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Paul Dans 2

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THROWN UNDER THE BUS WHEN 2025 BECAME TOXIC

FEDSOC resp for whole career via student?!

HERITAGE

SCHED F SHERK

LIAR BIRTHER GIBSON

CHEVRON? DONZIGER VIDEO OUTTAKES

BOOST rfk gig // DEEP STATE

lacivita trump threw under bus

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tried to primary lindey g, golf buddy endorse; quit april bef deadline, end lynch appliance sales; tucker

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MMA

Former Project 2025 Director Paul Dans: "We have to let young white men take the wheel again of the American economy...this is their birthright, their country"

11 26

Former Project 2025 director resurfaces in mainstream media, and suddenly he is telling a different story about the extremist work he oversaw

In interviews with CNN and The New York Times, Paul Dans swiped at the Trump campaign and Heritage President Kevin Roberts

Written by Madeline Peltz & Sophie Lawton

Published 09/10/24 mma

The former head of Project 2025, Paul Dans, bragged about the initiative’s extreme policies and criticized both the Trump campaign and Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts in interviews withCNN and The New York Times, his first since resigning from his post. Dans used the opportunity to mislead about the content of Project 2025, in particular the plans to replace scores of federal workers with MAGA acolytes.

Dans took swipes at Trump campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles for the campaign’s disavowals of Project 2025 and blamed them for the hair splittingly close race. He told The New York Times, “Trump should be running like Secretariat at the Belmont, but instead it’s a race to the wire,” and reportedly advocated for the pair to be replaced.

On CNN, Dans appeared to expand his criticism to include Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts (though he didn’t use his name).

“Certainly there were some remarks by people at Heritage that I would — I fully renounce,” he said, “Any kind of, you know, talking about the second American revolution or bloodlessness. we have to lower the temperature in this country.” Dans appears to be referring to Roberts’ viral remarks from July, in which he said, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Video

CitationFrom the September 9, 2024, edition of CNN's The Source

Dans has effusively praised former President Donald Trump in the past and bragged about the former president’s cozy relationship with Project 2025.

Project 2025’s connection to Trump is not limited to Dans.

Dans told CNN host Kaitlan Collins, “The ideas within Project 2025, I think they’re pretty solid.” In fact, Project 2025’s policy proposals are both extreme and deeply unpopular. Here is a sampling of the ideas Dans is referring to:

Dans also misled CNN viewers on Project 2025’s plans to gut the federal bureaucracy. “I mean, what Project 2025 really is: It's not a threat to democracy, it’s a threat to bureaucracy,” he told Collins. “It's putting the American — we the people — back into our government."

In reality, Project 2025 aims to replace politically neutral bureaucrats with far-right Trump loyalists through the reimplementation of a Trump-era executive order known as “Schedule F.” Schedule F would remove employment protections for up to 50,000 federal employees, allowing them to be fired.

Project 2025 has prepared for a future Republican administration to execute these firings quickly with the creation of a personnel database that has been referred to as the “conservative LinkedIn.” The initiative has been soliciting resumes for potential staffers and reportedly screening applicants through questions that drill down “more on political philosophy than on experience, education or other credentials,” according to Axios.

Additionally, ProPublica obtained and reported on training videos for potential hires produced by Project 2025, finding that “some of the content is routine advice that any incoming political appointee might be told. Other segments of the training offer guidance on radically changing how the federal government works and what it does."

Dans has also said he’s recruited audience members of Steve Bannon’s War Room to serve as bureaucrats in the next Trump administration.

Given Project 2025’s focus on remaking key parts of the executive branch into Trump’s main political weapon to enact a retribution agenda, Dans’ comment about Project 2025 being a “threat to bureaucracy” is anything but reassuring.

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Could RFK Jr. be Trump’s Project 2025 liaison? Asked to 'help pick' government officials

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mma 8 24

April 19, 2023, edition of Fox News' *Tucker Carlson Tonight

Kennedy’s friendly sit-down with Carlson was characteristic of the glowing treatment he received from right-wing outlets and influencers for the Democratic run he had officially announced earlier that day. His bid drew fervent praise from the likes of Trumpist political operative Charlie Kirk and arch-conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and he became a constant presence on right-wing cable outlets and podcasts. In the early months of his campaign, Kennedy received more Fox weekday appearances than high-profile Republican presidential candidates like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and more mentions on that network than all but three members of that field.

It’s no secret why avowed right-wingers were so interested in Kennedy’s Democratic presidential bid — they thought he could be a spoiler who would help Trump win. Indeed, Steve Bannon, a former Trump White House adviser who had spent years using his streaming show to promote Kennedy’s anti-vax conspiracy theories, reportedly encouraged him to launch the run because he viewed Kennedy as “a useful chaos agent.” Other current and former Trump advisers also talked up Kennedy’s campaign and were not shy about why they were doing so: As Roger Stone put it, Kennedy would “soften Joe Biden up for his defeat by Donald Trump.”

Kennedy was a bad fit for a Democratic campaign. He has one of the party’s most celebrated names, and played a leading role in environmental organizations earlier in his career. But in recent years, he became better known for promoting conspiracy theories about childhood vaccinations, and his extremist views on the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine put him in step with the right-wing propaganda machine. As a candidate, Kennedy thrilled white supremacists by claiming that the virus had been “ethnically targeted” to not affect Jewish people.

