On a Thursday morning in early June, I hopped off a train at Washington’s Union Station and walked a few blocks east to get a glimpse into the headquarters of one of the most secretive — and most hyped — organizations in America: Project 2025, tucked away inside the main offices of the Heritage Foundation on Capitol Hill.
My visit came at an opportune moment: For months, journalists and liberal watchdog groups had been poring over Project 2025’s 900-page policy book — titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” — which purports to be a “comprehensive policy guide” for the next Republican administration, including recommendations to restrict access to medical abortion, remove civil service protections for some federal workers and banning pornography. If you’ve heard a Democrat talking apocalyptically about Project 2025 in the past few months, this document is probably what they have in mind.
I was there to spend two days shadowing the project’s leadership, focusing on the lesser-known aspects of the project’s four-part plan. In addition to the policy book, Project 2025 was also building a “conservative LinkedIn” — a database of fully vetted candidates who could fill jobs across future Republican administrations — and an online “training academy” to give job-seekers the ideological and practical chops to make the entire federal bureaucracy match Trump’s MAGA ambitions. (Project 2025’s final part, known as “Pillar IV,” involves the creation of an “180-day playbook” for implementing the policy agenda — but the playbook would be kept confidential.)I was met in the foundation’s marble-lined lobby by Ellie Keenan, a smiley communications staffer who was to serve as my handler. She got me a security pass, showed me to a nearby elevator and pressed the button for the sixth floor. We were headed straight to the nerve center of what The Wall Street Journal dubbed “the radical conservative plan to reshape America.”
The elevator doors opened onto a narrow hallway, which I walked down expecting to be greeted by a buzz of activity. Instead, I entered a silent, low-ceilinged room, filled by four empty cubicles, a copy machine and an empty desk covered in cardboard boxes and stray copies of the policy book. A half-eaten box of granola bars and a jar of candy on a nearby windowsill were the only signs that human beings occasionally occupied the space. Keenan gestured toward two adjacent offices belonging to two of the project’s seven full-time staffers.
This, I wondered, is it?Over the course of my visit, I came to see that the emptiness of the Project 2025 offices at Heritage headquarters was a good metaphor for the project as whole. On both the left and the right, Project 2025 had been portrayed as a vast and well-orchestrated operation — either to rationalize and systematize Trumpism, according to some conservatives, or to undermine democracy and implement an ultra-disciplined reactionary regime, according to some liberals.
Instead, what I discovered — during my visit and in my conversations with conservatives involved in the project — was a shoestring operation struggling with internal disagreements, political miscalculation and questionable leadership. Project 2025 had set out to turn Trumpism into a well-oiled machine; instead, it had created an engine of the same sort of political disorder that defined the first Trump White House.
Shortly after my visit, the signs of that disorder became visible to the world beyond the Heritage headquarters. In early July, the week before the Republican National Convention, former President Donald Trump — sensing the political liability that Project 2025 had become — took to social media to distance himself from the group, claiming (falsely, I learned) to “know nothing about Project 2025” and that he had “no idea who is behind it.” Three weeks later, on July 30, Heritage announced that the project’s director, Paul Dans, was stepping down amid increased pressure from the Trump campaign. Project 2025 will continue in a pared-down form under the leadership of Heritage President Kevin Roberts, but its relationship with Trump’s team appears to be seriously damaged.
Which isn’t to say that it will carry no influence with the next Trump administration. Dans may be gone, but the policy book will still be out there ready to be adopted, and the project can still turn over its personnel database and “180-day playbook” to Trump’s transition team. Many of the people who have been closely involved in the project — including Russell Vought, who is leading the work on Pillar IV, and Johnny McEntee, a former top aide to Trump — are likely to hold senior positions in the next Trump White House, and Trump’s vice presidential pick JD Vance remains close with Roberts, having authored the foreword to his new book. Out of sheer necessity, the Trump transition team may end up relying on the project’s resources, especially its personnel database, given Trump’s stated ambition to “dismantle the deep state” and replace it with conservative loyalists.But in the end, it may have been Heritage’s self-generated hype — which at times exaggerated Project 2025’s scope and overlooked internal fissures — that led to its sidelining.
Now, the escalating kerfuffle that culminated in Dans’ departure chips away at the sense of professionalization and newfound competence that both Project 2025 and the Trump campaign have been trying to convey about the next Trump administration. The former president and his allies may want to project the illusion of discipline, but the movement that fuels Trumpism still runs on chaos — and Project 2025 is no exception.
