Overview

Background

During the first Trump administration, Dans served as a senior advisor in the Office of Community Planning and Development at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In February 2020 he was appointed White House liaison and senior adviser to the director of the Office of Personnel Management, where he managed the federal agency responsible for human resources policy for more than two million federal workers, and he subsequently served as chief of staff to the OPM director, working to staff the approximately 4,000 presidential appointees across the federal government.

In January 2021, President Trump appointed Dans to a six-year term as Chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission, recognizing his expertise in urban development and policy. His OPM experience gave him an unusually detailed understanding of the personnel machinery of the executive branch — an understanding that would become central to Project 2025's design.

Public Role in the Second Trump Administration

Architect of Project 2025

Dans was appointed director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, known as Project 2025, by the Heritage Foundation on April 14, 2022. 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.

The effort consisted 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. Developed with participation from major conservative groups, the multi-million dollar effort also spent several years building what was described as a "LinkedIn for conservatives" that an incoming administration could tap for hiring purposes.

The Trump Campaign's Disavowal

Project 2025 attracted attention for some of its more ambitious proposals in the policy plan, including reinstating more stringent rules for the use of the abortion pill mifepristone and abolishing some federal agencies. On the campaign trail, President Biden and Vice President Harris made the project the centerpiece of their case against a Trump restoration. Trump responded by publicly distancing himself from the effort. Trump told supporters during a rally that Project 2025 was written by people on the "severe right" and that its policies were "absolutely ridiculous and abysmal."

On July 30, 2024, Dans announced he was stepping down from his position as Director of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation. In a statement, Heritage said the decision to part ways was mutual and due to strategic differences, clarifying reports that Dans had been terminated over issues of alleged misconduct. In addition to stepping down from Project 2025, Dans also left the Heritage Foundation.

Despite the public break, the project's underlying influence proved durable. A CNN review found that many of Trump's early actions as president in his second term aligned with Project 2025's proposals. The disavowal during the campaign and the policy alignment afterward underscored the distinction between electoral politics and governing — Dans's work survived the campaign even as he did not.

Personnel and the Administrative State

Dans's specific contribution to Project 2025 was less about any single policy than about the infrastructure of conservative governance. His OPM background made the personnel pillar of the project his primary domain. 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 his acolytes believe undermined him at every step. This time, the goal was for Trump to take office with a fully staffed, carefully selected administration ready to roll. Dans was instrumental in building the vetted candidate database and the training seminars intended to realize that goal.

Recent Developments

Dans launched a Senate bid in South Carolina to oust incumbent Republican Lindsey Graham, announcing his Republican primary campaign in Charleston. Graham, a close friend of President Trump's, is seeking a fifth term and already has the president's backing. Chris LaCivita, a senior adviser to Graham's campaign who co-managed Trump's 2024 bid, said in a statement that Dans had "parachuted himself into the state of South Carolina in direct opposition to President Trump's longtime friend and ally in the Senate."

Dans campaigned on restoring faith-based values, tackling the national debt, and ending what he described as endless wars through an America First approach. He differentiated himself from Graham by portraying the incumbent as offering mere lip service to conservative principles, and he drew on his Project 2025 experience to propose bringing its reform blueprint to Senate policymaking. Dans framed the Senate itself as a bottleneck to further conservative change, saying: "If you look at where the chokepoint is, it's the United States Senate. That's the headwaters of the swamp."

Early polling showed Graham leading with 41 percent on the initial ballot, followed by a second challenger at 21 percent, with Dans at 11 percent. Graham faced several challengers in the Republican primary, including Dans and businessman Mark Lynch. The primary contest remained one of the more closely watched intraparty races of the 2026 cycle, given Dans's national profile and Graham's complicated history with the MAGA wing of the party.

Outlook

Dans enters the South Carolina primary as the underdog, facing a well-funded incumbent with an explicit presidential endorsement. His path to victory would require convincing Republican primary voters that Graham's personal loyalty to Trump is insufficient cover for a career record that the MAGA movement views with deep suspicion. Whether the Project 2025 brand, which was toxic enough during the 2024 campaign to prompt Trump's own disavowal, becomes an asset or a liability in a South Carolina GOP primary remains an open question.

More broadly, Dans represents a type increasingly present in the Trump political ecosystem: the policy architect who helped generate the intellectual infrastructure of the second term and now seeks to translate that role into direct political power. His candidacy is a measure of how far the project's ideas have traveled from controversy to claimed vindication — and how the men who built those ideas are positioning themselves for the next phase of conservative politics, inside or outside the administration.