Kennedy’s positioning made him a better fit for MAGA voters than Democrats. So when he failed to gain traction in the Democratic race and switched to an independent run in the fall, he immediately became a thorn in Trump’s side.

The right turned on RFK Jr. when his independent campaign started hurting Trump}:

Sean Hannity, the Trump political operative who also has a prime-time Fox show, used a September 2023 interview with Kennedy to pitch the candidate on switching from his Democratic primary bid to a third-party run.

“When Sean Hannity's nicer to you than they are, you got a problem,” the Fox host told him. “You would agree with that. If they're not treating you fairly, why stay with them? If they're not going to treat you fairly, why?”

Video

CitationFrom the September 12, 2023, edition of Fox News' Hannity

But a month later, when Kennedy returned to Hannity’s show shortly after announcing his run as an independent, the host shivved him. Over more than seven minutes, Hannity characterized Kennedy as “very liberal,” and criticized him over his positions on environmental policy and for endorsing Democrats for president in past elections.

Again, there’s nothing subtle about what was going on. Trump’s campaign saw polling which suggested that Kennedy would attract more support from Republicans than Democrats as an independent candidate, so they pivoted to attacking him — and Trumpist shills like Hannity followed along.

Over the following months, the right-wing press struggled with how to cover Kennedy, seemingly hoping to use him to damage Democrats while also trying to remind their viewers that he was too liberal to actually support.

Meanwhile, reporters produced features detailing embarrassing events from Kennedy’s past, including his claims that a parasite had eaten parts of his brain and triggered memory loss, and his admission that he had once discovered the carcass of a bear cub by the site of the road in upstate New York, driven it into New York City, and dumped it in Central Park with an old bicycle to suggest that it had been killed by a cyclist (“Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm,” he told The New Yorker).

Kennedy had too little support in national polls to make the presidential debate stage and no path to electoral victory. All he could do was take votes from Trump — and so after reported lobbying by people like Carlson, he’s apparently planning to drop out and endorse the Republican nominee instead.

The question is what Kennedy secured in return.

An anti-vaxxer running HHS?}:

Kennedy’s campaign had reportedly been trying to secure him a future administration position in exchange for his endorsement. His efforts to meet with Harris to discuss such a deal went nowhere.

But Kennedy found Trump more amenable to such a deal. Kennedy reached out to Trump following the July assassination attempt on the former president, using a phone number reportedly provided by Carlson. The pair reportedly talked about Kennedy “about endorsing his campaign and taking a job in a second Trump administration, overseeing a portfolio of health and medical issues.” Kennedy subsequently told The Washington Post he is “willing to talk to anybody from either political party who wants to talk about children’s health and how to end the chronic disease epidemic.”

Trump has since publicly floated giving Kennedy a major job in his administration, telling CNN he “probably would” consider such an appointment.

It’s unclear what such a job might look like, and Trump is such a huge liar you’d have to have brainworms to trust him to hold up his end of such a bargain. But Donald Trump Jr. has said of Kennedy, “I love the idea of giving him some sort of role in a three-letter agency and letting him blow it up.” And Trump’s media supporters have proposed offering Kennedy a position as prominent as secretary of health and human services, with Paul Dans, the former director of Project 2025, suggesting Kennedy should head that department, the Food and Drug Administration, or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in order “to really clear house at the agency.”

Video

CitationFrom the August 21, 2024, edition of Timcast IRL

Granting Kennedy control of HHS and its $1.5 trillion budget, or one of the “three-letter agencies” it oversees, like the FDA or CDC or the National Institutes of Health, could have disastrous consequences. As a report on the prospect from NBC News detailed, Kennedy has kooky health views and “has described wanting to dismantle those offices and rebuild them with like-minded fringe figures.”

But such a move would serve as the natural culmination of the right-wing media’s campaign against the COVID-19 vaccines developed under Trump and rolled out under Biden. Carlson and his ilk spent years waging war on those lifesaving medications, falsely claiming they were ineffective and inflating claims about their potential side effects. (By driving down support for the vaccines among Republicans, their effort surely led to the deaths of many members of their audiences.)

Thanks to that campaign, Trump was unable to take credit for the COVID-19 vaccines on the campaign trail. The former president shied away from discussing his administration’s greatest accomplishment to avoid alienating his own supporters during the GOP primary. He’s tried to court Kennedy’s endorsement by talking down childhood vaccinations, bizarrely telling him in a leaked phone call, “I want to do small doses” rather than giving infants a shot that “looks like it’s meant for a horse, not uh, you know, a 10-pound or 20-pound baby.” And on the campaign trail, he’s vowed that his administration “will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate.”

All of this is troubling enough. Trump’s anti-vaccine rhetoric — and threats to enact it as policy — has come as Republicans have become generally less supportive of vaccination. But putting an anti-vax crackpot in charge of a government health agency could supercharge that process, with dire consequences for America’s children.

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WIKI 6 26 NO TALK

Paul Edouard Dans[1] (born 1968/1969)[2] is an American lawyer, political operative and politician, who briefly served as Chief of Staff to the Office of Personnel Management in President Trump's first administration. A Republican, he is best known for leading Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's 2025 presidential transition project intended to enact conservative policy through the federal government.[3][4] Prior to entering politics, Dans was a lawyer.

