NEW YORK —The director of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 vision for a complete overhaul of the federal government stepped down Tuesday after facing pressure from Donald Trump’s campaign.

Paul Dans’ exit comes after the project “completed exactly what it set out to do: bringing together over 110 leading conservative organizations to create a unified conservative vision, motivated to devolve power from the unelected administrative state, and returning it to the people,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said in a statement.

Democrats for the past several months have made Project 2025 a key election-year cudgel, pointing to the ultraconservative policy blueprint as a glimpse into how extreme another Trump administration could be.

The nearly 1,000-page handbook lays out changes in the federal government, including altering personnel rules to ensure government workers are more loyal to the president.

Trump has repeatedly disavowed the document, saying on social media he hasn’t read it and doesn’t know anything about it. At a rally in Michigan earlier this month, he said Project 2025 was written by people on the “severe right” and some of the things in it are “seriously extreme.”

“President Trump’s campaign has 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,” Trump campaign advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said in a statement.

“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.”

But Ohio Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, wrote a foreword to a forthcoming book by Roberts in which he lauds the Heritage Foundation’s work. A copy of the foreword was obtained byThe Associated Press.

“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,” wrote Vance.

Quoting Roberts elsewhere in the book, Vance writes: “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”

The Heritage Foundation said Dans left voluntarily and it was not under pressure from the Trump campaign. Dans didn’t immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. For months Trump’s campaign has warned outside groups, and Heritage in particular, that they do not speak for the former president.

Project 2025’s website will remain live and the group will continue vetting resumes for its nearly 20,000-person database of potential officials eager to execute its vision for government, the Heritage Foundation said Tuesday.

The group said Dans will leave the Heritage Foundation in August and Roberts will now run Project 2025 operations.