‘Greatest Misinformation Campaign Since Russia Hoax’: Project 2025 Director Counters Lies

Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell /

Left-wing smears of Project 2025 constitute “probably the greatest misinformation campaign since the Russia hoax,” the head of the initiative for the next conservative president said Monday at The Heritage Foundation’s Policy Fest at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project for Heritage, was referring to the eventually debunked allegations that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win the presidency in 2016.

Dans spoke at the Policy Fest on the first day of the RNC, which will run through Thursday when Trump is scheduled to accept the party’s nomination for a third time.

The purpose of Project 2025 is “to bring our [conservative] movement together,” Dans said.

“We’re 110 conservative organizations who have really committed ourselves to making America a government of by and for the people,” Dans said. “Over the last 100 years, the progressives have built an administrative state and it’s ruled by a class of experts, as Sen. [Mike] Lee was saying. And really, it’s the anti-democracy at work.”

President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign launched a website dedicated to attacking Project 2025 and has posted what Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and others call baseless claims about the policy initiative, including falsely asserting that Project 2025 seeks to “terminate the Constitution.”

Organized by Heritage but including contributions from over 100 other conservative groups, the 2025 Presidential Transition Project (its full name) aims to equip an incoming conservative presidential administration with policies to rein in the size and power of the U.S. government’s bureaucracy.

Project 2025 provides a “solution set” to take on the government’s deep state, Heritage’s Dans said, and is a call for Americans to take back control of their own government.

“This is really a way for us to make sure, when we ultimately get in the driver’s seat, that we’re ready to move out because this whole system has been built by the Left, and even when we win, we can still lose if we aren’t working to put the policies in place,” he said.

Project 2025 isn’t running for president, Trump is, Dans said.

“We’re a group of private citizens advocating for better government,” he said.