(Yahoo) The director of Project 2025, a controversial conservative playbook for a second Trump presidency that has stoked intense debate on the national political stage, is stepping down.
The departure Tuesday of attorney Paul Dans from his director role at the Heritage Foundation, which oversees Project 2025, was immediately welcomed by former President Trump’s campaign, which has been trying for months to distance the candidate from the plan.
“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,” said Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, two senior campaign advisors.
Dans could not immediately be reached for comment. But officials at the Heritage Foundation said his departure was expected and consistent with long-standing plans for the project to enter a different phase following the major party conventions.
“Paul, who built the project from scratch and bravely led this endeavor over the past two years, will be departing the team and moving up to the front where the fight remains,” said Heritage President Kevin D. Roberts.
Roberts said Project 2025 was “built for any future administration to use,” not specifically for Trump, and it was “NOT shutting down,” he said.
“Our collective efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels — federal, state, and local — will continue,” Roberts said.
Project 2025 calls for vastly more power to be consolidated with the president, for more federal employees to be appointees of the president and for less federal intervention in a range of areas, including education — where it calls for the elimination of the Department of Education.
It also calls for stricter enforcement of immigration and new rules that would empower mass deportations, and for the wall along the southern border to be completed. It rails against certain environmental protections, and the demolition of key environmental agencies such as NOAA and the National Weather Service.
It calls for much tighter restrictions on abortion, and for the federal government to collect data on the women who receive such procedures. It also supports a slew of ideas that are strongly anti-LGBTQ+. In order to “make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors,” Roberts wrote in an introduction to the plan, the federal government should delete all references to queer identities, “diversity, equity and inclusion,” abortion or “reproductive health” from federal legislation and rules.
In addition to staking out conservative policy positions, Project 2025 is working to build out a database of conservative personnel interested in jobs in government — ostensibly as a pool of right-wing candidates for Trump to fill his government with if he wins.
In addition to welcoming Project 2025’s demise, LaCivita and Wiles again stressed there is no connection between it and Trump.
“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,” they said.
Trump has previously said he knew “nothing about” the plan, but also that he found some of its ideas “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
