This is an adapted excerpt from the Oct. 4 episode of “Velshi.”
The current government shutdown is not your ordinary shutdown — and to understand why this one is unlike the 20 other times that the government has let funding lapse since 1976, we have to go back to our library and break out a copy of Project 2025.
In case you need a refresher, Project 2025 is the 900-page-plus blueprint for enacting an ultraconservative agenda. It was put together by the prominent conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, which has been compiling policy plans for Republican administrations since the 1980s.
Project 2025 was developed after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, in preparation for a return to the White House. But, it turns out, Project 2025 was extremely toxic to Trump’s re-election bid last year, so for much of the 2024 campaign, he tried really hard to distance himself from it.
Trump claimed he had nothing to do with the blueprint, but he has been connected to The Heritage Foundation for years — he even gave a keynote address at one of its events in 2022. And in his speech, he mentioned that the organization was preparing to “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
Several Trump allies, including former and current administration officials, also had a hand in writing or coordinating it. That list includes: Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s closest and most senior advisers; CIA Director John Ratcliffe; White House border czar Tom Homan; and, perhaps most importantly, Russell Vought, the current director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Vought is a self-described Christian nationalist and is considered the key architect of Project 2025. He also wrote the second chapter of the Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership,” which laid out strategies and legal theories — some more legitimate than others — about how to expand the power and influence of the executive office of the president.
In that chapter, Vought wrote: “The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch.” He added that doing so would require “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”
Vought advocated for major cuts to government spending, dismantling the independence of federal agencies, gutting the federal workforce and weaponizing federal funding to get states and institutions to submit to the White House’s demands. That’s the Trump 2.0 agenda in a nutshell. A government shutdown has given the White House cover to do all of the above.
That’s why they sound gleeful about it — to the point that Trump is now openly embracing Project 2025 and its involvement in his administration. On the morning of the second day of the shutdown, he posted on Truth Social:
I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent. I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.
As the head of the office that handles budgeting and managing personnel, during a shutdown, Vought gets to determine who’s an essential worker and who’s not. If the shutdown continues, he has been threatening to put into motion a large-scale —and likely illegal — reduction in force.
Vought has ordered the government to freeze $18 billion allocated for transit projects in New York, the home state of both Democratic congressional leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. He also said that $8 billion in green energy funding would be canceled in 16 states — all states that Kamala Harris carried in the 2024 presidential election.
The White House has been making it seem like it has no other choice in this situation. But in reality, there is no difference between the White House’s shutdown contingency plan and the agenda it’s already put into action.
As The New York Times’ editorial board put it in an op-ed, “In effect, Mr. Trump’s position is that Democrats must either support his plans to slash important public services, or else he will slash important public services.”
This shutdown is just the catalyst to speed things up. Making massive cuts to the budget, firing government employees en masse, maximizing political pain on the Democrats and shutting them out of negotiations — that has always been the plan, and much of it was written down right in Project 2025.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