Dans was a candidate in the 2026 United States Senate election in South Carolina, challenging Lindsey Graham in the Republican primary, before dropping out of the race and endorsing Mark Lynch on Friday April 10th. ^[5]

Early life and education

Dans spent his childhood just north of Baltimore, Maryland. He attended Dulaney High School, where he played sports and was on the debate team.[6] Dans received a Bachelor of Science with a major in economics and a Master of City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).[7] At MIT, he played on the lacrosse team and was selected as a CoSIDA Academic All-America athlete.[8] Dans’s thesis focused on the redevelopment of industrial parks, such as the Brooklyn Navy Yard.[1]

Dans worked at architecture and planning firms before attending law school at the University of Virginia (UVA), where he was president of the law school's Federalist Society chapter. During his time at UVA Law, Dans spent one year living and studying law in Paris, where in 1996 he received a certificate in French Law from the University of Paris II Pantheon-Assas.[6][9] He later practiced law in New York City.[7][9]

Career

Law

Following law school, Dans worked at multiple law firms, including LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae for three years, Debevoise & Plimpton for two years, and a third firm where, among other cases, he handled litigation between Yves Saint Laurent’s beauty line and Costco. He then went on to run a solo law practice.[6]

Dans was among the attorneys hired by Chevron to defend the company against a multibillion-dollar lawsuit pertaining to oil pollution in Ecuador.[6][10] Dans has been credited with proposing that the outtakes of the film Crude, an exposé of Chevron, be subpoenaed to potentially uncover evidence of legal malfeasance by the plaintiff’s lead lawyer, Steven Donziger. The outtakes enabled Chevron to file suit against Donzinger, leading to a court decision that voided a $9.5 billion judgment against the company.[6]

Trump administration

In 2011, Dans advocated for Donald Trump to run for president, several years before joining the Trump administration in an official capacity.[11]

During the first Trump administration, Dans served as a senior advisor in the Office of Community Planning and Development at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.[12] In February 2020, Dans was appointed White House liaison and senior adviser to the Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), where he managed the federal agency in charge of human resources policy for the more than two million federal workers. He then went on to serve as chief of staff to the director of the OPM, working to staff the approximately 4,000 presidential appointees across the federal government. Dans worked closely with John McEntee to remove longtime public servants from government. Dans was hired without the knowledge of Dale Cabaniss, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, who resigned abruptly in 2020.[12][13][14]

Heritage Foundation

Main article: Project 2025

Dans is known as the "architect of Project 2025",[15] which he led as director from the political initiative’s launch in April 2022 until August 2024.[16] Dans described the project as "systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army [of] aligned, trained, and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state".[17]

In 2023, Dans stated that Project 2025 had a "great" relationship with President Trump,[18][better ^source ^needed] despite clashing with the 2024 Trump campaign team.[19]

On July 30, 2024, Dans announced he was stepping down from his position as Director of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation in the wake of public criticism from President Trump.[20] In a statement, Heritage stated that the decision to part ways was mutual and due to strategic differences, clarifying reports that Dans had been terminated over issues of alleged misconduct.[21] Days before Dans stepped down, he appeared on a podcast run by Tenet Media, a company that was found to have received funding from Russia Today and was ultimately used to promote Russian propaganda.[22]

U.S. Senate campaign

Main article: 2026 United States Senate election in South Carolina

On July 28, 2025, it was reported that Dans would challenge Lindsey Graham for the South Carolina U.S. Senate seat, which has been held by Graham since 2003.[2] The National Republican Senatorial Committee called for an investigation of Dans after he failed to file a Personal Financial Disclosure Form within the required timeframe.[23]

Personal life

Dans resides in Charleston, South Carolina.[24] He is a fluent French speaker.[9] Dans' father was a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and his mother had worked for National Institutes of Health and then became a schoolteacher. Dans has three siblings.[6][25][26] His ancestors' roots are in the Catholic faith.[6]

In 2007, Dans married Mary Helen Bowers, founder of Ballet Beautiful and a former New York City Ballet dancer who trained Natalie Portman in preparation for her role in the movie Black Swan.[11] Bowers was appointed to the Kennedy Center's Board of Trustees by President Trump at the end of his first term. Together, she and Dans have four children.[2]

Dans's twin brother, Tom Dans, is a venture capitalist and was an official in Donald Trump's first administration. In 2025, Tom's organization American Daybreak coordinated trips to Greenland by Donald Trump Jr. and Usha Vance, which were criticized for their promotion of the second Trump administration's Greenland policy.[27][28]

References

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meet the Man Behind Project 2025’s Most Radical Plans

As Donald Trump tried to disavow the project, its director stepped down. But the plans that he prepared remain.

By Alec MacGillis , ProPublicaPublished August 2, 2024

Paul Dans, director of The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, speaks at the National Conservative Conference in Washington, D.C., on July 10, 2024.Dominic Gwinn / Middle East Images / AFP via Getty Images

This story was originally published byProPublica.*ProPublica*is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.}:

In January 2023, a group of about 15 people gathered for three days at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative Washington think tank a few blocks from the Capitol. Their aim was ambitious and farsighted: to start building the next Republican administration, two years before a Republican president might again take office.

