‘beyond My Wildest Dreams’: The Architect Of Project 2025 Is Ready For His Victory Lap

A year ago, Paul Dans was chief architect of what was shaping up to be the blueprint for Donald Trump’s second term. Eight months ago, he was sent into MAGA exile.

Dans was the director of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation when, midway through the 2024 presidential campaign, he and his program started to become a huge political liability for Trump. Democrats warned of Project 2025’s “radical” agenda, saying it would mean a ban on abortion, elimination of LGBTQ+ rights, and complete presidential power over federal agencies along with the elimination of some of them, including the Department of Education. At the Democratic National Convention, Saturday Night Live’s Kenan Thompson held up a giant-size replica of the 900-page Project 2025 book and quipped, “You ever see a document that could kill a small animal and democracy at the same time? Here it is.”

Conservatives began blaming Heritage and Project 2025 for hurting Trump’s election chances. Trump himself repeatedly contended he hadn’t even read Project 2025, claiming on Truth Social that he had “no idea who is behind it.” In an interview with the POLITICO Deep Dive podcast published Saturday, Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita complained that “there was some stuff in there that we were like, ‘Where the hell did that come from?’”

Dans became a sacrificial lamb. Pressured to resign from Heritage, Dans left in a fit of pique at the end of July, and he later criticized LaCivita and campaign co-head Susie Wiles for campaign “malpractice.”

Now Dans, who lives in Charleston, South Carolina, and works as a lawyer and government relations consultant, is letting bygones be bygones and says he’s delighted with the extent to which Project 2025 has, in fact, become the Trump administration’s playbook.

This week, in his first in-depth interview since Trump returned to the presidency, Dans effectively confirmed what Democrats were saying all along and Trump himself denied: There really is almost no difference between Project 2025 and what Trump was planning all along and is now implementing. And if the White House were to call, he’d be glad to get back on the team.

“It’s actually way beyond my wildest dreams,” Dans said. “It’s not going to be the easiest road to hoe going forward. The deep state is going to get its breath back. But the way that they’ve been able to move and upset the orthodoxy, and at the same time really capture the imagination of the people, I think portends a great four years.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

So as it turns out, the Trump administration’s program and Project 2025 seem to be one and the same. True?

I'm not saying that. I'm saying that directionally, they have a lot in common, but so do great minds. 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.

In other words, what’s being implemented now is Project 2025, for the most part. But that was the issue brought up during the campaign, when Trump said he had nothing to do with Project 2025. Did the president not tell the truth?

He absolutely told the truth. Project 2025 was done outside of President Trump. It was done by the conservative movement to really say, “This is what we believe in. This is what we want to see in the next conservative president.”

You’ve said this agenda goes back much further than Trump — you wanted to attack the federal administrative state that you view as populated by liberals, one that started more than 100 years ago under Woodrow Wilson.

Well, that’s right. We are going on our 250th birthday here in a little over a year from now. And the last 100 years have been a great diversion from the enduring constitutional structure of this great American experiment in democracy. That is, we needed to undertake a restoration of democracy by slamming the door shut on the Progressive Era. What happened dating back to FDR, but even before that with Wilson, was a way of thinking that an expert class would superintend life for the rest of us, that the common man didn't have the sense to rule his own destiny. The entire artifice of the federal government had been built over the last 100 years in essentially a very anti-democratic manner.

Our Constitution vests the executive power squarely and solely in the president of the United States. 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.

But that’s still very much at issue. You and your conservative colleagues are saying the president can do whatever he wants to federal agencies based on the “unitary executive theory” of the Constitution, and by seeking to overturn the Impoundment Control Act [which prevents the president from blocking congressional spending]. But doesn’t the president have to implement the policies passed by Congress even if he doesn’t agree with them?

