Paul Dans

Paul Dans directs Heritage’s Project 2025 “Presidential Transition Project” and is an editor of the “Mandate for Leadership,” the right-wing’s “plan to seize power by gutting America’s system of checks and balances.” Dans served in the Trump Administration as Chief of Staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which is the federal agency in charge of human resources policy. In this capacity, Dans worked with the White House’s Office of Presidential personnel, led by John McEntee, to staff the president’s 4000 federal appointees to help create and execute the MAGA policies put in place by Trump’s administration. These two would also work to cull any disloyal employees during Trump’s presidency.

During Dans’ tenure, OPM was playing a central role in operationalizing a scheme known as “Schedule F,” an Executive Order designed to prevent civil servants from resisting Trump’s agenda. According to a special report by Axios: “The intention of this obscure legal instrument was to empower the president to wipe out employment protections for tens of thousands of civil servants across the federal government.” The outlet noted: “It is Schedule F, combined with the willpower of top lieutenants like McEntee, that could bring Trump closer to his dream of gutting the federal bureaucracy and installing thousands devoted to him or his ‘America First’ platform.”

On October 21, 2020, just two weeks before election day, Trump signed Executive Order (EO) 13957, which ordered the heads of all federal agencies to submit a list of positions that could be reclassified as Schedule F by January 19, 2021, the day before inauguration. Reclassifying these jobs as exempt from civil service protections would have allowed Trump to fire thousands of civil servants and replace them with loyalists. For example, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget proposed that 415 jobs out of 610 employees be reclassified as exempt from protection from firing under Schedule F, reclassification that was approved by OPM when Dans was at the helm of office alongside Rigas. The EO was later rescinded by President Biden. Reports have emerged that Trump and his allies plan to reinstate the EO creating Schedule F if he were re-elected and replace more than 50,000 federal employees with people loyal to Trump.

After the end of the Trump administration, Dans was appointed by Trump to serve a six-year term as Chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission. After briefly starting a solo law firm, in April 2022, he became the Director of the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, known as Project 2025, which includes a “Presidential Personnel Database” to identify operatives for a prospective Trump administration to hire. (Notably, Ginni Thomas played this role of screening potential hires in the Heritage Foundation in 2000, while her husband, Justice Clarence Thomas, cast the decided 5-4 vote to stop the Florida recount and make George W. Bush president; she was rewarded with a massive pay raise and the job of liaison to the Executive Branch from Heritage.) In this role, Dans also served as one of three editors of the Mandate for Leadership document.

Project 2025 is, per the Center for American Progress, a “road map for how a new far-right presidential administration can take over the country. The project contains four components: a 920-page book with far-right policy proposals, a personnel database of loyalists ready to replace tens of thousands of civil servants, a private online training center, and an unpublished plan for the first 180 days of a new administration. Many of the proposals in Project 2025 are sweeping and would eliminate fundamental personal freedoms while cutting the take-home pay of millions of Americans. Unsurprisingly, Project 2025’s policies to increase taxes on the middle class, allow corporations to stop paying workers overtime, implement a national abortion ban, and raise the retirement age for Social Security are wildly unpopular.”

Project 2025 contemplates that its to-do list would be acted on the afternoon of the Inauguration and in short order in the succeeding days. The changes would weaponize the federal government to control some of the most intimate aspects of Americans’ lives, in addition to spreading terror over rounding up millions of immigrants, and causing economic chaos. For example, a key architect of Project 2025, Jonathan Mitchell has said “We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books.” That is, Trump has sought to downplay concerns about his central role in overturning Roe v. Wade by claiming that the issue be left to the states, when pressed about a national abortion ban. But Project 2025 outlines using the Justice Department to enforce the Comstock law to ban the mailing of abortion pills, thus achieving the same goal as an abortion ban without federal legislation.

On July 5, Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025, stating on Truth Social that: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.” As Judd Legum states in Popular Information, however: “this is false.” Legum continues that: “Project 2025’s 922-page policy agenda has 30 chapters and 34 authors. Twenty-five of Project 2025’s authors served as members of the Trump administration.”

When interviewed on CSPAN, Dans was asked to what extent Trump had a hand in drafting Project 2025 policies, and he responded, “He was president for four years, so many of the ideas are carry ons from his original work. So, I would like to think that a lot of it does kind of spring from that first term of Trump.”

Dans has said he “was a huge backer of President Trump, [he was] the reason I got into politics” and began “work[ing] on the Trump campaign in Allegheny County, PA in the war room” in 2016. Before that, Dans was a solo practitioner in New York City for seven years, where he was on the steering committee of the New York City Lawyers chapter of Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society.