Archived version

In January 2023, a group of about 15 people gathered for three days at the Heritage Foundation […] 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.

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This week, as Project 2025 faced denunciations from the Trump campaign, the project’s director, Paul Dans, stepped down from his role.

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His [Dans’] 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,

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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.

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He [Dans] 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.

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The people preparing for his [Trump’s] 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.

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“We’re going to get this done right on the next go-round,” he [Dans] told Jenny Beth Martin, a co-founder of the [conservative] Tea Party Patriots, on her podcast 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?”

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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 [Schedule F was later rejected by President Biden].

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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, [said] 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.

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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 [said]. “Ultimately, what Project 2025 is is a call to action for patriots to come serve in Washington.”

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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?

[Edit typo in the title.]