As things began to unravel in full public view, I thought back to an exchange that I’d had with Dans during my visit to Project 2025 headquarters in June. I had asked Dans how confident he was that, if Trump won in November, his transition and his administration would use the resources that Project 2025 had put together. His answer was entirely self-assured.
“We talk to President Trump, and we also talk to his team,” Dans told me. “The reality is that we have a great complement of people here that are extremely effective and who were in the prior administration, and we have a hundred [allied] organizations with thousands of people at work. You can’t help but not use this work.”
Dans may have been telling the truth about Heritage’s relationship with Trump, but he was overstating the extent of what his team had to offer. With Dans gone, Trump and his team may still rely on Project 2025 if they win in November — but they may be disappointed with what they find when they take a deeper look.To hear Dans tell it, the motivations behind Project 2025 were a mix of the cinematic and the heroic.
“We kind of envision this project — as they do in Hollywood when they’re pitching a project — as the Manhattan Project meets the Empire State Building meets D-Day,” Dans said when I met him with in his office. A tall, broad-shouldered man with dark hair and a prominent chin, Dans has a habit of flitting back and forth between partisan red meat and folksy metaphorizing, and he has a knack for (almost) reciting famous quotations and aphorisms from memory.
On the second day of my visit, he was feeling especially grandiloquent: From the example of the Manhattan Project, he told me, his team derived the desire to “bring together the best and brightest to solve an existential crisis”; from the construction of the Empire State Building, the inspiration to build something that once seemed impossible; from D-Day, “the courage that they had … to get over the fear of the unknown.”
“We took our inspiration from Daniel Burnham, who is the great architect of the City Beautiful Movement,” he continued, reaching for one of his famous quotations. “‘Make no little plans. They have — they lack — the power to, you know, to inspire men — they lack that magic — but they also aren’t gonna get realized.’” (Close enough.)Dans was a reasonably safe choice to lead the project. A commercial litigator by training, Dans joined Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2019 before entering the U.S. Office of Personnel Management in February 2020, where — along with McEntee, Trump’s body man-turned-director of White House Office of Personnel Management — he waged a late-stage crusade to purge the administration of any disloyal elements, earning him a reputation as a committed Trump loyalist.
In April 2022, Roberts tapped Dans to oversee Heritage’s “2025 Presidential Transition Project” — or Project 2025, for short. At Heritage, he quickly moved to reconstruct what he called “the HUD mafia,” a core group of young and hyper-loyal advisers who had left that department to oversee personnel late in the Trump administration. Two of McEntee’s top aides — Spencer Chretien and James Bacon — both joined shortly thereafter, and McEntee came on in May 2023 as a senior adviser. A few months later, Dans poached another former McEntee aide, Troup Hemenway, from Heritage’s top rival in Washington’s MAGA universe, the America First Policy Institute’s “America First Transition Project,” sealing Project 2025’s reputation in conservative circles as the institutional home for Trump’s young and loyal coterie of personnel staffers.
One year later, in April 2023, Heritage published the 900-page “Mandate for Leadership.” This wasn’t an earth-shattering development by itself: Heritage has published policy manuals in elections years stretching back to Ronald Reagan’s run in 1980. But Heritage signaled that its ambitions for the project were more sweeping than in years past, announcing that it had gathered a coalition of over 50 conservative organizations to serve on the project’s advisory board, whose members had agreed to contribute to the project’s other pillars on a volunteer basis. (The coalition has now expanded to over 110 members.)Yet the focus on building a united front around the project obscured fundamental disagreements simmering below the surface of Heritage’s coalition. In November 2022, Heritage hired Rick Dearborn, the executive director of Trump’s first transition team in 2016 who later served as White House deputy chief of staff, as a fellow advising the project. Dans then tasked Dearborn with writing the chapter about the White House Office, the innermost sanctum of the West Wing that’s led by the White House chief of staff and includes the president’s closest advisers.
To some of the people on the project’s advisory board, though, the elevation of Dearborn — who served in the White House for just over a year during the chaotic early days of the Trump presidency, and who many in the administration thought was responsible for the failures of the first transition team — severely undercut the project’s credibility. “It was essentially like asking an amputee sitting at home who’s never driven a car to comment on Formula One,” said a conservative who advised the project. “I thought this was a real thing, but Dearborn is drafting the section on [the White House Office]?”
Similar complaints were raised privately among some of the project’s partners about the inclusion of Steven Bradbury — one of the authors of the George W. Bush administration’s infamous legal memoranda authorizing the use of torture methods during the War on Terror — who wrote the Mandate’s chapter on the Department of Transportation, according to the adviser. (Bradbury served as the general counsel and later acting director of the Department of Transportation during the Trump administration.)