The group’s leaders originally cast the initiative as candidate-agnostic, intended to assist the 2024 Republican nominee, whoever that might be. But there was no real doubt who the envisioned beneficiary was. The team included several former members of the Trump administration, and the whole effort was geared to address a perceived shortcoming of that White House: its failure to fill enough key government positions with Trump loyalists. So few had expected Trump to win in 2016 that hiring had been left mostly to GOP veterans, who brought in establishment figures and never managed to fill some slots at all, leaving the president exposed to the bureaucratic resistance that his acolytes believe undermined him at every step: the dreaded “deep state.”

They were determined not to let this happen again. This time, Trump would take office with a fully staffed, carefully selected administration ready to roll. Thus the name of this new effort at Heritage, Project 2025. It would consist of four “pillars”: an 887-page policy plan, a database of conservatives willing to serve in the administration, training seminars for potential new appointees on the functions of government and a battle plan for each agency.

In recent months, Project 2025 has gotten attention for some of the more radical proposals in its policy plan — such as reinstating more stringent rules for the use of the abortion pill mifepristone and abolishing some federal agencies. On the campaign trail, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris made the project the centerpiece of their case against a Trump restoration. Their attacks were so effective that Trump has publicly disavowed the effort (while selecting a running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, who is closely allied with Heritage).

This week, as Project 2025 faced denunciations from the Trump campaign, the project’s director, Paul Dans, stepped down from his role. Trump’s campaign co-managers, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, said in a statement that “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.” For Dans, it was a sudden end — or at least a pause — in a remarkable ascent from obscurity.

Related Story

News

|

Politics & Elections

Far Right Project 2025 Is Ending Its Public Push — But It’s by No Means Dead

The Trump campaign has tried to distance itself from Project 2025, despite deep connections to the far right manifesto.

By Chris Walker , TruthoutJuly 31, 2024

But then again, his resignation was at least partly symbolic: The work of Project 2025 is largely done. Under Dans, the project has assembled a database of more than 10,000 names — job candidates vetted for loyalty to Trump’s cause — who will be ready to deploy into federal agencies should he win the 2024 election. Project 2025 has delivered a toolkit, ready for use, to create a second Trump administration that would be decidedly more MAGA than the first.

The most important pillar of Project 2025 has always been about personnel, not policy. Or rather, the whole effort is animated by the Reagan-era maxim that personnel is policy, that power flows from having the right people in the right jobs. To that end, the plan’s most pertinent proposal is reinstating Schedule F — a provision unveiled near the very end of Trump’s term, then repealed by the Biden administration — which would shift as many as 50,000 career employees in policy-shaping positions into a new job category that would make them much easier to fire.

This was the mission that brought people together at Heritage for those three days, with the task of designing the personnel database that would populate the next administration, all under the supervision of Dans, a tall, broad-shouldered guy with a slow, jut-chinned way of speaking and traces of a Baltimore accent.

Not long ago, Dans, 55, would have seemed an unlikely person for the role. The son of a liberal Johns Hopkins University professor, Dans was a New York lawyer who before Trump’s election had never served in government. For years following that election, he had tried and failed to find a place in the administration, seemingly in spite of a celebrity connection: His wife was a fitness coach for Karlie Kloss, the supermodel sister-in-law of Jared Kushner. Finally, in 2019, Dans got in the door, at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Some four years later, here he was, hoping to build the next administration. Dans envisioned the personnel database that he wanted to create as a “conservative LinkedIn.” To help explain it, he displayed sketches he had made. They depicted the online file for a sample applicant — “Betsy Ross.” One page would show her occupation, which of the conservative organizations supporting Project 2025 had suggested her and which agencies she was being considered for. Another would show the findings of an internal review of her application, her progress on the training sessions (one of which Dans called “Deep State 101”) and any “red flags.” Yet another would show additional vetting: a “webcrawl” report; her performance on the Project 2025 questionnaire, which would ask detailed questions about ideological and policy beliefs; and more. The database would allow administration officials to search for candidates of a certain profile to fit a certain role.

This was what Dans wanted the Heritage staffers gathered in the room and the tech engineers they’d contracted from Oracle to build: the engine of Trump 2.0. It would be a personnel machine not only far beyond what the first Trump administration had at its disposal, but beyond what any other administration had enjoyed, either. According to one person in attendance, the database would take several months to build and would cost upward of $2 million. It would reach outside the usual channels to draw in MAGA believers from across the country. And Dans was at the helm. “There was no one who had a better idea of it than he did,” the person in attendance told me. “He was driving the whole thing.”

As the database development progressed in the months that followed, Dans stressed a detail that made it even more far-reaching. He did not want the positions being filled to be limited to the 4,000 or so slots that are reserved for political appointments. He also wanted it to suggest people for roles that are currently assigned to career employees, in keeping with the plans for Schedule F.

Propelling the project has been a worldview that can be easily overlooked amid Trump’s talk about restoring the halcyon days of his first term. The people preparing for his return to the White House emphatically do not view his first term as a success. Rather, they view it as a missed opportunity to implement the MAGA vision. For Dans, Trump’s first term was an object lesson in how difficult it could be to reach Trump’s goals without a captive bureaucracy.

