| This article is part of a series on |
| Conservatism in the United States |
|---|
 |
Paul Dans is a Republican political operative and a former member of the Donald Trump Administration. He is currently leading Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's 2025 Presidential Transition Project intended to reshape the U.S. federal government to reflect right-wing policies. [1] [2]
Dans earned his bachelor's degree in Economics and a master's degree in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [3]
Dans worked at architecture and planning firms before attending law school at the University of Virginia, where he was president of the law school's Federalist Society chapter, and later practicing law in New York City. [3] [4]
Dans worked as a senior advisor in the Office of Community Planning and Development at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. [5]
Dans then served in the Trump Administration as Chief of Staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management where he managed the federal agency in charge of human resources policy for the more than two million federal workers. He also served as the Office of Personnel Management's White House liaison and worked with the White House Office of Presidential Personnel to staff the approximately 4000 presidential appointees across the federal government. Dans was seen as a Trump loyalist and worked closely with John McEntee to remove longtime public servants from government who did not demonstrate sufficient loyalty to Trump. Dans was hired without the knowledge of Dale Cabaniss, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, who resigned abruptly in 2020. [5] [6] [7]
In 2023, Dans confirmed that Project 2025 had a "great" relationship with former President Donald Trump. [8]
The Heritage Foundation, sometimes referred to simply as "Heritage," is an activist American conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1973, it took a leading role in the conservative movement in the 1980s during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose policies were taken from Heritage Foundation studies, including its Mandate for Leadership.
The Hatch Act of 1939, An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities, is a United States federal law. Its main provision prohibits civil-service employees in the executive branch of the federal government, except the president and vice president, from engaging in some forms of political activity. It became law on August 2, 1939. The law was named for Senator Carl Hatch of New Mexico. It was most recently amended in 2012.
The United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is an independent agency of the United States government that manages the United States federal civil service. The agency provides federal human resources policy, oversight, and support, and tends to healthcare (FEHB), life insurance (FEGLI), and retirement benefits for federal government employees, retirees, and their dependents.
William Asa Hutchinson II is an American attorney, businessman, and politician who served as the 46th governor of Arkansas from 2015 to 2023. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as a U.S. attorney, U.S. representative, and in two roles in the George W. Bush administration. He was a candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
In the United States, Office of Inspector General (OIG) is a generic term for the oversight division of a federal or state agency aimed at preventing inefficient or unlawful operations within their parent agency. Such offices are attached to many federal executive departments, independent federal agencies, as well as state and local governments. Each office includes an inspector general and employees charged with identifying, auditing, and investigating fraud, waste, abuse, embezzlement and mismanagement of any kind within the executive department.
David Hossein Safavian is an American former lawyer who worked as a congressional aide, lobbyist, and later as a political appointee in the George W. Bush administration. A Republican, he served as Chief of Staff of the United States General Services Administration (GSA). He is a figure in the Jack Abramoff lobbying and corruption scandal, having worked with the lobbyist on the Mississippi Band of Choctaw account. After serving with Abramoff as a lobbyist, in 1997 Safavian co-founded lobbying firm Janus-Merritt Strategies with Republican activist Grover Norquist.
In American politics, the unitary executive theory is "an expansive interpretation of presidential power that aims to centralize greater control over the government in the White House."
In the United States, a presidential transition is the process during which the president-elect of the United States prepares to take over the administration of the federal government of the United States from the incumbent president. Though planning for transition by a non-incumbent candidate can start at any time before a presidential election and in the days following, the transition formally starts when the General Services Administration (GSA) declares an “apparent winner” of the election, thereby releasing the funds appropriated by Congress for the transition, and continues until inauguration day, when the president-elect takes the oath of office, at which point the powers, immunities, and responsibilities of the presidency are legally transferred to the new president.
Reinhold Richard "Reince" Priebus is an American lawyer and politician who served as chairman of the Republican National Committee from 2011 to 2017 and as White House chief of staff during the first six months of Donald Trump's presidency.
