Paul Dans is an American Politician, Attorney and Political Consultant best known as the Architect of Project 2025, a policy and personnel blueprint prepared for the next Conservative U.S. Presidential Administration. Dans designed and directed Project 2025, while at the Heritage Foundation, leading a coalition of over 110 conservative organizations and thousands of volunteers so that the Right would be ready to govern on Day One. Independent estimates claim the origins of approximately 80% of President Trump’s Second Term domestic agenda can be traced to Project 2025. The Financial Times described “Paul Dans [as] arguably the most influential and revolutionary American whose name FT readers may not know. The Maga activist who crafted Project 2025 – the programme of ultra-conservative ideas that dynamised the first 100 days of the second Trump administration.” Dans served in President Trump’s First Term in various roles including as Chief of Staff and White House Liaison at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Senior Advisor at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and was appointed by President Trump to serve as Chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission. Dans is an expert in Bureaucratic Reform and a leading voice in the America First movement. From August 2025 to present, Dans has been campaigning for public office as a candidate for United States Senate from South Carolina challenging incumbent Senator Lindsey Graham. On April 10, 2026, Dans withdrew his candidacy and threw his support behind Graham’s other challenger, creating a unified front against the Incumbent in the upcoming June 2026 primary election. Dans is a successful attorney engaged in high-stakes commercial litigation. Working on behalf of Chevron, Dans has been described as a “litigation genius” by the American Lawyer magazine for his seminal contribution in cracking the infamous Chevron Ecuador Litigation wide open and unravelling a $27 billion fraud. His creative litigation strategy uncovered smoking gun evidence of wrongdoing in the phonied up environmental case. Dans holds his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law and the University of Paris II Pantheon-Assas. His wife of 20 years is world famous ballerina and celebrity trainer, Mary Helen Bowers. Bowers, upon retiring from the New York City Ballet, trained Natalie Portman for her Academy Award winning performance in Black Swan, going on to launch the viral Ballet Beautiful workout (balletbeautiful.com), the leading method in Barre fitness world-wide with clients in over 130 countries and pioneer in online fitness training. She was appointed by President Trump in 2020 to serve as a Trustee of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The Dans family lives in Charleston, South Carolina with their five children.