The Toxic Men Who Want to Control Federal Employees

What do a horrible boss, teen predator, and dog killer have in common?

Paul Dans, John McEntee and Kevin Roberts

Imagine being an employee so toxic that you were fired by a guy who boasted to his co-workers about beating a dog to death with a shovel. Now imagine that you are still less sketchy than the guy using the dating app he started to solicit 18 year old girls, offering them free trips to LA to “hook up.”

What do these people have in common? They are key figures in Trump’s effort to redesign the federal public sector. The guys who should trigger calls to HR want to become the HR system for government.

I am speaking of Paul Dans, the head of Project 2025 until he exited in July, John McEntee, who led the screening of Republican political appointees for both Trump and Project 2025, and Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation overseeing Project 2025.

Both Dans and McEntee are people who would not have held any positions of power in a normal presidential administration. McEntee was kicked out of the White House when he failed a security check due to frequent gambling. He had no obvious qualifications apart from being the guy who carried Trump’s bag and being unswervingly loyal to Trump. But when Trump brought him back to the White House, he ordered that McEntee also be put in charge of the enormously important Presidential Personnel Office.

One of Tump’s own appointees voiced concerns about McEntee, saying “Mr. President, I have never said no to anything you’ve asked me to do, but I am asking you to please reconsider this. I don’t think it is a good idea.” Trump grew apoplectic: “You people never fucking listen to me! You’re going to fucking do what I tell you to do.”

Paul Dans was another Trump loyalist, one who struggled to find a place in the administration despite volunteering on the Trump campaign. He had no relevant experience in government, and had failed to make partner in an unremarkable legal career. Despite his lack of qualifications, Dans had a different explanation, which was that he was one of a group of “people getting sandbagged because somebody thought that they were too ‘America First’-y or too Trumpist.” He finally broke into government with a position in HUD thanks to a Federalist Society connection with James Bacon, a college student working for Ben Carson. Bacon would later get recruited by McEntee to join him at the Presidential Personnel Office, and in turn brought Dans on board.

“Toxic and Abusive Behavior”

From the Presidential Personnel Office, Dans star finally rose. He was deployed to the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the career civil service. At OPM he championed Schedule F, the directive that would allow appointees like Dans to fire long-time career public servants. The Director of OPM resigned when she was told by McEntee that she now answered to Dans, who became the de facto leader of the agency.

Dans’ inexperience with government showed. Anytime he encountered a delay he assumed it was deliberate: “He questioned everything from the point of view that there was a conspiracy against him and the president,” said a fellow Republican appointee. He would lose his temper and “just throw bombs into senior staff meetings” making him an intimidating figure.

The pattern of abusive workplace behavior did not stop him from being handed the plum assignment of leading Project 2025. And when Dans exited in late July, Heritage praised him, with Kevin Roberts posting that Dans “built the project from scratch and bravely led this endeavor over the last two years.”

New reporting paints a darker story. Dans was fired for being a toxic colleague. He yelled and swore at co-workers, demeaning them. Colleagues said that Dans “always struggled to maintain collegiality” and described “toxic and abusive behavior” especially toward female colleagues. He failed to listen to repeated warnings, including from Roberts, to behave professionally. After an internal investigation, he was fired for what the Heritage Foundation now acknowledges was “professional misconduct and mistreatment of colleagues.”

The “Deputy President”

When the Trump administration ended, McEntee could have followed the route of other ex-Trumpers and joined a think tank. While he would eventually return to this world via Project 2025, his priorities were elsewhere. With backing from the tech billionaire and Trump/Vance supporter Peter Thiel, McEntee launched a dating app aimed at conservatives, called “The Right Stuff.”

In explaining his motivation for creating the app, McEntee wrote: “Washington, D.C. is a very liberal city, and I'm super conservative. How could I find people who had the same values as me? I found I couldn't really use the apps because it was tough to find someone on there with similar opinions…Personally, I have never and would never date anyone who doesn't share the same political views as me.” McEntee’s app received mixed reviews. Users complained about the Ashley Madisonesque lack of women on the site.

The few women that did sign up seemed to fall under his eye. One 18 year old on the app was messaged by McEntee, who is 34. She described her experience to Wired.

“It was very sexual from day one. He kept making comments about my age and how hot it would be to sleep with someone who was my age…he would say things like,‘I come and visit you and we hook up or whatever, you should bring one of your friends or you should take a couple of your friends’ and was like verifying that my friends were the same age as me as well.

Wired reported that McEntee’s texts “repeated mentions of specific sex acts even after the young woman said she was not comfortable with this.”

In pitching the app, McEntee wrote: “Some may believe this app is only for finding marriage, but it's not. It's designed for anyone on the right; from those who want long term commitment to young professionals who have moved to a new city and college kids just having fun.” Indeed.

Another 18 year-old college student received an Instagram message from the business account of McEntee’s dating app, first offering her free branded clothes. Again, McEntee offered to fly her out to California. In a rare show of bipartisanship he messaged “I think you’re a liberal” but “as long as you’ll be fun I don’t care.”