Mandate for Leadership is a series of books published by The Heritage Foundation, an American conservative think-tank based in Washington, D.C. They offer specific conservative policy recommendations designed to be implemented by the federal government.
Mary Helen Bowers is an American celebrity fitness guru, entrepreneur and former New York City Ballet dancer originally from Charlotte, North Carolina. She attended Alexander Graham Middle School in Charlotte, North Carolina before leaving for New York. She was a full scholarship student at the School of American Ballet in Manhattan at fifteen years old. One year later she was invited to join the New York City Ballet. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature from Columbia University in New York City. She danced with the New York City Ballet for a decade.
John David McEntee II is an American political advisor and dating app CEO who served in the Trump administration. He has been a Trump loyalist during and after the Trump presidency. He began as a body man and personal aide to the president but was dismissed by White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly in March 2018 after failing a security clearance background check, which discovered he was under investigation by the Department of Homeland Security due to issues related to gambling.
Russell "Russ" Thurlow Vought is an American former government official who was the director of the Office of Management and Budget from July 2020 to January 2021. He was previously deputy director of the OMB from 2018 to 2020 and acting director from 2019 to 2020.
Brendan Thomas Carr is an American lawyer who has served as a member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) since 2017. Appointed to the position by Donald Trump, Carr previously served as the agency's general counsel and as an aide to FCC commissioner Ajit Pai. In private practice, Carr formerly worked as a telecommunications attorney at Wiley Rein.
Emily Webster Murphy is an American attorney and former government official who served as the administrator of the General Services Administration (GSA) from 2017 to 2021. Before serving in the GSA, Murphy was an attorney for the Republican National Committee and worked for several congressional committees and executive departments in the field of acquisition policy.
William Perry Pendley is an American attorney, conservative activist, political commentator, and government official who served as the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management from 2019 to 2021.
John Gibbs is an American far-right politician and political commentator. A member of the Republican Party, Gibbs was a software engineer and missionary before entering politics. During the Donald Trump administration, he held roles in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and was acting Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Community Planning and Development. Gibbs has a history of making false, inflammatory, and conspiratorial remarks on his Twitter feed.
A Schedule F appointment was a job classification in the excepted service of the United States federal civil service that existed briefly at the end of the Trump administration during 2020–2021. It would have contained policy-related positions, removing their civil service protections and making them easy to fire. It was never fully implemented, and no one was appointed to it before it was repealed at the beginning of the Biden administration.
Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, and convicted felon, who served from 2017 to 2021, announced his campaign for a nonconsecutive second presidential term in the 2024 U.S. presidential election on November 15, 2022. He was officially nominated on July 15, 2024 at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, and accepting his nomination to the presidency of the United States for the GOP during the final day of the convention on July 18, 2024, where was announced JD Vance, the junior U.S. Senator from Ohio, as the nominee for vice president and campaign partner. If elected into office, Trump will become the oldest president in American history and the second to serve a second non consecutive term after Grover Cleveland.
The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, also known as Project 2025, is an initiative organized by the Heritage Foundation with the aim of promoting a collection of conservative and right-wing policy proposals to reshape the United States federal government and consolidate executive power should Donald Trump win the 2024 presidential election. The Project asserts that the entire executive branch is under the direct control of the president under the unitary executive theory. It proposes reclassifying tens of thousands of federal civil service workers as political appointees, in order to replace them with loyalists more willing to enable Trump's policies. In doing so, proponents argue that the change would dismantle what they view as a vast, unaccountable, and mostly liberal government bureaucracy. The Project seeks to infuse the government and society with Christian values. Critics have characterized Project 2025 as an authoritarian, Christian nationalist plan to steer the U.S. toward autocracy. Many legal experts have said it would undermine the rule of law, the separation of powers, the separation of church and state, and civil liberties.
