Project 2025 director ends work on plan for Donald Trump ...

In short:

The man who led Project 2025 — a controversial plan for Donald Trump's second term in office — is standing down.

Donald Trump had distanced himself from the plan, which is not officially part of his platform, but Democrats had ramped up attacks on it and pointed out it was written by Trump allies and former staff.

What's next?

Kamala Harris's campaign has indicated it will continue to focus on Project 2025 on the trail. But Mr Trump's campaign said the project's "demise would be greatly welcomed".

The director of the "Project 2025" plan for a Donald Trump presidency has stepped down after Democrats made attacking it central to their election campaign and Trump repeatedly distanced himself from it.

Paul Dans, who predicted Project 2025 would become "the engine room of the next administration" in a recent interview with the ABC's Four Corners, will leave the initiative in August.

Kamala Harris and, before her, Joe Biden had been frequently targeting Project 2025 on the campaign trail, highlighting its more radical proposals to expand presidential power and reshape government.

That prompted Trump to declare he had "nothing to do with" the project, though many of the people who worked on it were his allies, including scores of his former staff. Mr Dans served as chief of staff in the Office of Personnel Management in the Trump administration.

"This is his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country," Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez insisted in a statement after today's announcement.

But the Trump campaign said it had "been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the president in any way".

"Reports of Project 2025's demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you."

The Heritage Foundation think tank, which led Project 2025 in conjunction with more than 100 other conservative groups, said Mr Dans's work overseeing it was always due to end about now. It said Mr Dans left voluntarily and it was not under pressure from the Trump campaign.

But a former Heritage Foundation aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was almost certain the Trump campaign had forced the shake-up.

Trump campaign representatives did not respond to messages inquiring about whether the campaign pushed for Mr Dans to step down. 

Mr Dans did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

What is Project 2025?

Also known as the "Presidential Transition Project", Project 2025 is spelled out in an almost 1,000-page document.

One of the most controversial proposals involves replacing thousands of traditionally apolitical public servants with Trump loyalists.

"We have a database with over 10,000 people from all walks of life entering into this, aspiring to serve," Mr Dans told Four Corners.

The proposal lines up with Trump's own plan, outlined on his campaign website, to "shatter the deep state". 

He has vowed to revive a 2020 executive order to reclassify public servants working in policy roles as "Schedule F" employees, effectively turning them into political appointments. 

That would strip job protections from potentially tens of thousands of government workers, making it easy for the president to sack them.

Project 2025's other proposals include:

eliminating government programs focused on climate protection and racial and gender equitypursuing abortion bans at all levels of government, and removing the mifepristone abortion bill from the marketdisbanding government agencies including the Department of Educationscaling back social welfare programs such as food-stamp support and Medicaid health insurance 

In July, Trump said "some of the things" proposed by Project 2025 were "absolutely ridiculous and abysmal". 

"Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them," he wrote on social media.

But a CNN analysis later found at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had contributed to Project 2025, including at least six of his former cabinet secretaries. 

In 2018, the Heritage Foundation said Trump had embraced nearly two-thirds of its 2016 blueprint within a year of taking office.

And Trump's running mate, JD Vance, wrote a foreword to a forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts. 

The foreword, obtained by The Associated Press, says: "The Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill; it is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump."

The Harris campaign said Trump and Project 2025 had been working hand in glove. 

"Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real," it said.

"In fact, it should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding."

Mr Roberts said the project had "completed exactly what it set out to do: bringing together over 110 leading conservative organisations to create a unified conservative vision, motivated to devolve power from the unelected administrative state, and returning it to the people".

"Our collective efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels — federal, state, and local — will continue," Mr Roberts said.

ABC/AP