I think what we’re engaging in is going to be a constitutional debate on the order of what happened in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. We have designed the system so that each of these three independent branches have their own constitutional obligations, and when these overlap or collide is ultimately for the people to sort out. So this is a debate that needs to happen. The pendulum over the last 100 years has swung in a direction that’s been a major incursion on both the core executive branch authority, but also an abandonment of the responsibility of the legislature to do its work. In that span of time you've seen an activist judiciary step up and answer these questions. Is that really the ultimate equilibrium we should live with? I think that’s going to get played out through a national conversation and the court system.

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. 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.

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.

Trump and his team have talked a lot about exposing fraud, waste and abuse, but we haven't seen much evidence of that. What we've mostly seen evidence of is attacking so-called DEI (“diversity, equality and inclusion”) programs. It looks very much like a political agenda.

Well, President Trump, for one, did a great recitation during the State of the Union address of really indefensible expenditures of money. Many examples were from USAID. He also spoke about some of the recent findings examining Social Security recipients and determining whether there may be illicit payments going to people with ages of over 140 years old. This along with what's been unearthed in the Treasury Department with trillions of dollars of expenditures not being properly tagged, proves that the system is built in a way that, by intention, no one can understand, and none of the money is really traceable. But the irony of now is that with the advent of AI and technicians like Elon Musk, we are, for the first time, getting a holistic view of the government.

But what Trump said has been largely debunked. There simply are not millions and millions of fraudulent payments going out to people who are dead or too old, based on the Social Security Administration’s own 2023 Inspector General report and other reports. It seems as if Trump was exaggerating or falsifying the record.

I don't believe that's true at all. What DOGE uncovered is that the fundamental controls in the financial system aren't there. That is trillions of dollars flowing out of the Treasury without the elemental tagging being done to them. Same at Health and Human Services. Ditto Social Security. Therefore there's absolutely no way to audit this system.

I’m talking specifically about how much fraud there might be in Social Security payments. There's no evidence to back up what Trump was saying.

I don’t know one way or the other. I get second-hand reports as you do.

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?

At Project 2025, we published the source code to the deep state. And we pointed the way. We said the motherboard of this whole thing lies in the obscure agency called OPM [the Office of Personnel Management]. 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.

It looks as if the president is signing, or is about to sign, an executive order to eliminate the Department of Education, which has just gutted its workforce. That was another big target of yours. 

It's been an 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. I myself am the product of K-through-12 public education, and my mother being a public-school teacher, my mother-in-law being the same, you're not going to find a bigger advocate for public education. But that said, the declining test scores, the poor literacy rate — it's just not working.

Why is the DOE to blame for that? I mean, state and local boards of education are still primarily responsible for these schooling standards, not the federal government.

My understanding is that a lot of what state and local governments face are unfunded mandates and directions from the Department of Education. They don't comply, they get money taken away from them. They're between a rock a hard place having to live up to this centralized direction from Washington. And I think that when you relieve them of that, certainly they will step up and do their job. 

It must be tough for you to be on the outside looking in. Do you regret having criticized Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita last summer?

Well, as Frank [Sinatra] would say, regrets I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention.

Are there places where you think they are going too far too fast? Some of the analysis in the new Mandate for Leadership, the bible of Project 2025, was more nuanced. In the chapter you co-wrote, for example, “Managing the Bureaucracy,” you concluded that careful reform of merit pay was needed — and you even lauded Jimmy Carter's attempted reforms.

I used to give a speech where I started with a riddle that said, “What happens when you combine a GS-14 with a GS-11?” [General Schedule payscales for federal workers rated from one to 15.] And the answer was me. That is, my parents came to Washington, and they were the best of a generation in the 1960s, the first in their families to go to college. And they met at the National Institutes of Health. So I've always grown up with great reverence, if you will, for federal employees, and I do think that there's always going to be a call for the best and the brightest to work in the United States government.

That said, the system's been derailed over the last 30 years, and there has been a great breakdown in its efficiency and quality of output, but also in the ability to control it and limit itself in terms of growth. That is, it's a self-perpetuating blob, if you will.

But going back to what you said about your parents, do you feel that some federal employees are being treated badly here? People are getting notices saying they're being dismissed for incompetence when they had just received in the past year very good assessments from the superiors. Isn’t there some unfairness here?

