Paul Dans, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, stepped down following public scrutiny of the project during the presidential campaign. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts confirmed the departure, saying Heritage had always set the project’s policy drafting to finish after the two party nominating conventions and was sticking to that timeline. Roberts said the organization would continue building a “personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels—federal, state, and local.”
The Trump campaign, which had spent the month distancing itself from the project, responded through co-managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita that “reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed.”
The personnel work continued. In July 2025 Dans told the Associated Press that the second Trump administration’s reductions to the federal workforce and cuts to federal programs were what he had hoped for in drafting Project 2025, and launched a Republican primary challenge to Lindsey Graham for his U.S. Senate seat in South Carolina.
What Is Not Established Here
Two claims were removed for want of a source. The entry reported “an account that campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita had warned Project 2025 contributors they would be barred from a second Trump administration,” attributed only to unnamed “reporting at the time”; no cited source contains it. It also stated that after the 2024 election “a number of people associated with Project 2025 took positions in the administration” — widely reported, but not in any source cited here, and it was the premise of the entry’s claim that LaCivita’s warning “did not hold.” Both were cut rather than annotated. What remains is what the AP interview supports: Dans’s own account of what the administration did, in his own words.