A spokesperson for Project 2025 rejected the idea that there had been complaints about either hire. “We’re not interested in anonymous pot shots from people who may or may not even have served on the transition.”More recently, members of the coalition have started to raise questions about Dans’ and Roberts’ stewardship of the project — and especially martial rhetoric that the two men have used to describe the project’s work. (Dans has termed the policy book a “battle plan” for the next administration, while Roberts has said that the country is in the middle of a “second American revolution” that will be “bloodless … if the left allows it to be.”)
In a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington in July — where Dans also spoke about Project 2025 — the conservative economist Oren Cass, who contributed to Mandate’s chapter on the Department of Labor, indirectly chastised Roberts for his rhetoric, arguing that it undercut the project’s substantive policy goals. “Gaining productive power requires focusing on people’s problems and explaining how you are going to solve them, not pounding the table for Christian Nationalism or a second American revolution,” Cass said in his speech. (He declined a request to elaborate on his criticisms.)
In other instances, people involved with the project heard Dans talk about “keeping the cucks out” of the next administration or embracing a style of politics that “isn’t your grandpa’s conservatism.”Even the policy book itself became a subject of controversy within parts of the coalition. Although Project 2025 claimed to be agnostic about which of the Republican primary candidates would claim the nomination, Trump loyalists suspected early in the drafting process that Roberts was throwing Heritage’s institutional weight behind Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. And while Roberts has since warmed to Trump, some people wondered whether his support for DeSantis informed the strategy behind the policy book — making it less tailored to a Trump nomination. “There were a lot of things in [the book] that were drafted potentially with DeSantis in mind,” said the adviser.
The frustrations extended through the drafting process and the roll-out. In at least one case, the project’s leadership asked for advisers’ input on a late-stage draft of one of the book’s chapters with less than two hours before the final publication deadline, according to a person involved. “So many people complained” about the quick turn-around, the person said. “How can we review a several-thousand-word document in an hour and make any substantive changes?” (A spokesperson for Heritage denied this account.)
The more fundamental disagreement, however, pertained to the question of whether Heritage should hold off on publishing the policy book until closer to the election, or whether it should consider not publishing it publicly at all. Internally, the project’s leadership took for granted that its policy recommendations would be public, pointing to the foundation’s long history of publishing a new edition of the Mandate during election years, dating back to 1980. Although Heritage had traditionally not published its Mandate until the summer before the election, the Project 2025 leadership had decided to move up the publication date to publicize its recommendations and preempt any future transition efforts.
But privately, some of the project’s partners wondered whether publishing the book so early — and promoting it so aggressively — would give Democrats unnecessary political ammunition and afford their opponents more time to devise legal strategies to counter conservatives’ plans.“If you genuinely believe that there is like a powerful deep state that is inclined to work adverse to conservative interests or to harm average Americans, then you would think it would be a little bit more discreet and a little more careful,” the person said. “If you think you’re in occupied France and the Vichy regime and the Nazis are out to get you, then you would act like a real resistance. You wouldn’t publish Charles de Gaulle’s travel timetable for everyone to read.”
Over time, those fears have come true. On the campaign trail, Democrats have moved aggressively to tie Trump to the Project 2025 agenda, and House Democrats and other liberal groups have launched task forces to combat future efforts to enact the project’s recommendations. In the end, the episode left some involved with the project wondering whether Project 2025 had always been an elaborate vanity project for Heritage.
“What was the goal of all this?” said another person with direct knowledge of the project. “Was the goal to blueprint the Trump administration, or was the goal to increase the clout and power of the Heritage Foundation?”Chretien turned around his computer monitor to reveal his profile on Project 2025’s most cherished resource. The personnel database, Chretien told me, was a significant part of what distinguished Project 2025 from Heritage’s past transition efforts: The think tank wasn’t just issuing white papers; it was building a network of vetted and loyal foot soldiers who could be trained and ready on Day One. Even if Trump lost, he said, the database could serve as a resource for the conservative movement for decades to come.
The need for such a database didn’t come out of nowhere. On the campaign trail, Trump and his allies have promised to “take swift and unprecedented action to protect Americans from the out-of-control Deep State” by “fir[ing] rogue bureaucrats and career politicians” and replacing them with Trump loyalists. Trump’s vice presidential pick, JD Vance, has suggested that Trump “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” All of those new bureaucrats would need to come from somewhere — and Project 2025 gambled that its database could serve as the staging ground.