Well, sure, in specific cases, there may be. But I think you have to look at the system as a whole. It's just gone so haywire. When the civil service was stood up, 10 percent of the jobs were consecrated to these protections [prevented from dismissal except for just cause or poor performance]. Fast forward to today 100 years later, nearly 99.5 percent of positions are subject to those civil service protections. Further, the performance appraisal system is broken. Fully 99.7 percent of the federal workforce receives annual performance reviews stating they are performing “fully successfully” or better. This just can’t be. Certainly there is no such analog in the private sector.

Let’s go into some examples where there seems to be divergence between Project 2025 and what Trump and Musk are doing. Your chapter on USAID recommended serious reforms but it also talked about all the benefits that USAID brought, particularly in the soft power struggle with China. Now you have Musk saying USAID is nothing but a criminal organization and should be eliminated.

Project 2025 was really a resource guide to point the way to various problems and offer some solutions, all of which were only a menu that the next president could pick and choose from. Some of these agencies are so corrupted that you almost have to start anew. Many of the missions of these corrupted agencies are actually delegated from other agencies, so there is a possibility of restoring them to their original place and order. With respect to foreign aid, a lot of this could be done through the State Department, and will, I think in proper measure, continue to be done.

But Project 2025 didn’t call for the elimination of USAID, which is what [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio is apparently doing. Why not stand behind what you guys actually backed at the time — which was to strengthen USAID and restore those programs countering China?

I think they stand for the same proposition, which is fundamental reform. That's what the people voted for in elections. You know what happened was USAID under Biden was a complete perversion of its mission. It became a mechanism for promotion of the progressive worldview: climate extremism, gender radicalism, abortion promotion. It's just so inculcated in every aspect of what they were doing business wise, that it's almost easier to start anew. So they're transporting over a portion of it, resettling it in the State Department.

That's been tried before. Andrew Natsios, who is a conservative Republican who ran USAID, said it's not a good idea because USAID programs involve a lot of technical knowledge that State Department employees don't have.

I can’t say. I haven’t opened up the hood of the place myself, personally, but I'm trusting in the administration and their assessment of it, and certainly, you know, under [Biden administration USAID director] Samantha Power, it was just a field day, and it's run amok. You know what they did with fertilizer? Encouraging people to do away with chemical fertilizer ultimately impacted the cost of food. Which is which is having a negative impact on hunger.

Let’s go back to the 2024 political campaign, when you were pressured to resign last summer as Democrats attacked Project 2025. Didn't the Trump campaign come to you at some point beforehand and say, “Cool it?”

Look, one thing that happened with Project 2025 was that we got caught in this maelstrom of misinformation, and at some point, the left decided that they were all in on Project 2025. That turned out to be one of the great political miscalculations of all time.

Do you think that looking back, you might have done more at Heritage to distance yourself from the Trump campaign the way, say, the America First Policy Institute under Brooke Rollins did by staying very quiet?

Fake news is going to be fake news. And, you know, going in and arguing with leftist misinformation agents on MSNBC is kind of a pointless endeavor, in my estimation. President Trump is the great communicator, and he was able to make those points strongly himself. And, that said, what we had hoped would happen has happened. So I can't imagine how anything could end really any better.

Is there any way at all in which what Trump is doing is falling short or diverging from your original vision for Project 2025?

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.

Are you looking to get a job in the Trump administration now? Is this a job interview?

Well, I have a job. One is that I'm a father of four kids. Two, I'm an attorney. And three, the mission of this was always to get our government going in the right direction. So I just worked for two and a half years, really, without cessation to try to do my small bit to help move this entire ball forward. Should President Trump or his team need me, I will gladly answer the call.

I have to think you’d want to be in on implementing the agenda you were such a huge part of creating.

The race is long, you know? I always think that the election is just the starting gate. Look, this is going to go on even for multiple administrations. I do one day aspire to rejoin public service. So I would say, “Watch this space.”