The former president’s supporters are determined that a second Trump administration would be much more organized than the first, stocked with foot soldiers who are both loyal and capable of moving policy forward. Dans declined to be interviewed for this article or to respond on the record to a detailed list of questions, but he has been laying out his thinking in interviews with conservative media outlets. “We’re going to get this done right on the next go-round,” he told Jenny Beth Martin, a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots,on her podcast [vid]

last winter. And in essence, that will mean cleaning house, he said. “If a person can’t get in and fire people right away, what good is political management?”

Paul Dans was raised, in the 1970s and ’80s, in a family that embodied liberal idealism. Peter Dans was a professor of medicine who had enlisted in the Public Health Service; started an STD clinic and a migrant health clinic while on faculty at the University of Colorado; and served in the office of Sen. Gaylord Nelson, the Wisconsin Democrat who founded Earth Day. Paul’s mom, Colette Lizotte, was a French teacher who had previously worked as a chemist at the National Institutes of Health.

The family lived in a hilly, verdant stretch north of Baltimore. Paul and his twin brother, Tom, hung out with the other smart kids at Dulaney High School; they played sports and were on the debate team. “Both were very bright kids, very well behaved,” recalled Phil Sporer, who attended school with them from early on. “The Dans boys were everybody’s perfect child.”

The first hints of Dans’ political orientation emerged in college. He went to MIT, where he majored in economics, joined a frat, played on the lacrosse team and, as classmate Juan Latasa told me, stood apart from the “political correctness” that was rising at elite campuses around 1990. “It wasn’t always easy for such students. It was a very liberal place,” Latasa said. “It was tough.”

Dans stayed on at MIT to get his master’s in city planning. His thesis on the redevelopment of industrial parks, like the Brooklyn Navy Yard, showed him still wrestling with competing impulses. There was Reagan-style optimism: “The myriad crises which America must grapple with in coming years pale in magnitude to the nation’s gifted legacy.” But there was also a hint of resigned declinism, with Dans addressing an “age of diminished expectations.”

At the University of Virginia School of Law, which Dans attended next, his transformation became explicit: He joined the campus branch of the Federalist Society, the conservative network founded by law students at Yale and the University of Chicago in the 1980s, and he rose to become chapter president. “I was always attracted with the Federalist Society message about how some daring students stood up at Yale Law School and challenged the hegemony there and really was trying to speak truth to power,” hetold hosts vid]

Saurabh Sharma and Nick Solheim last year on “Moment of Truth,” a podcast produced by American Moment, a conservative organization now aligned with Project 2025.

Still, Dans left little mark on his law school classmates, perhaps partly because he took a year off to study in Paris. I reached out to a couple dozen of his peers, and an email from a lawyer in Dallas was representative: “I wish I could help but I do not remember any details about Paul Dans.”

Dans’ fixation on the federal bureaucracy began at home. The idealism of the 1960s brought his parents to Washington, where they met while working at the National Institutes of Health. “They had basically come up through the JFK, Kennedy-esque, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country’” era, he told Sharma and Solheim.

:{Dans didn’t seriously consider following his parents into public service — law school debt precluded that option, he said — but he would ultimately become wrapped up in a debate that had first inspired them. They went to Washington during the federal government’s great post-World War II expansion, when the ranks of career employees began swelling and when more job protections started accruing to them, sparking a decadeslong argument that has carried on to this day.

To federal employee unions and other defenders of the bureaucracy, such protections were in the spirit of the Pendleton Act, the 1883 law that created the modern federal workforce, along with mechanisms for employment based on merit. But to many conservative critics, and some good-government liberals, the job protections that federal workers gained in the 1960s undermined the “merit based” nature of the civil service by making it difficult to remove ineffectual workers.}:

After law school, Dans chose a different meritocracy, joining a wave of young attorneys in the New York corporate legal world in the late ’90s. But Dans stood out. He was much more conservative than most of his colleagues. He prided himself on being one of very few in his Upper West Side building to get the New York Post. He admired Donald Trump for bringing a “can-do spirit back … building on the skyline again.”

Some colleagues kept their distance, but not Julio Ramos, a fellow junior associate at the law firm LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae. Dans kidded Ramos about his lefty politics and regaled him with talk of supply-side economics and Reagan. It was all very civil. “Even though he was from the right,” Ramos told me, “he didn’t have any hatred toward the left.”

Dans left after three years to become an associate at another large firm, Debevoise & Plimpton, and after two years there eventually landed at a less prestigious firm, where his cases included a lawsuit between Yves Saint Laurent’s beauty line and Costco over perfume labeling. By 2009, having not made partner anywhere, and two years into his marriage to Mary Helen Bowers, a former New York City Ballet dancer, Dans went into solo practice.

Dans has criticized the legal field for what he perceives to be anti-conservative discrimination. “We are, as a profession, really getting snowed under right now,” he said on the “Moment of Truth” podcast. “Republicans and conservatives have not stood up in the face of, kind of, cancel culture, and [these] Marxist, Saul Alinsky attacks.”

Even the moment he has often framed as his biggest triumph affirmed Dans’ alienation from liberal lawyers. In 2009, he was one of hundreds of attorneys hired to defend Chevron and its employees against a multibillion-dollar lawsuit for oil pollution in Ecuador. According to the journalist Michael Goldhaber, Dans was hired at $100 an hour — less than 5% of the top rate at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, which was leading Chevron’s defense.

