Paul Dans

Paul Dans is an American lawyer who directed the 2025 Presidential Transition Project — publicly known as Project 2025 — at The Heritage Foundation, and who co-edited its policy volume Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. He stepped down from the project and left Heritage in July 2024, and registered with the Federal Election Commission as a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from South Carolina in July 2025.

Legal Career and Federal Service

The biography Dans supplied for Mandate for Leadership states that he worked in high-stakes commercial litigation at several large international law firms in New York City from 1997 to 2012, and then founded his own law firm. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law and holds graduate and undergraduate degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The same biography records that before joining Heritage he served in the Trump administration as Chief of Staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, as OPM’s White House liaison, and as a senior advisor at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. CNN, reporting in July 2024, likewise described him as having been OPM chief of staff, acting as a liaison between the agency and the White House.

The federal government’s own personnel record confirms the OPM service and dates part of it. The 2020 “Plum Book” — United States Government Policy and Supporting Positions, the committee print issued by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform in December 2020 with data as of June 30, 2020 — lists Paul Dans in OPM’s Office of the Director as the incumbent of “White House Liaison & Senior Advisor to the Director,” a noncareer Senior Executive Service appointment. The same listing shows the OPM directorship vacant, Michael Rigas as deputy director, and Basil Parker as chief of staff. Dans therefore held the White House liaison and senior advisor role, not the chief of staff role, as of June 30, 2020; any period he served as chief of staff fell outside that snapshot.

Project 2025

Dans directed the 2025 Presidential Transition Project at The Heritage Foundation, which the volume describes as organizing policy and personnel recommendations and training for appointees in a future presidential administration. He signed the volume’s note on the project as “Paul Dans, Director, Project 2025.”

Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise was published by The Heritage Foundation in 2023 (ISBN 978-0-89195-174-2). Its title page reads “Foreword by Kevin D. Roberts, PhD / Edited by Paul Dans and Steven Groves”: Dans and Groves are the volume’s editors, and Roberts, Heritage’s president, contributed only the foreword. Dans and Groves jointly signed the Acknowledgments.

Beyond editing, Dans was a co-author of Chapter 3, “Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy,” with Donald Devine and Dennis Dean Kirk — the chapter dealing with OPM and the other agencies that manage the federal workforce, the subject area of his own government service.

In June 2024, on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Dans said Project 2025 was “gonna be a D-Day invasion plan,” urged listeners to “flood the zone with us,” and said, “We’re going to make this happen under President Trump. And this is ultimately his direction and his team’s direction.”

Departure from Heritage

On July 30, 2024, CNN reported that Dans had stepped down as director of Project 2025 and was also leaving The Heritage Foundation. Kevin Roberts confirmed the departure in a statement to CNN, saying that “under Paul Dans’ leadership, Project 2025 has completed exactly what it set out to do: bringing together over 110 leading conservative organizations to create a unified conservative vision,” and that “this tool was built for any future administration to use.” A Heritage spokesperson said the project’s personnel phase — a nationwide effort to identify candidates for administration posts — would continue.

The departure followed months of public distancing by Donald Trump, who called some of the project’s ideas “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal” and said he had “no idea who is behind it.” Trump campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles said in a statement that the 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.” CNN’s own review found that at least 140 people who had worked in the Trump administration had a hand in the project, including more than half of those listed as authors, editors and contributors to Mandate for Leadership.

Senate Candidacy

Federal Election Commission records list Dans as a candidate for the United States Senate from South Carolina, candidate ID S6SC04296, running as a Republican and coded by the Commission as a challenger. His first filing is dated July 28, 2025, and the record is active through the 2026 election cycle.

What Is Not Established Here

This page previously described Dans in a single paragraph and carried a stub flag; it now rests on the volume he edited, on contemporaneous reporting of his departure, and on his FEC candidate registration.

Several things commonly said about Dans are not asserted here because no source consulted for this audit established them. His birth year is not stated: secondary summaries give 1968 or 1969, and no primary or first-party record confirms either. The exact start and end dates of his OPM and HUD service are not given: the Mandate for Leadership biography names the posts but not the dates, the Plum Book fixes only a single day (June 30, 2020) and shows him in the liaison role on it, and a search of the Federal Register’s full-text API for “Paul Dans” returns no documents. Secondary summaries give his chief-of-staff tenure as February to December 2020; that span is not repeated here, because it is contradicted at its midpoint by the Plum Book, which names a different person as chief of staff on June 30, 2020. The names of the New York law firms he worked for, and of the firm he founded, are not stated for want of a source. His departure from Heritage is reported here as it was reported — as a step-down confirmed by Heritage’s president — without any characterization of whether it was voluntary, since the sources consulted do not settle that.

On the Senate candidacy, the FEC record establishes only office, state, party, challenger status and filing dates. It does not name a primary opponent, and no incumbent is named on this page on the strength of it. Nor is any fundraising figure given: the OpenFEC totals endpoint was rate-limited to the point of failure during this audit.

Heritage’s own site (heritage.org) returns HTTP 403 to automated clients including curl with a browser user agent, so Dans’ Heritage staff page could not be read directly; the Mandate for Leadership PDF, retrieved from the Internet Archive, was used as the first-party substitute for his own account of his career.