What are key personnel and authors associated with Project 2025 (e.g., John Malcolm, Paul Dans, etc.)?

Executive Summary — A short, firm answer to who’s who in Project 2025

Project 2025 is a large Heritage Foundation–led transition blueprint that lists hundreds of contributors and was publicly associated with a core leadership team including Kevin Roberts (Heritage president), Paul Dans (identified as the project's director until August 2024), and a set of senior conservative operatives and former Trump officials who authored or trained on the project; multiple reporting threads also identify Russell Vought, Stephen Miller, Brendan Carr, Tom Homan, and others as authors or key designers whose names later surfaced in administration staffing plans ^{[1] [2] [3]}. The record shows convergence on certain high-profile figures across sources, but also disagreement about whether some names — notably John Malcolm and others — were formal Project 2025 authors or simply affiliated with Heritage or allied networks, so claims about every individual require source-by-source scrutiny ^{[1] [4] [5]}.

1. Who the sponsors and public architects are — The Heritage Foundation’s visible imprint

Project 2025 is publicly presented and administratively housed at The Heritage Foundation, with the foundation’s leadership and staff centrally involved in commissioning, editing, and publishing the project’s policy guides and personnel databases; Kevin Roberts is named as Heritage president while Heritage staff and associated fellows served as program leads and contributors ^{[6] [7]}. The project’s scale — aiming to provide agency playbooks and candidate lists — created both operational leadership roles, such as Paul Dans listed in reporting as a director responsible for building personnel systems, and a broader roster of policy authors from Heritage networks who drafted agency-specific plans ^{[2] [5]}. This framing explains why some individuals are identified as authors in one source and described as affiliated or supervisory personnel in others: Heritage functions as both publisher and convenor, producing authored content and hosting contributing networks ^[1].

2. The consistent, high-profile names — Who appears across multiple reports

Multiple reporting threads converge on a set of high-profile conservatives tied directly to Project 2025’s drafting or instructional roles and later named for administration posts: Russell Vought (project architect and OMB nominee in some accounts), Stephen Miller (policy lead), Brendan Carr (telecommunications policy contributor and FCC nominee), Tom Homan (immigration/border content and border czar in staffing lists), and Karoline Leavitt among others ^{[8] [3]}. These names appear repeatedly because they played visible roles creating policy blueprints or running training sessions tied to the project, and they were publicly reported as authors, instructors, or leading contributors whose policy recommendations mapped onto personnel selections in the ensuing administration ^{[8] [3]}. The repetition of these names across sources strengthens the factual link between Project 2025 policy output and subsequent staffing nominations.

3. Disputed or unclear attributions — Where the record diverges on John Malcolm, Paul Dans, and others

Sources agree that Paul Dans led operational elements of Project 2025 until mid-2024 and was heavily involved in building a vetted personnel database, but there is divergence about whether he is the singular “architect” or one of several operational leaders; some pieces label him the project director while others emphasize Heritage’s institutional leadership more broadly ^{[2] [9]}. By contrast, John Malcolm is named in some contexts as a Heritage-affiliated expert, but the available analyses do not consistently list him as a Project 2025 author or core staffer, creating ambiguity about formal authorship versus broader conservative network ties ^{[1] [6]}. These differences reflect both evolving reporting and the blurred line between Heritage staff, contributing authors, and external advisers who fed material into the project’s playbooks ^{[1] [5]}.

4. What multiple sources add and where agendas shape presentation

Different outlets emphasize different aspects: watchdog groups and labor unions highlight the project’s staffing ambitions and names of administration nominees as evidence of a deliberate takeover strategy, focusing on personnel lists and training programs ^[3]. Heritage and sympathetic reporting stress policy development, recruitment, and the need for a transition blueprint, framing Project 2025 as a standard conservative policy manual for governance ^[1]. This divergence shows an agenda-driven lens: critics foreground personnel vetting and ideological intent, while proponents emphasize legitimate transition planning. Both frames are factual about project outputs, but they prioritize different evidence — staffing lists and database-building versus authored policy guides and public workshops ^{[9] [8]}.

5. Bottom line: who to credit as authors and who needs more verification

The defensible core: Heritage Foundation leadership, Paul Dans (operational director until August 2024), Kevin Roberts (Heritage president), and a set of named conservative figures including Russell Vought, Stephen Miller, Brendan Carr, and Tom Homan are well-documented contributors, authors, or instructors tied to Project 2025 outputs and follow-on personnel moves ^{[7] [3] [2]}. Names like John Malcolm appear in adjacent Heritage or conservative contexts but lack consistent attribution across the provided reporting to list him definitively as a Project 2025 author; further primary documentation (byline checks on Project 2025 materials, Heritage contributor lists, or contemporaneous author credits) is needed to confirm each individual’s formal authorship ^{[1] [5]}. This mix of confirmed core architects and plausible but unconfirmed affiliates explains why source-by-source verification matters.