As Dans later told Goldhaber, he had an epiphany: While watching the documentary film “Crude,” an exposé of Chevron in Ecuador that was done in collaboration with the plaintiffs’ lead lawyer on the case, Steven Donziger, Dans realized that the outtakes from the film should be subpoenaed, to see if the filmmaker captured any legal malfeasance by Donziger. Dans put the suggestion in a memo.

As it turned out, the subpoenaed outtakes did prove to be damning. Chevron sued Donziger in U.S. federal court, ultimately resulting in a ruling that the company did not have to pay the $9.5 billion judgment. Dans took full credit: “I came up with a theory that we could get documentary film outtakes, basically caught them doing their nefarious acts on video,” he told Martin on her podcast.

According to other lawyers on the case, the story is more complicated: Although Dans wrote a memo suggesting the outtakes be targeted, others started the push for subpoenas — and came up with the necessary legal basis for seeking the crucial outtakes — independently of Dans raising the idea.

When the Chevron case was over, Dans was back on his own, handling motley litigation, including a patent fight between two manufacturers of sheet-pile wall systems and a class action against Frito-Lay regarding its claims that some of its products were made with all-natural ingredients. The address for Dans’ solo practice was a mail drop at the New York City Bar Association.

Toward the end of the aughts, as President Barack Obama’s first term wore on, Dans’ conservatism began to take on a new shape. He spent a lot of time online. “I’m one of the people sitting at his kitchen counter, you know, on the bench there, on the stool kind of going, How can that be? That’s crazy,” he told Martin. “You’re clicking … you know, refreshing the Drudge Report like 100 times a day.”

One thing he clicked on was Trump’s conspiracist claims about Obama’s origins: “I had some serious academic questioning about the birthplace of a former president, if you will,” he told Sharma and Solheim. Dans got excited when rumors spread in 2011 that Trump would be going to New Hampshire to announce a run for president. Alas, it didn’t happen.

Early in the 2016 primary season, Dans attended a dinner of the steering committee for the New York City Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society. As he later recalled to Sharma and Solheim, someone asked whom people were supporting for president, and around the table it went: “I like Jeb.” “I like Marco.” “I like Jeb.”

Dans watched in bewilderment. Here were all these New York Republicans, and no one had yet mentioned the man who lived a few blocks away, who had decided to run for president this time. Finally, it was Dans’ turn. “Well, I like Trump, and I think he’s going to win,” he later told Sharma and Solheim. “I like him because I’m sick of losing.”

That fall, Dans headed to the Pittsburgh area to volunteer for Trump. He had worked on other campaigns, but none had ever felt like this. “There was no passion,” he told Sharma and Solheim. “We were hungry for a candidate who could really speak to Americans. … Donald Trump delivered.”

Trump’s appeal to Dans verged on the tribal: He came to see himself as “a pure-blooded deplorable mix,” as he told Sharma and Solheim, citing the working-class, ethnic Catholic roots of his ancestors — his paternal grandfather was born to Spanish immigrant parents and had been a merchant mariner, and his mother hailed from French Canadian mill workers in Rhode Island. Never mind that his father was a medical professor who had raised Dans in an affluent suburb.

When Trump won, Dans eagerly sent off his resume. “Next stop, you know, Department of Justice, right?” he said to Martin years later, recalling his confidence. But no. As he also told Sharma and Solheim, the response was “crickets.”

His explanation? He was too MAGA. “There were so many people getting sandbagged because somebody thought that they were too ‘America First’-y or too Trumpist,” he told Martin. He was advised to instead slip in “under the radar” as “just your milquetoast Republican appointee.” Watching his accounts of this disappointment, it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Dans, whose affect in interviews can come off as both genial and awkward, like the chatty, perhaps too chatty, guy at the airport bar.

Finally, late in 2018, Dans came to Washington for a Federalist Society meeting and connected with James Bacon, a college student who was working as confidential assistant to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. With Bacon’s help, and with the benefit of his master’s in city planning, Dans finally broke in, in July 2019, as a senior adviser in HUD’s Office of Community Planning and Development.

Career staff at HUD didn’t know what to make of Dans. “We tried to figure out what his role was,” one of them told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “He kind of wandered in,” the career employee said. “He was fairly disdainful of the career staff and did not have a lot of respect for why things were the way they were.” For Dans, his arrival was a “real baptism” in how the government actually works. “You don’t realize that the federal government is just an avalanche of money shooting out of various agencies,” he told Sharma and Solheim. “It’s trying to tame this spew of money and direct in the right way, is what you’re doing when you get to an agency.”

As Dans saw it, the career employees were the problem. They were biased against conservatives, and they disregarded changes sought by the duly elected administration. Dans also blamed fellow appointees, too many of whom were clueless about the actual work and thus willing to cede decision-making to career employees. “You came and you went to cocktail parties, and you had your birthday cakes around the office and, you know, maybe a couple of ribbon cuttings, and you got to go on a little international junket,” he told Sharma and Solheim. “And meanwhile, everything else is kind of going at the same level.”

By late 2019, the White House was coming to share Dans’ diagnosis. James Sherk, then a special assistant on the Domestic Policy Council, began compiling purported examples of what they viewed as deep-state obstinacy that Trump should have been able to discipline with dismissals, including anonymous reports about Environmental Protection Agency employees withholding information about legal cases from political appointees and about Department of Justice lawyers refusing to investigate discrimination against Asian Americans at Yale.

