The ex-boss of Project 2025 reckons that an “unleashed” President Donald Trump has been making huge strides in his second term’s first 100 days towards reversing liberal gains that date back to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Paul Dans, who spearheaded the effort to craft a detailed conservative transition plan that was a big deal in last year’s presidential election, thinks Trump needs a fresh batch of lawyers to champion his policies in court. According to Dans, these legal battles will be the highlight of the next 100 days.
“If Roosevelt had the New Deal, this is what I would think of as Trump’s real deal,” Dans quipped. “This is tearing down the administrative state and rolling back a lot of this progressive framework that FDR built up.”
Dans, the brains behind Project 2025, which was run by the Heritage Foundation before the 2024 campaign, focused on setting up a future right-wing administration ready to govern from Day 1 with more prep and planning than Trump had in his first term. The project mainly revolved around plans to revamp the civil service drastically and providing a list of potential MAGA-inspired hires for a new administration.
The most talked-about part of Project 2025 was a 900-plus-page memo that outlined several policy positions a future administration should mull over. Despite many policies in the document mirroring those Trump vowed to enact in his own plan, Agenda47, the president and his camp distanced themselves from Project 2025 on the campaign trail. Dans, who worked in Trump’s initial administration, got the boot from his position over the summer as the campaign’s fury grew.
However, after Trump’s victory, he brought on board several authors of the report to key positions, including Russell Vought, Tom Homan, Peter Navarro, and Brendan Carr. During the transition, the team utilized the Project 2025 database of potential hires, as per NBC News.
The blueprint essentially predicted much of what Trump would implement or try to implement once in power. An independent tracker discovered that the administration has executed or taken action on about 40% of the material in Project 2025’s blueprint. This includes slashing research grants to universities, prepping cuts for climate research, revoking Temporary Protected Status for some immigrants, and launching a full-on attack on diversity programs in government.
As Trump reaches the 100-day milestone, Dans had a chat with NBC News in a couple of interviews recently. He doesn’t think measuring Trump’s actions against Project 2025’s plan “is really accurate,” insisting, “these are, to be sure, President Trump’s own policies, many of which were in Project 2025.”
“It’s with great excitement that I read what’s going on every day and see a new step that they’re taking,” Dans shared. “But to be sure, this has to get implemented. At this point, a lot of the executive orders and the like are policy pronouncements, and the real rubber is going to meet the road when it comes to implementing all these directives.”
With a Congress split down the middle and few new laws passed, many of Trump’s executive actions are caught up in court battles that will determine how far the president can go. “Many of us always saw this as the ultimate end game, that this is where the two sides would meet,” Dans pointed out. “It comes down to having the right people. Ultimately, you need to have zealous advocates for MAGA in position and ready to face off with their counterparts.”
“He needs additional reinforcements on his team,” Dans remarked. “As this kind of slows down into a war of attrition with the deep state, particularly on the legal front.” He added, “As much as he can continue to get his team on the field, that’s imperative.”
On his Truth Social platform, Trump posted that his administration has filled over 80% of political appointee positions in some of the largest agencies, including the departments of Justice, State, Defense, and Treasury. These positions are a small fraction of the total jobs in each agency, but Trump recently moved to reclassify a bunch of federal workers to make them easier to replace.
The administration has faced some setbacks in court already. The drama over Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador started when the administration claimed in court filings that he was deported due to an “administrative error.” Last week, the administration switched out its lawyers in a case challenging New York City’s congestion pricing after the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan mistakenly filed a memo outlining weaknesses in the administration’s argument and strategy.
“This is where the worry comes in,” Dans said. “Is there enough of a MAGA elite among the top legal minds to meet” the administration’s needs?
“I think it’s really incumbent on the administration to get a lot of these good lawyers who are out in the 50 states, get them to Washington and press them into service,” Dans continued.
Enhancing MAGA staffing has been a top priority for Dans, given how crucial dismantling the existing federal bureaucracy was to Project 2025. This mission has been spearheaded by Trump and Elon Musk, the billionaire adviser overseeing the Department of Government Efficiency.
“What’s elementally important is that Project 2025 identified the administrative state as the major blockade to effectuating change for the better,” Dans noted.
The Trump administration hasn’t “fired enough people, to be sure,” he added, explaining how challenging it is to do so under existing regulations. With Trump recently moving on the policy known as Schedule F — the reclassification of some career government employees to make them easier to remove — Dans said he expects to see “a lot more of this taking place.”
Dans had plenty of praise for Musk and his effort, as the tech titan announced this month that he will soon dedicate more time to his business interests and decrease how much time he’s spending in government.
“Without DOGE, I don’t believe any of this would be able to be accomplished at the pace it has been,” Dans said, adding its structure remains necessary to achieve Trump’s goals in the months to come. “This is a great 100-day mark, a watershed moment in history. This is the slamming of the door on the progressive era.”
But Dans did offer some caution on artificial intelligence policy, as Trump has sought to loosen restrictions around AI via executive orders while Musk and DOGE have implemented AI programs at some federal agencies.
“AI has produced this MRI of the blob, and now we can actually make connections that would have been impossible before, in a matter of a weekend, that might have taken two years of study,” Dans said, adding, “But I do believe that AI needs to be carefully policed by the administration.”
‘Short-term pain, but all for long-term gain’
As Trump hits the 100-day mark of his administration, polling is flashing several warning signs for him on signature issues, like immigration and the economy, as deportations to a prison in El Salvador and the president’s global tariffs garner headlines.
Dans, though, says Trump is on target and maintains a mandate for “sweeping change.”
“This is Trump, unchained and able to do what he promised the American people,” he said. “There’s no playbook out there for restoring the country. Much of this is intuitive to him and to others. There are going to be ups and downs. It’s a long-term proposition. So there will be some short-term pain, but all for long-term gain.”
Moving forward, Dans said he’s eager to see more reforms at the Defense Department, including a “large repurposing” of the agency as it sharpens its focus on Asia, which he believes is coming once there’s a settlement in Ukraine. He also wants to see Trump take action on a policy he proposed during the campaign but has gotten little attention in recent months: the construction of 10 “freedom cities” on federal land.
“I always thought that was an intriguing Trump idea,” Dans said. “It captures the imagination of everybody to build something new. He’s a builder. So the first part of building is demolition, but he’s going to get on to the construction phase pretty soon.”
Looking ahead to 2028, Dans said there won’t be a need for a Project 2029.
“We have President Trump in power now, he has a team,” Dans said. “The premise of Project 2025 was that we needed, as conservatives, to get together. We were a herd of cats, often scratching at one another, and we needed to kind of start marching in the line. And that’s what Project 2025 did.”
“And I think, not only our initiative, but other presidential transition projects really put this forward that time was of the essence,” Dans continued. “And President Trump has certainly come out and played with an urgency that is 100% correct.”