McEntee’s is a frequent TikTok poster, where he promotes his dating app by posing as a man on a date offering quippy MAGA takes to an unseen and unheard female, e.g.:

In one of these videos he asked: “Can someone track down the women Kamala Harris said are bleeding out in parking lots because Roe v. Wade was overturned? Don’t hold your breath.” Multiple women responded, posting stories of excruciating pain because of the end of abortion protections. According to the student, it was this video that caused her to go public about her experience with McEntee, and she has said that several other women have contacted her to say they had similar experiences with McEntee.

You might think that what McEntee does in his private time is his own business. Indeed, it is literally it is his own business he is using to solicit teenagers. But as with Dans, McEntee’s behavior echoed actions he took at the White House. While there is no reporting that McEntee propositioned those he recruited, colleagues observed a pattern of McEntee picking “the most beautiful 21-year-old girls you could find, and guys who would be absolutely no threat to Johnny in going after those girls…It was the Rockettes and the Dungeons & Dragons group.” (One had been an actual Rockette. Others were Instagram influencers).

Before you feel too bad for the Dungeons and Dragons group of men, note that working for McEntee was a platform to bigger and better things. Troup Hemenway and James Bacon were college students when working with McEntee. Dans brought them and another McEntee aide, Spencer Chretien, to help run Project 2025. No word on how many of the women that McEntee recruited landed plum jobs at Heritage.

The head of the Office of Presidential Personnel is not a Cabinet position, or a household name, but it is very important lever to control who works in government. McEntee was described by some as “the deputy president.” Colleagues compared his office to “the East German Stasi or even the Gestapo—always on the lookout for traitors within.”

Chaos is a ladder, as the saying goes, and McEntee’s star rose even higher in the chaotic months between Trump losing the election and leaving office. The White House liaisons he appointed to agencies were often unqualified extremists. The 25 year-old liaison at DHS berated the Secretary Chad Wolf for not being sufficiently loyal and threatened staff. One DHS official said: “I was legitimately worried he was going to come and kill us.” The same official was then moved to the Department of Defense, where he boasted he would he would fire the Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. McEntee fulfilled that promise, preparing a memo accusing Esper and other senior officials there for not being sufficiently loyal to Trump. Esper was fired.

The Dog Killer in Charge

Overseeing all of this is the Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. And Roberts has his own problems: multiple former colleagues said he had boasted about killing a neighbor’s dog with a shovel. The timing is bad, of course, since a key policy message of Trump and JD Vance (who wrote the foreword for Robert’s new book), is that that it is immigrants are killing beloved pets. Instead, it seems to be the person in charge of the governing blueprint that Trump keeps trying to distance himself from.

While Roberts deserves some credit for firing Dans, the anonymous Heritage leaks disparaging Dans appear to have come after he demanded a $3.1 million severance package, which Heritage rebuffed. At the same time, Heritage has nothing to say about their other Project 2025 employee, McEntee. While it might denounce toxic behavior in their workplace, predatory behavior by their employees is fine.

Dans is a person that Heritage would not employ because of his toxic behavior. But they think his ideas are appropriate for massively restructuring the federal personnel system so that people like Dans and McEntee can fire whoever they want. McEntee is not someone you would want anywhere near younger women. But he is the person that both Trump and Heritage put in charge of recruiting the next generation of appointees.

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Maybe you think my describing the personal characteristics of these guys is an unnecessary ad hominem attack unrelated to their policies. After all, proposals like Schedule F are already unsupported by evidence, and are unpopular. Why bother? But their personal characteristics reflect their management practices, and changing how federal workers are managed is their main policy contribution. We should take seriously concerns about how they would use the power they seek.

I want you to think through how McEntee, Roberts or Dans, or the type of people they are trying to hire, would manage federal employees if given the power to fire them. Much like Trump, these are not people you would hire in your place of work, or even trust to dog sit. Why would you let them gut the capacity of the federal government?

One chemist with the Food and Drug Administration put it like this:

I fear that we’ll be forced to give politically motivated findings rather than scientific findings – people need their jobs, people need their paychecks. I can see this happening. I’m told: ‘Here’s this product. It was manufactured by Company X, which is a big supporter of the president. Whatever you find, let me see your findings first before you send them or publicize them. Let’s make sure that everything is looking good for Company X.’…We need people in place based on merit and professionalism, not on the political situation. Or else this can cost lives.

Trump has made the purging of the public sector a central theme in his election. Part of the thing that he, Dans, Roberts and McEntee hold in common is an inability to understand the government they seek to lead. They throw temper tantrums when they face procedural delays or pushback. They are so certain of themselves, they believe that the rules do not apply to them, and that experts are there to be ignored. Robert Shea, a former Bush official, explains the problem of the Schedule F approach. Getting frank advice from civil servants stops political appointees from making mistakes:

They told me when what I wanted to do was stupid. They advised me on whether it was legal or not. But they also bent over backward to help me find better ways to do what we wanted to accomplish.

By contrast, implementing the vision of Trump would create “an army of suckups” says Shea. If you were a federal employee who counseled that the actions that appointees like McEntee were “proposing was illegal, impractical [or] unwise, they could brand you as disloyal and terminate you.”

And if Trump returns to office that is exactly what we will get. A group of toxic, abusive, and entitled men who don’t know what they are doing will be empowered to rid the federal government of the people that do.