"This is the secret": Away from the stage, Trump allies plot Project 2025 agenda at his convention

MILWAUKEE — The conservative policy director and attorney behind the Project 2025 manifesto took to the stage at a Republican National Convention sponsor's event to mock liberals' fear over the conservative movement's plan to transform the federal government under a second Trump administration — all while laying out a vision to take down the so-called "deep state."

"I think that that's what's really gotten under the left's collar, is that this is really a way for us to make sure when we ultimately get in in the driver's seat, that we're ready to move out," said Paul Dans, the Project 2025 director who served as chief of staff and White House liaison at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management under Trump. 

Dans — and former Trump administration employees who are championing Project 2025 ideas — spoke Monday at an hours-long event hosted by the Heritage Foundation, the activist think tank that has fueled the U.S. right-wing movement for decades and is now behind the 2025 Presidential Transition Project.

Dans repeatedly described Project 2025 as an antidote to the deep state that he described as behind everything from the COVID-19 pandemic to the attempted assassination of Trump over the weekend.

"Remember everyone who died from COVID?" Dans said. "Remember that disastrous pullout in Afghanistan? Even remember what happened on Saturday? All these are products of this deep state, and we need to re-infuse political control over this bureaucracy. And that's the importance of Project 2025."

Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah who spoke before Dans, said that opposition to bureaucracy is key to Trump's success — and the reason that "they" continue to attack him.

"This is the secret to why Trump has been successful," he said. "It's also the secret to why we need Trump so much today, and the secret to why they're doing everything they can, why they tried to imprison him, why somebody tried to kill him."

Dans says the Biden campaign is pushing a "fake attachment" between Trump and Project 2025, which he said launched over two years ago. 

"We are not running for president," Dans said. "President Trump is running for president. We're a group of private citizens advocating for better government."

He claimed the media has "debunked" any connection with Trump.

But CNN found that at least 140 former Trump administration employees have served in Project 2025 roles such as authors or contributors. That includes six of his former Cabinet secretaries. 

In total — CNN found "nearly 240 people had ties to both Project 2025 and to Trump."

Dans chastised the Biden campaign's Twitter account for sharing a list of some of those individuals.

"It's a loathsome abuse of power for the most powerful person in the world to direct fire on his fellow Americans," Dans said.

Trump, for his part, has called the project "absolutely ridiculous and abysmal," claiming he has no idea who's behind it and denies he has anything to do with it.

But in an April 2022 speech before the Heritage Foundation, Trump applauded them for “lay[ing] the groundwork” for his next administration.

“They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do,” Trump said of the Heritage Foundation and their efforts to – as they describe on the Project 2025 website – “pave the way” for Trump’s next administration.

Dans claimed that Project 2025's critics are pointing to "a lot of made up policies... that are just nowhere found."

Dans claimed "90%" of the media's characterization of Project 2025 is false. He deemed criticism from Democrats as "probably the greatest misinformation campaign since, I don't know, the Russia hoax."

"To be sure, the people who are screaming the loudest about it have the most to lose," Dans said. "They are really the ones defending this deep state. They are defending the anti-democracy. This is really Projection 2025 on behalf of the left."

Dans spoke little about the particulars of the over 900-page Project 2025 agenda, instead saying that the overriding goal is to quash the administrative state.

Project 2025 contains a lengthy wishlist of conservative and far-right goals: from moving the Justice Department and its FBI under presidential control, to slashing climate change regulations, to eliminating the federal Department of Education, to ending public funding for "transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for servicemembers."

The word abortion appears 198 times in Project 2025: from prohibiting Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers from receiving Medicaid funds, to having the government cut funding for states that don't report every abortion, stillbirth and miscarriage. 

Project 2025 would also have the FDA reverse its approval of abortion pills and direct the agency to stop allowing the mailing of abortion pills. And Project 2025 would eliminate the requirement for insurance providers to cover the emergency contraceptive Ella.

Project 2025 targets the "toxic normalization of transgenderism" — it aims to prevent transgender individuals from serving in the military, to rescind anti-discrimination regulations protecting transgender individuals and to make it harder to get gender reassignment surgery.

