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Donald Trump spent the Summer of 2024 desperately lying to voters about his ties to Project 2025. After he won, he picked at least 11 Project 2025 authors, contributors, and advisory board members for top jobs. Once he took office, he immediately pursued the Project 2025 agenda.
For those of us paying attention, this was no surprise. Since the fall of 2023, I’ve written articles and made MSNBC appearances warning about how Trump’s official Agenda 47 directly aligns with Project 2025. Now, we’re witnessing the Heritage Foundation’s playbook unfold in real-time, and one of its chief architects is openly bragging about it.
Paul Dans served as director of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation until August 2024, when he was forced out. Dans’s resignation from the project came as the Trump Campaign was receiving public backlash for its ties to Project 2025. Trump’s team falsely sought to separate themselves from the endeavor, so the Heritage Foundation had Dans take the fall with a publicized resignation. But, as I noted in my article at the time, Project 2025 was still actively recruiting loyalists, and its policies were already embedded in Trump’s Agenda 47.
Now, after months in the wilderness, Paul Dans is speaking out and seeking credit. This weekend, Politico published an interview headlined “The Architect of Project 2025 Is Ready for His Victory Lap.”
Politico’s Michael Hirsh sat down with Dans and pointedly asked him, “So, as it turns out, the Trump administration’s program and Project 2025 seem to be one and the same. True?”
Dans responded, saying they aren’t the same but that “directionally, they have a lot in common.” Dans continued, “We had hoped, those of us who worked putting together Project 2025, that the next conservative president would seize the day, but Trump is seizing every minute of every hour. I’m not sure that you’d be able to implement Project 2025 without Donald Trump’s ability to bring people together and Elon Musk’s ability to focus the direction of the work.”
Elon Musk has played a key role in executing Project 2025’s agenda, although in a more sloppy manner than the playbook calls for. Musk’s DOGE team has been purging civil servants, ignoring laws, unilaterally attempting to dismantle agencies, accessing sensitive data, sidelining civil servants, and testing the limits of executive power. In spite of DOGE’s reckless approach, Dans is clearly thrilled by this.
Later in the interview, Hirsh pressed Dans for some specifics, asking, “Is there any way at all in which what Trump is doing is falling short or diverging from your original vision for Project 2025?”
Dans then responded with a comment that confirms what all of our eyes and ears have observed: “It’s actually way beyond my wildest dreams. It’s not going to be the easiest road to hoe going forward. The deep state is going to get its breath back here, but the way that they’ve been able to move and kind of upset the orthodoxy, and at the same time really capture the imagination of the people, I think, portends a great four years.”
There you have it. The former director and chief architect of Project 2025 is explicitly saying that Trump’s implementation of Project 2025 is beyond his wildest dreams.
Dans is, unfortunately, right.
Trump has been executing Project 2025’s agenda with a ferocity and speed that goes beyond even what the project calls for at times. But the speed and sloppiness have caused the Trump Administration major setbacks.
Legal rulings have stalled key agenda items, rushed purges of civil servants have caused internal dysfunction and a disruption of services, and public backlash has exposed the radical nature of these policies. Even the project’s architects didn’t anticipate this level of aggressive, yet often clumsy, execution.
But nonetheless, Trump’s effort to twist the federal government into a tool of the far-right continues. Let’s get into the details.
Over two-thirds of Trump’s early executive orders mirrored Project 2025. I discussed this with Rev. Al Sharpton on MSNBC during Trump’s first week in office.
President Trump’s purging of federal workers, effort to unilaterally dismantle agencies like the Education Department, restrictive immigration executive orders, reinstatement of Schedule F to strip civil servant protections from federal works, the rollback of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, his gender executive orders, and his environmental regulation rollbacks are straight out of Project 2025’s playbook.
Elon Musk’s early takeover of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is also directly from Project 2025.
Politico’s Michael Hirsh asked about Dans’s previous role at OPM and how Musk has taken it over: “You worked at the Office of Personnel Management in the last year of the first Trump administration — essentially the human resources department of the federal government. And that then became a sort of ground zero for Musk’s DOGE effort. Did you anticipate this might play out that way?”
Dans responded by confirming that yes, in fact, DOGE’s approach to OPM was exactly as outlined by Project 2025.
“At Project 2025, we published the source code to the deep state. And we pointed the way,” Dans asserts. “We said the motherboard of this whole thing lies in the obscure agency called OPM. And why is that? Because personnel is policy. If the president wants to deliver on the promises made to the American people, it all turns on the staff beneath him.”
The idea that “personnel is policy” is the driving force behind the mass purges that were led by DOGE. After Elon Musk has had his role limited, according to Trump, we could see these mass purges enter a more methodical phase in its implementation.
Russell Vought, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director, has taken recent moves to further Project 2025’s agenda in a more quiet manner. Vought is a self-proclaimed Christian Nationalist and was the key connective point between Project 2025 and Trumpworld. Vought was in charge of crafting Project 2025’s first 180-day plan, and he was also the policy director of the RNC’s 2024 platform writing committee.
Now, Vought is settling into his role in the executive branch.
Last month, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies,” that seeks to bring independent government agencies under direct White House control.
The agencies impacted include the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the National Labor Relations Board. The executive order only partially applies to the Federal Reserve, maintaining interest rate decisions at the Fed’s Board of Governors.
The takeover of those independent agencies is outlined in Project 2025.
