Ex-Project 2025 chief says Trump’s actions are beyond his ‘wildest dreams’

The director of Project 2025, a rightwing plan to dismantle the federal government which Democrats warned about last year and forced Donald Trump to attempt to disown it, said Trump’s actions in power were proving “way beyond my wildest dreams”.

Paul Dans was director of Project 2025 for the Heritage Foundation, the hard-right group which has produced such policy plans for more than 40 years.

Project 2025 alarmed progressives with its advocacy of slashing government staffing and budgets and attacking protections for LGBTQ+ Americans; efforts to ensure diversity, equity and inclusion throughout government; attempts to tackle the climate crisis; and more.

Democratic attacks proved effective enough for Trump to claim he had “nothing to do” with the project. In July, as the Trump campaign scrambled to limit damage, Dans was forced out of his Heritage role.

Now, with Trump back in power, the president and his chief donor and ally, the Tesla and SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk, have mounted an assault on the federal government that has already led to thousands of firings, a bonfire of climate regulations, attacks on DEI initiatives real and imagined and much more.

“It’s actually way beyond my wildest dreams,” Dans told Politico. “It’s not going to be the easiest road to hoe going forward. The deep state is going to get its breath back here, but the way that they’ve been able to move and kind of upset the orthodoxy, and at the same time really capture the imagination of the people, I think portends a great four years.”

According to rightwing activists, the “deep state” is a permanent government of bureaucrats and operatives that exists to thwart Trump. Steve Bannon, a close ally to Trump and a chief propagator of the deep state conspiracy theory, has said it is for “nut cases”.

Dans, who now works as a lawyer and government relations consultant, batted away questions about recent criticism of Project 2025 by Chris LaCivita, co-chair of Trump’s campaign and previously a target for Dans’s own complaints.

But Dans also told Politico he was “not saying” Trump’s agenda and Project 2025 were “one and the same. I’m saying that directionally, they have a lot in common, but so do great minds.

“We had hoped, those of us who worked putting together Project 2025, that the next conservative president would seize the day, but Trump is seizing every minute of every hour. I’m not sure that you’d be able to implement Project 2025 without Donald Trump’s ability to bring people together and Elon Musk’s ability to focus the direction of the work.”

Musk’s role overseeing the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has stoked controversy, not least over accusations that his businesses stand to gain from his efforts. He denies conflicts of interest.

Dans said Trump “absolutely told the truth” when he distanced himself from Project 2025, claiming it was generated “outside of President Trump. It was done by the conservative movement to really say, ‘This is what we believe in. This is what we want to see in the next conservative president.’”

But Project 2025 authors who have taken up key roles in the second Trump administration include Russell Vought, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist now in charge of the office of management and budget.

Dans said Project 2025 was an attempt to “undertake a restoration of democracy by slamming the door shut on the Progressive Era”, which he dated to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president from 1933 to 1945, and even before that to Woodrow Wilson, in office from 1913 to 1921.

“I think what we’re engaging in is going to be a constitutional debate on the order of what happened in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787,” Dans said, reaching back to the point when the constitution was written.

Many of Trump’s orders and actions have been blocked by courts. Amid fear that the administration will simply defy legal oversight it does not like, Dans said he did not “put much stock in those district court opinions”.

“One federal judge can’t come in and push the secretary of the treasury aside and say this court knows better how to do your job than you do,” Dans said. “To do that and hamstring the president is a naked usurpation of power … we are nearing a point when this will need to be resolved.”

Musk’s work in slashing federal staffing and budgets is proving unpopular, with his businesses taking a hit. Dans praised “the advent of AI and technicians like Elon Musk … for the first time, [providing] a holistic view of the government”. Dans also rejected challenges to Musk’s work, including his claim to have identified huge fraud in programs such as social security.

Dans expressed support for eliminating the entire federal Department of Education, which Trump seems poised to do, and said that while some dismissed federal employees “may” have been treated unfairly, “you have to look at the system as a whole”.

He defended the evisceration of the US Agency for International Development, not advocated by Project 2025, claiming “a complete perversion of its mission” under Joe Biden.

Noting that his own parents met while working at the National Institutes of Health, another key agency hit hard by Musk and Trump, Dans said: “At Project 2025, we published the source code to the deep state. And we pointed the way.”

Asked about Trump’s denial of knowledge of Project 2025, and Dans’s own ejection from the Heritage Foundation, Dans said: “Fake news is going to be fake news. And, you know, going in and arguing with leftist misinformation agents on MSNBC is kind of a pointless endeavor, in my estimation. President Trump is the great communicator, and he was able to make those points strongly himself.

“And, that said, what we had hoped would happen has happened. So I can’t imagine how anything could end really any better.”