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Fact check: Who are the lead authors and advisory council members of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation?
Executive Summary
Project 2025’s central planning and editorial leadership are attributed to Paul Dans and Steven Groves, identified as the primary editors or lead authors of the large Heritage Foundation policy guide titled The Conservative Promise, and the project draws on dozens of former Trump administration officials and conservative organizations as contributors and advisers, according to compiled records and summaries [1] [2]. The initiative’s advisory apparatus is organized largely around a coalition of conservative policy and allied organizations—ranging from the Foundation for Government Accountability to Liberty University and the Honest Elections Project—rather than a conventional roster of individually named “advisory council” celebrities, with the organization list appearing in the project’s front matter [1]. This report extracts core claims, cites diverse documentation, and contrasts published lists of lead authors, contributors, and partner organizations to present a concise, sourced account of who shaped Project 2025 and the composition of its advisory network [3] [1].
1. What the primary sources claim about the project’s authors and editors — names at the top of the blueprint
Primary documentation and contemporary summaries consistently identify Paul Dans and Steven Groves as the editors and principal architects of the 900-plus-page Project 2025 policy manual, often titled The Conservative Promise, with Dans named as project director through August 2024 in public records and Groves credited as co-editor and a substantive contributor to policy chapters [1]. Heritage-branded publications and project pages list an expanded set of chapter authors and staff contributors that include Paul Dans, Spencer Chretien, Troup Hemenway, and other Heritage officials and affiliated scholars whose roles range from chapter authorship to project coordination; these materials frame Dans and Groves as the editorial leads while dozens of chapter authors carry out sector-specific agendas [3] [4]. The pattern across sources is consistent: lead authorship is editorial and coordinating, while subject-matter authorship is distributed among many specialists.
2. Who the named authors and chapter contributors are — from policy wonks to former officials
The Project 2025 authorship roster expands beyond the two lead editors to include a wide network of chapter authors and contributors who bring experience from government, academia, and advocacy. Sources enumerate contributors such as Daren Bakst, Jonathan Berry, Lindsey M. Burke, Russell Vought, Mandy Gunasekara, and other policy figures credited for chapters on energy, education, law, public administration, and regulatory rollbacks [4] [1]. Heritage and affiliated summaries report roughly 30 chapters authored by some 40 primary authors with input from more than 100 partner organizations, establishing a federated authorship model in which subject-matter experts draft operational blueprints intended for immediate executive implementation [1] [3]. These records also note that several contributors were former Trump-administration officials and that some were later nominated for roles in the subsequent administration, attesting to the project’s pipeline role linking policy design to personnel selection [5].
3. The advisory setup: coalitions and partner organizations that formed the project's convening council
Rather than listing a narrow panel of named individuals as an advisory council, the project’s front-matter advisory roll credits a broad coalition of conservative organizations who functioned as the advisory and partner ecosystem. The named advisory groups include the Alabama Policy Institute, American Accountability Foundation, American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Center for Equal Opportunity, Concerned Women for America, Family Policy Alliance, First Liberty Institute, Foundation for Government Accountability, Honest Elections Project, Institute for the American Worker, Liberty University, National Association of Scholars, National Center for Public Policy Research, and several others, forming an organizational advisory network that contributed to or endorsed project chapters [1]. Project materials and secondary summaries present this constellation as the advisory backbone rather than a roster of individuals, signaling an emphasis on institutional buy-in and coalition alignment across conservative policy, academic, and faith-oriented groups [1].
4. How contributors overlapped with government nominations and the project’s political role
Multiple reports document that architects of Project 2025 were physically and institutionally linked to the Trump administration’s staffing and policy rollout, with names like Russell Vought and Stephen Miller appearing in both project contributor lists and nomination reports for administration posts, illustrating the project’s function as a staffing and policy pipeline [5] [1]. Heritage and partner documentation also highlights contributors who advocated specific policy reversals—such as Mandy Gunasekara’s authorship of an EPA downsizing strategy—demonstrating concrete programmatic recommendations being translated into political personnel selections and administration priorities [1]. The overlap between project authorship, advisory organizations, and subsequent nominations underscores how Project 2025 operated as a coordinated blueprint for governance change, with documented ties between the document’s contributors and executive staffing choices [2] [5].
5. Assessment: what these listings mean for transparency, influence, and public scrutiny
The assembled records show Project 2025 presents itself as a collaboratively produced conservative governance playbook edited by Dans and Groves and backed by a broad coalition of organizational advisers, with many chapter authors drawn from a pool of former administration officials and allied policy shops [1] [3]. This structure concentrates agenda-setting in editorial leads while distributing technical drafting across aligned organizations, producing both operational depth and coalition legitimacy; it also means accountability is diffused across institutions rather than focused on individual council members. Readers should note the dual realities in the documentation: the project is both a Heritage-led editorial enterprise and a networked coalition effort whose influence extended into staffing and policymaking, as evidenced by contributor nominations and role adoptions in government [5] [2].