And Project 2025's authors vow to end illegal immigration and seal the 1,933 mile-long U.S.-Mexican border. Other immigration policies include eliminating visas for crime victims and making clear that ICE deportation officers can deport "immigration violators anywhere in the United States, without warrant where appropriate, subject only to the civil warrant requirements of the [Immigration and Nationality Act] where appropriate."

Trump himself said at a Michigan rally this spring that: "On day one, we will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history."

When asked whether he would build new detention camps, he told Time Magazine this spring that he expects he'd deport people so quickly they may not be needed but said: "I would not rule out anything." 

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At the Heritage's Monday event, Trump's former acting ICE Director Tom Homan denied that the Trump administration would build "concentration camps" and sweep neighborhoods for his massive deportation program.

But Homan — a Project 2025 contributor who championed the increased separation of children from parents at the border — promised a reinvigorated deportation effort in a second Trump administration.

"Bottom line is under President Trump, he's still going to prioritize national security threats and criminals, but no one's off the table," said Homan, the former acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and currently a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation's border security and immigration center. "If you're in the country illegally, it's not OK. If you're in the country illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder, because it's not OK to enter this country legally." 

The Trump administration, according to Homan, would focus on enforcing removal orders for people who unsuccessfully seek asylum under federal law. 

"So they're going to be ordered removed, they'll get a federal order saying you must leave," Homan said. "What is the option? We have to execute these orders."

He continued: "A federal judge says: 'You must go home.' The Trump administration gon' make them go home."

Another former Trump official-turned Heritage Foundation staffer called on Trump to use the first day of his second term to revoke all federal guidance on sexual orientation and gender identity — including Biden's executive order expanding sex discrimination prohibitions to include gender identity or sexual orientation.

"That is the primary responsibility, I think, of the next administration is to make sure that they don't sacrifice children on the altar of woke progressivism," said Sarah Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation who previously worked as a senior counsel for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education on Trump.

Perry said Trump should take away loan amnesty for student loans and instead give parents educational vouchers and credits — a move that opponents have long said would decimate the U.S. public school system and access to education.

To quash the administrative state, Project 2025 would instead create an administration composed solely of political appointees to replace the U.S. system of nonpartisan civil servants.

"Political appointees who are answerable to the President and have decision-making authority in the executive branch are key to this essential task," reads Project 2025.

On Monday, Dans described Project 2025 as a guidebook for conservatives to "take back the government." 

"Even when we win, we can still lose if we aren't working to put the policy in place," Dans said. "The day after the election is just day one. You're at the starting gate, and it takes outsiders. That's what's so amazing about President Trump, is that this system is only going to change when outsiders come into Washington and make the change. And that's really the call of Project 2025. It's a threat to the system, because it's you taking back your own government."

The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973, came up with a guide for former President Ronald Reagan that "ultimately became the Bible of the Reagan Revolution," Dans said. 

"What we've done here is basically put up the solution set," he said. "This is the source code of how this whole thing works."

Dans said Project 2025's primary focus is going up against the "fourth illicit branch" of government: federal agencies designed to roll out federal programs. 

He argues progressives have built up the power of those agencies for decades.

"Really it's the anti-democracy at work," Dans said. "This is a class of people making laws, making policies that come right out of the Ivy League academies, and they're thrust upon you."

Dans — who says he earned his bachelor's and graduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology —  said for too long, conservatives have failed to offer a "full-throated approach to what to do about this unaccountable, unconstitutional fourth branch of government."

Dans praised a recent Supreme Court ruling that reigned in the "administrative state" by overturning the Chevron doctrine, which granted federal agencies deference when rolling out federal laws and programs.

Other rulings this term further limited the power of agencies to pass regulations — a development that scholars say increases public risk from unsafe products and leaves the environment vulnerable.

Conservative groups including the Heritage Foundation have pushed such steps for decades. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's wife Ginni Thomas worked as the Heritage Foundation's director of executive branch relations during George W. Bush's administration.

Dans' talk was moderated by the editor-in-chief of the conservative online magazine The Federalist, Molly Hemingway, who concluded the event saying: "See, Paul's not near as scary as the media says he is."