Heritage has advertised its digital personnel database, which was built by Oracle, as a “conservative LinkedIn” — but from a technological point of view, it might more accurately be called “conservative Facebook, circa 2006.” The user interface is a simple white, black and red layout with sections for demographic info (name, age, location), professional history (educational achievements, work history, resume) and political background (previous government experience, lobbying history, past political contributions). Profiles include a tab where prospective job-seekers can upload letters of recommendation or statements of political purpose, though neither is required.To create a profile, applicants fill out a publicly available questionnaire, which, in addition to asking for basic personal information, prompts applicants to “agree” or “disagree” with a series of political statements such as, “The police in America are systemically racist,” (stipulated answer: “No”); and, “The President should be able to advance his/her agenda through the bureaucracy without hinderance [sic] from unelected federal officials,” (“Yes”). Once a profile is completed and uploaded to the system, it gets reviewed by a small team led by Hemenway, working out of Heritage’s smaller townhouse on the other side of Capitol Hill. (My scheduled visit to the townhouse was canceled after a last-minute “change of plans,” the reasons for which became slightly clearer when another Heritage staffer asked me — sarcastically — if I had gotten to see the “Heritage trap house.”)
Based on that information in the database, Hemenway and his team reach out to some candidates by phone for additional details and then conduct “mapping exercises” where they pair applicants to suitable jobs and compile personnel lists of people who could fill various senior appointments. The plan remains to make these lists and the database — which is searchable and filterable by requirements like work experience and expertise — available to Trump’s transition team if he wins in November.
On paper, the database has been a success. As of June, Chretien told me, the database contained over 10,000 profiles. But he declined to say how many of those profiles had been completed (an applicant can create a profile but fail to fill it out completely) or formally vetted. By July, a Heritage spokesperson said the database was “closing in on 20,000 profiles.”
Privately, though, some of the people directly involved in the project have questioned whether the database is attracting the type of people who could actually work a job in a future Republican administration. In an explicit effort to reach beyond the Beltway, the Project 2025 staff have traveled around the country to promote the database, hosting recruiting stations at events including the Iowa State Fair — a move that may help grow the database’s raw numbers but isn’t guaranteed to identify people with the credentials to staff senior roles in the White House or at a cabinet agency.“It’s like a noble aspiration to say that we should look beyond D.C. … [but] it becomes a qualitative issue rather than a quantitative one,” said the person who advised the project. “I don’t think anyone [outside the Project 2025 team] has any idea what kinds of individuals are in the database.”
To ensure a baseline level of knowledge across prospective recruits, Project 2025 has rolled out its “Presidential Administration Academy,” a series of interactive video trainings led by prominent conservative politicos and broken up into four different subject areas, including “Conservative Governance 101” and “the Administrative State and the Regulatory Process.” At the end of each module, viewers are prompted to take a quiz, and participants who watch all the classes and pass all the quizzes are awarded a “certificate” that’s reflected on the profile in the database.
But in the end, the modules were relatively light on substance and heavy of ideology, according to a person who was familiar with them. At least one conservative who was asked to contribute to a module was subsequently asked to “dumb down” his material to make it more palatable to viewers.The relatively low-budget feel of the database and the training academy has prompted some of the project’s partners to wonder what, exactly, Dans and his team have done with the $22 million that the Heritage Foundation initially pledged toward Project 2025. When I asked Dans how the budget had been used, he reached for one of his folksy aphorisms.
“I remember this Old Milwaukee [beer] ad from the ’80s … and there was the one guy who was in charge of the beer fund, and [he and his friends] were all happy and they’re drinking ‘Old Mill,’ and [one of them] said, ‘Well, what did you do with all the monies that you were putting into the beer fund?’ And then you see the guy behind them with a big yacht.”
“We’re drinking ‘Old Mill’ here,” he added.
So not all of the $22 million that had been earmarked for the project had actually been allocated to it? I asked.
Dans nodded. “We’re much more [low] budget over here than what people [operating] in the caverns of the liberal mind would like to believe.”Trump loomed large over my visit to Project 2025, both spiritually and visually: A photo of Trump with members of Heritage’s leadership team hung in the hallway outside Dans’ office; on Dans’ desk, a mug emblazoned with a picture of Trump and Dans — both making Trump’s signature thumbs-up — stared out at me. Desktop portraits of Trump dotted staffers’ offices, like little devotional images set up next to shrines.The first signs of a rupture between Project 2025 and Trump world occurred last November, when Trump’s senior advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita released a statement distancing the campaign from “the efforts by various non-profit groups” to prepare for a possible Trump transition. The statement did not single out any groups by name, but it was widely understood to be addressed to Heritage and the America First Policy Institute, which had begun its own parallel transition project.