The ultimate example of perceived perfidy came in December 2019, when the House used the testimony of federal employees to approve two articles of impeachment against Trump: for using the levers of powers to pressure Ukraine into discrediting Biden and for obstructing Congress. This gave Trump and his remaining White House coterie new resolve to take more control of hiring.

Trump turned the Presidential Personnel Office over to John McEntee, his 29-year-old former personal assistant who had left the White House in 2018 after a background check found that he posed a security risk due to his frequent gambling. (McEntee, now an adviser for Project 2025, has declined to comment about the background check in the past.)McEntee recruited Bacon, the college student, to assist him in overhauling personnel, and, looking for someone to join in the effort, they settled on Paul Dans. The person who had barely made it into the administration had impressed them with his critiques of the status quo.

In February 2020, the White House installed Dans at Office of Personnel Management as “White House liaison and senior adviser to the director” — its eyes and ears there.

Dans, encouraged by McEntee, wasted no time. He quickly ordered the removal of the agency’s chief of staff, Jonathan Blyth, and asserted so much authority across the agency that its director, Dale Cabaniss, who had spent years as a Republican staff member in the Senate, decided to leave as well. Cabaniss was replaced by an interim director, Michael Rigas, but people at the agency told me that Dans was the de facto director for the remainder of the year; late in 2020, he was named chief of staff. (Rigas and Blyth did not respond to requests for comment; Cabaniss declined to comment on the record.) So total was the takeover of the personnel process that Dans’ colleagues took to referring to him, McEntee and their allies as “the coup group.”

One of Dans’ first assertions of authority came at a senior staff meeting after Cabaniss’ departure, amid the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. According to another Trump appointee, some 20 people were present in the conference room at OPM’s headquarters near the National Mall when the agency’s then-chief information officer, Clare Martorana, said that, like most other agencies, it would use Zoom for online meetings.

Dans erupted, declaring that Zoom, which was founded by a Chinese immigrant to the U.S., posed the risk of spying by China. Martorana took in his outburst with “a combination of anger, amusement and just dumbstruck awe,” the Trump appointee recalled. She then tried to explain that Zoom was on the government’s approved list of vendors and that many other agencies were using it. This did not mollify Dans.

As 2020 went on, Dans’ colleagues became accustomed to his insistent demands, which, coupled with his large frame, could make him an intimidating presence. Dans wanted to hire as many appointees as possible in the final year of Trump’s term in office, and he wanted the agency’s processes to move faster. “He would just throw bombs into senior staff meetings,” said the appointee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, “and they would say: ‘What are we supposed to do with this? He can’t be serious with this.’”

In October 2020, less than two weeks before the election, Trump signed an executive order creating Schedule F, the new category of career employees in key positions who would now be easier to remove.

Over at OPM, Dans was busy with a related effort, seeking to recategorize positions in the Senior Executive Service — higher-ranking managerial slots across the government that are mostly filled with career employees — into a general category that would allow the president to appoint more of them. He was also engaged in another aspect of the administration’s new emphasis on personnel: making sure that OPM appointees answered long ideological questionnaires and met for interviews with staffers to assess their fitness for staying on in a second Trump term.

Those who dealt with Dans at OPM told me that they tried to respond to his demands as best they could, but that he often grew agitated when told that OPM did not have the ability to do what he wanted. He seemed to take such explanations as a personal affront. “He questioned everything from the point of view that there was a conspiracy against him and the president,” the appointee said.

Colleagues chalked up his outbursts to insecurity born of his not understanding how the government worked and being broadly out of his depth. “He reminded me of some of the people who show up at Republican conventions,” said a second Republican appointee at the agency, who, like the first, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “Those people usually show up and then go home. They show up and are vocal, but they’re not like, ‘Now I’m going to go do the boring work of the sausage-making of government.’”

Donald Devine, who led OPM during the Reagan administration and whom the Trump administration had brought on as an adviser during this period, scoffs at such critiques. “If you do anything, people aren’t going to like it, and that’s why he’s so different,” Devine told me. “Most of the other people in the executive office of OPM weren’t doing much, so people didn’t care about them. He’s a serious person trying to do a serious job. You don’t see a lot of that, and that’s why I like him so much.”

Dans’ only problem, Devine said, was that he ran out of time. “The major things were going to be done the next term,” he said. “It was too late to do anything before they figured out how to run personnel.”

After the election, Dans stayed hard at work at OPM, even as other appointees started to vanish in the final weeks of the Trump administration. Since then, Dans has criticized prosecutions of those involved in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. “The unfortunate thing is it does send a message to people that you shouldn’t criticize the government,” he said in a *C-SPAN* interview last year.

A year and a half after arriving in Washington, Dans left for his new home in South Carolina, near his wife’s hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina, while she was expecting their fourth child. “I went home kind of in this Cincinnatus sort of spirit: return to the farm. Our farm being in Fort Mill, South Carolina, in a subdivision,” he quipped to Sharma and Solheim.

But then he turned serious: “We’re ‘God, country and family.’ And now is the time to go put a little more emphasis on the God and family part of that. But we’ll be back for the country thing.”

