The head of Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 announced to his staff that he would be departing the project at the end of August. Paul Dans, chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management under President Trump and its liaison to the White House Officer of Presidential Personnel, has served as the director of Heritage Foundation’s Presidential Transition Project, or Project 2025. Now, he seems to have been offered up as a scapegoat as Project 2025 was made radioactive by the left and disavowed by former President Trump and his campaign.
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Project 2025, a plan that has been much discussed and seldom read, provided an incoming Trump administration with a list of policies to implement to bring down costs and realign government operations with the spirit of the Constitution. It also provides a putative Trump administration with an extensive pool of candidates for appointed positions. This would let the administration rapidly gain control over key parts of the federal government.
Trump’s campaign welcomed the demise.
In his departure email, obtained by Politico, Dans does not sound like a beaten man.
“Friends and patriots: to every thing there is a season. We completed what we set out to do, which was to create a unified conservative vision, bringing together over 110 leading organizations united behind the cause of deconstructing the administrative state,” Dans wrote in an email that was shared with POLITICO.
“This tool was built for any administration dedicated to conservative ideals to utilize. The work of the project was due to wrap with the nominating conventions of the political parties. Our work is presently winding down, and I planned later in August to leave Heritage. Electoral season is upon us, and I want to direct all my efforts to winning bigly,” Dans wrote.
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.
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.
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In terms of substance, Project 2025 or something like it was necessary. The project brought together over a hundred veterans of Trump’s administration, and center-right organizations were involved in the project. (Warning: this account belongs to a leftwing nutter, please don’t click through).
Should he win, Trump will be faced with a virulently hostile federal bureaucracy. Some, like some members of the Department of Justice and the Intelligence Community, will undoubtedly try to devise Russia Hoax 2.0 to hamstring Trump’s second administration just as they did his first. It is imperative that Trump has people waiting in the wings to take control and that they have an action plan for accomplishing things.
What is instructive about this episode is that Trump refused to spend any time fighting over what the project did and didn’t say. He walked away from it; the project finished its work, and that work will be available if Trump takes office. He refused to get bogged down in a fight over a document produced by a think tank that was plausibly not sponsored by the Trump campaign. I’m not sure 2016-2020 Trump could have resisted the urge to go to war.
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In the big scheme of things, this is meaningless. It takes away one chew toy from the leftist press, but they’ll find another. It does, however, hint that we may be looking at a more disciplined Trump than we are used to seeing.