The executive order also seeks to give Vought the power to control funds at those independent agencies and grants him supervising power over them. Vought, once a background character in the first Trump term, is now expanding his power in unprecedented ways.
Of course, unilaterally freezing congressionally approved funds is in direct violation of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. It’s also clearly outlined in the Constitution that Congress has the power of the purse. This order appears to be a calculated challenge to the constitutionality of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 – a challenge the Trump Administration likely hopes the Supreme Court will take up.
Going even further, Vought made another move last month that moves the Trump Administration’s purge of federal workers into its next phase. Vought sent an OMB memo that instructs federal agencies to plan for mass firings and includes guidance for screening new hires. As I outlined in my article covering this move, Project 2025 involves not only purging nonpartisan civil servants but also replacing them with trained loyalists. Vought’s Phase 1 and Phase 2 of his memo mirror that plan.
Russell Vought opened his chapter on executive power in Project 2025’s policy playbook (Page 43) by quoting Article II of the Constitution in his very first sentence – the basis for the unitary executive theory. Vought lambasts the federal bureaucracy and the notion of “independence.” Vought argues that the President must act with a “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”
During his interview with Politico, Paul Dans was asked about the unitary executive theory, and spoke about executive power, echoing similar sentiments as Vought.
“Our Constitution vests the executive power squarely and solely in the president of the United States,” Dans claimed. “And over the last 100 years, these encroachments on that power were not only unconstitutional, they were anti-democratic and lacking in moral legitimacy in the sense that the people vote every four years for a president to put forward new policy, and if his policies are being impeded by an unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy, that is a problem that needs reformation.”
Of course, any limits placed on executive power were placed by a coequal branch of government and were fully constitutional. They’ve been affirmed by the Supreme Court, and in the case of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, those limits were placed by Congress.
What Dans outlined in that response on executive power is the thread that runs throughout Project 2025. It’s this false belief that Republican Presidents should be all-powerful and that nonpartisan federal workers who aren’t absolutely loyal to that president are part of an “unaccountable bureaucracy” that needs to be purged and replaced. This belief in the unitary executive theory also sees the courts as a secondary figure without the power to constrain the president.
I say this theory is for Republican presidents specifically because none of these people would advocate for a Democratic president to have this same level of unchecked authority.
It’s this belief about presidential power that leads the Trump Administration to think they have the authority to dismantle congressionally-created agencies like USAID or the Department of Education. That belief is downright unlawful.
On eliminating the Department of Education, Dans further confirmed to Politico that this has long been an objective of the Heritage Foundation: “It’s been a historic target of the conservative movement from the time it was stood up. The original 1980 volume of Mandate for Leadership called for its abolition. The damage done by the federalization of education — you can’t argue with the results — America earns a failing grade.”
Hirsh asked Dan about the court orders halting the Trump Admin’s unilateral efforts. “As a lawyer yourself, you’ve seen that the courts — even the Supreme Court — are pushing back against Trump in many cases and citing the very Constitution you say is being violated,” Hirsh said. “Judges have blocked the freezing of foreign aid, for example, programs under USAID, and the way that many employees, including probationary employees, have been dismissed.”
Paul Dans replied, “I don’t put much stock in those district court opinions. The left has forum-shopped to find courts willing to make ultra vires [lacking legal authority] expansions of their jurisdiction. It’s a dangerous precedent that delegitimizes the federal court system. One federal judge can’t come in and push the secretary of the Treasury aside and say this court knows better how to do your job than you do. To do that and hamstring the president is a naked usurpation of power. A federal court and its three law clerks cannot usurp the power granted to the president, and we are nearing a point when this will need to be resolved.”
Dan’s attitude towards the courts is shared by the Trump Administration. Just this past weekend, Trump defied a court that ordered them to turn around deportation flights that were authorized by invoking the Alien Enemies Act.
Last month, Vice President J.D. Vance joined Elon Musk’s public attacks on the federal judiciary, posting on Twitter that “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” Vance, who graduated from Yale Law School, knows his claim that judges “aren’t allowed” to review executive power is pure nonsense. Vance is very aware of the Supreme Court’s 1803 Marbury v. Madison ruling, which established judicial review and cemented the judiciary’s authority to check the power of the other two branches of government.
Those comments from Vance were not surprising. In fact, they echo a sentiment Vance shared in a September 2021 interview. Vance endorsed the Project 2025 plan to purge civil servants and called for the defiance of court orders:
“I think that what Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people… and when the courts stop you, stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say ‘the Chief Justice has made his ruling now let him enforce it.’”
(That Andrew Jackson quote is often attributed to him, but not confirmed)
You can see here, both in actions and in rhetoric, that the Trump Administration is in full alignment with Project 2025.
I know all of this is overwhelming, but the sloppiness and incompetence I continue to reference have proven to be an impediment to the Trump Administration’s pursuit of the Project 2025 agenda. Trump and Musk’s reckless approach has backfired, resulting in significant public backlash against the Republican Party and Musk’s company, Tesla.
I discussed this in more detail in my recent appearance on the podcast “Shrinking Trump” with John Gartner and Harry Segal, in which they said my way of looking at the Trump Administration’s stumbles cheered them up. If you’re despairing about everything going on, I highly recommend taking a watch or a litsen to that episode.
I still firmly believe that one of the greatest impediments to Trump’s authoritarian ambitions is his own incompetence. They’re failing in as many ways as they’re succeeding, and they’re turning the American people against them in the process. Stay vigilant, keep the hope, and carry on.
