside group held so much sway,” reported Time.

Heritage, meanwhile, had lost some luster. In 2012, Tea Party stalwart Jim DeMint resigned from the Senate to take over the foundation, but the Tea Party movement and DeMint’s stewardship both burned themselves out within a few years. DeMint’s successor, Kay Coles James, clashed with Trump allies, and in October 2021, Kevin Roberts was named president. Within months, he’d convened the beginnings of what would become Project 2025 and hired Paul Dans, who had worked as a personnel official in the Trump White House, to head it up. Work began in early 2022.

To ensure that Project 2025 wasn’t just a parochial project, Roberts directed Dans to look outside Heritage and gather a wide range of contributors from across the right wing, making Heritage a convener for the whole Make America Great Again movement. Hundreds of figures from conservative groups contributed to the final product, representing many different shades of Trumpism.

Heritage saw Project 2025 as a way to reclaim its Reagan-era prominence. The 922-page policy document at its center bears the same name as its forebear. “The book literally put the conservative movement and Reagan on the same page, and the revolution that followed might never have been, save for this band of committed and volunteer activists,” Dans writes.

But Project 2025 diverges in essential ways from its predecessor, and not just because the policy vision is very different from Reagan’s. One big innovation was to create a sort of shadow government ready to plug into the executive branch on Day One of the new administration. This is a role that has historically been handled by presidential administrations themselves, but Project 2025 kicked off even before a president had been nominated so they’d be ready on January 20, 2025.

“We need a big-picture vision, and Donald Trump sets that forth, but we also kind of need the actual instruction manual, how to get things done,” Dans explained to Steve Bannon in 2024. This meant that Project 2025 would not only need to lay out detailed policy ideas, but also search out and train the people expected to implement them. The fourth prong of Project 2025, a playbook for the first six months of the administration, was never made public, but Vought hinted at its content in a 2024 speech: “We have detailed agency plans,” he said. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”

The Men Behind the Curtain

The two most important figures for understanding Project 2025 are Paul Dans, who directed the project, and Russell Vought, who is listed as an author but is widely understood to be the driving intellectual force behind the project. The two men share the convictions that (in a Reagan-era dictum) personnel is policy and that the nuts and bolts of government are overlooked, but they arrived there on very different paths.

Dans holds the more traditionally elite résumé but is the outsider of the pair. He has the stout build of the lacrosse player he once was, and he carries himself with a somewhat guarded awkwardness—approaching, but not quite reaching, amiability. In interviews, he speaks with gauzy nostalgia about a happier American past. In his own telling, he’s the classic MAGA voter: a disaffected son of a liberal Catholic family who wised up to the failings of Democrats and moved right. “I come from a pure-blooded deplorable mix,” Dans said on a podcast for American Moment, a Project 2025–aligned group, in 2023. He said his parents were drawn to Washington by the idealism of the Kennedy era and met there. He grew up in the D.C. area, then enrolled at MIT, where he studied economics and earned a master’s in city planning.

Dans then attended law school at the University of Virginia, where he became involved with the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group. It was not a propitious time to lean right, even at a place like UVA, and the Federalist Society was not yet the Supreme Court–dominating juggernaut it would become in the Trump era. “It was a winter, if you will, for conservatives,” he recalled in the American Moment interview. “Clinton had come into office. This was the forty days out in the wilderness.”

So when Dans graduated, he decided not to enter government and instead worked for white-shoe law firms in New York City. His most notable work came as part of an epic battle between Chevron and the crusading lawyer Steven Donziger, who had sued the oil company over environmental damage in Ecuador. Dans was part of a team that obtained damaging footage of Donziger, filmed for a documentary, that eventually led to his disbarment.

Dans remained interested in politics. He indulged in the “birther” fantasy that Barack Obama was not born in the United States—“I had some serious academic questioning about the birthplace of a former president,” he told the American Moment hosts, with a smirk—and when Trump emerged as the most prominent proponent of birtherism, Dans became a fan. He was crushed when Trump considered but passed on a presidential bid in 2012 and was an early fan of his 2016 campaign.

After Trump’s unlikely victory, Dans hoped his elite résumé and steadfast Trump support would put him on a fast track into the administration. Instead, he found himself shut out and concluded that the problem was that he was too MAGA. “I think the question number one [on the job application] was, Have you previously served in government?” he recalled. “That would be, well, who? Everyone can do the math backwards. That’s a Bush appointee.”

Dans finally caught a break in 2018, when he met James Bacon, a college student working in the administration. Appealing to the much-younger man for help must have been humbling for Dans, well into his career, but it got him an administration job working on homelessness policy at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. At HUD, he developed a healthy skepticism of career civil servants, but he had even more disdain for political appointees whom he found insufficiently committed to the cause.

“Our folks came in and they were clueless and lazy in a lot of cases,” he told the American Moment hosts. “There is obstruction [by civil servants], to be sure, but I think it’s more that the politicals kind of let themselves get led around by the nose, and that starts by not wanting to do the hard work.”