With the 2024 election approaching, with Trump leading Biden and then Harris in most national polls and with Dans’ vision of reshaping the bureaucracy heavily influencing the Trump campaign, it finally seemed like Dans’ moment might actually be arriving. On Tuesday’s episode of the “War Room” podcast — founded by former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, who is now in prison — Dans sometimes sounded triumphant. “In order to take this back, the swamp isn’t going to drain itself,” he said. “We need outsiders coming in committed to doing this. … With Project 2025, we built a pathway to encourage folks to do this.”

But in that same “War Room” episode on Tuesday, Dans decried the “great disinformation campaign” underway against Project 2025, “almost a hoax.” He listed some of the mistruths that Democrats had voiced about the project’s proposals, including a claim by Harris that it would eliminate Social Security. “Just completely fallacious stuff,” he said. “It’s just one big bald-faced lie.”

It was plain that he was taking the attacks very personally, and with good reason. The Democrats’ campaign to turn Project 2025 into an albatross around Trump’s neck was succeeding, to the point where some sort of dramatic break was needed. Just hours after that episode aired came word that Dans would be stepping down. “We are extremely grateful for [Dans’] and everyone’s work on Project 2025 and dedication to saving America,” Heritage President Kevin Roberts said.

In a note to Heritage staff, obtained by *The Wall Street Journal*, Dans himself suggested that his mission was, essentially, complete. “The work of this project was due to wrap up with the nominating conventions of the political parties,” he wrote. “Our work is presently winding down, and I plan later in August to leave Heritage.”

It was face-saving, but it was also largely true. The database was built; the training seminars had been taught. This time, the foot soldiers were ready to go, just waiting to be called on. “From the president’s lips to God’s ears that change is going to happen? It really happens below” the president, Dans said on “War Room.” “That’s the importance of recognizing: Personnel is really the cornerstone of the change.”

Disavowals or not, the logic of Project 2025 is embedded in the DNA of Trump’s plan to overhaul the government. Reinstating Schedule F is still a top-level agenda item. Jacqueline Simon, the public policy director of the American Federation of Government Employees, told me that the agencies could end up defining the new employment category so broadly that it could encompass far more than 50,000 positions. “It will be a purge,” she said.

Donald Moynihan, a public policy professor at Georgetown University, does not expect Trump to fire tens of thousands. Jettisoning just a couple of thousand, to make an example of them, may be enough. “They can fire 1,000 and put their heads on pikes, and then everyone else quickly falls into line,” he told me. “That way you have a terrified bureaucracy that still has institutional knowledge. That’s the more strategic way to use Schedule F, to scare the bejesus out of 49,000 people and force them into line.” Sherk, the author of Schedule F, suggested as much to me. “The notion we’re going to can 50,000 people is just insane,” he said. “Why would you do that? That would kneecap the ability to implement your agenda. You use it to go after bad actors and rank incompetents.”

That would still leave the challenge of finding people to fill the 4,000 slots for appointees and however many hundreds or thousands of openings are created by firings. Many Republicans who served in the first Trump administration are leery of serving in a second. “The last administration was a joke, and they had a real problem recruiting,” a Washington attorney who served in the George W. Bush administration, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution against his firm, told me. “Who the hell would jump into this clown car driving toward a cliff? Are people going to come forward, quality people? Not a fucking chance.”

This was precisely Dans’ mission with Project 2025: to find a whole new corps of people willing to come to the capital and do the work of implementing the Trump agenda that the usual D.C. fixtures refuse to do. How many will be suited to the task? “We have to recruit the talent to get to Washington,” Dans told Martin. “Ultimately, what Project 2025 is is a call to action for patriots to come serve in Washington.”

Will Dans himself be among that number? As Devine sees it, Dans’ current defenestration is political, and temporary. “Paul is too bright and intelligent not to,” he said. “They’ll pick him up somewhere.” Devine said that he’s spoken with Dans since his decision to resign. “He’s doing well,” Devine said. “He’s ready to go on to fight. The memorandum he sent [to Heritage colleagues] ends with that: ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’” Dans still sees himself as a field general for a new class of Trump bureaucrats, one that will come to power if Trump wins, whether the effort is called Project 2025 or not.

There is a paradox at the core of this. Dans was never looking for the proverbial farmers with pitchforks, because he is aware of how complex the work of the federal government is. Dans was looking for people who are both angry enough about the state of the country to want to commit four years to serving Donald Trump in Washington to fix it, and yet sufficiently versed in the mechanisms of government to be able to restrain it. “We need many more eyes and ears, many more technicians on the ground,” he told Sharma and Solheim.

It is idealistic, in its way, the conception of an aggrieved, underappreciated elite that is ready to be summoned to Washington. It sounds a lot like, well, Paul Dans. The question is, how many others like him have been out there all along, just waiting for this?

*Doris Burke contributed research.

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August 21, 2024, edition of *Timcast IR

PAUL DANS: I can't tell you how many MAGA people that I work with, really the hardcore, the most based, who are huge RFK Jr. fans. And they kind of were always kind of talking about it. But, remember, RFK Jr. went and interviewed for a job in 2016 at Trump Tower. So, you know, their relationship goes back years. Obviously there's a lot that doesn't -- some of his positions aren't square with America First, traditional America First. But certainly, there's no one better, I think, in the entire country to take on the administrative state, particularly HHS.

So you see in our movement so many medical freedom people -- count me right in with that group -- and just the excitement to have somebody either of his caliber at HHS, or CDC, FDA, are of course going to really clear house at the agency.

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