According to a person familiar with the matter, the statement was accompanied by a phone call from Wiles and LaCivita to Heritage leadership laying out the campaign’s terms. “The phone call was essentially, like, ‘Shut the hell up,’” this person said. “Everyone knows you did this or are doing it, stop talking about it, stop trying to raise money off of it, don’t go on TV talking about it, just leave it.”
In early December, as stories about Project 2025 continued to trickle out, the Trump campaign escalated its public attacks on Heritage, again in the form of another, even more forceful statement from Wiles and LaCivita and directed at Trump’s supposed “allies” who “haven’t gotten the hint”: “Let us be even more specific, and blunt,” Wiles and LaCivita wrote. “People publicly discussing potential administration jobs for themselves or their friends are, in fact, hurting President Trump … and themselves. These are an unwelcomed distraction.”The second message stuck — at least for a while. Early this year, Project 2025 began shrinking its media footprint and drawing back promotion of the project, and in the interviews they did do, Heritage staff began attaching the ubiquitous caveat, “Of course, we don’t speak for President Trump, but …”
As Democrats continued to tie Trump to the project, though, and the media continued to cover its policy plans and personnel efforts, some inside Heritage started to rankle at having to hold their tongues, believing that the Trump campaign’s de facto gag order was leaving them open to bad-faith attacks from Democrats and allowing the media to control the narrative around the project. By the spring — around the time Heritage agreed to let me visit for this story — they had inched back out into the public conversation, with Dans sitting for several extended interviews and Roberts giving a long interview with The New York Times Magazine about Heritage’s ambition of “institutionalizing Trumpism.”On July 5, in the middle of another Democratic-driven news cycle tying Trump to Project 2025’s policy proposals, Trump issued his first formal denunciation, adding, “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
The Trump campaign continued its public attacks throughout July, with LaCivita calling the project “a pain in the ass” and Trump reasserting his distance from it. By the end of the month — as the Trump campaign got closer to announcing its own, formal transition project — there was a sense within Heritage that something had to give.
“Paul decided to leave because the transition playbook was wrapping up, the personnel arm was running smoothly, and he realized it would help quiet all the noise around Project 2025,” a person inside Heritage said.
In this farewell note to the Heritage staff, Dans borrowed quotations from two former presidents.
“Every post is honorable in which a man can serve his country,” he wrote, citing George Washington.
“Fight, fight, fight,” he said, quoting Trump.On the afternoon of my first day, the Project’s leadership gathered in a wood-paneled auditorium for the project’s monthly advisory board meeting. A playlist of Trumpian tunes (“God Bless the U.S.A.,” “YMCA”) played over the audio system as about 40 members of the project’s partner organizations took their seats in the auditorium and another 30 popped up on a television screen via Zoom. At one point, a person from a partner organization told me, these meetings had been much fuller.
From a small stage at the front of the room, Dans, Chretien and Hemenway gave brief updates on the project’s work, and Keenan — who oversees communications for the project — produced a printed-out copy of The Nation’s June edition, which was entirely dedicated to Project 2025. (No press is bad press, after all.)
Meanwhile, in the atrium outside the auditorium, staff were laying out a buffet spread of hamburger sliders and tater tots and stocking a bar with White Claws and beer. It was time to do what Washington’s conservative movement does best: host a cocktail party. For a moment, the project’s power as the “convener for the conservative movement” was on full display. The meetings’ attendees started trickling out of the auditorium, and a steady stream of outside guests made their way into the atrium and toward the buffet. Pretty soon, the atrium was packed, and there was talk of migrating to the roof deck. The room buzzed with the energy of a group of people who were confident that they were in the right place at the right time.
And they may not have been wrong. Many of the people in the room could find themselves inside a second Trump White House; the policy book they helped write could become a blueprint for a revamped conservative agenda; the brouhaha between Trump and Project 2025 could prove to be a passing storm or an elaborate political charade.
Or, like the project itself, maybe it was all a bit of a mirage.
I schmoozed for a bit, but it was too loud to interview anyone, so I grabbed my stuff and headed for the exit.
“Man, it’s a zoo in there,” said a woman in the elevator.
“Well, what do you expect,” said a younger guy next to her. “The vast right-wing conspiracy isn’t going to run itself.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/08/02/project-2025-trump-inside-story-00172299
