On MSNBC's Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone discusses what Project 2025 reveals about the shutdown
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From the October 3, 2025, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): Angelo, first, take me inside your analysis of this question hanging in the air: whether the shutdown is a pretext for firings or whether it is the talk of firing hundreds of thousands of people with lives and families and car loans and student loans and jobs is just collateral as part of a negotiating tactic.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): I mean, one -- there's two things that I would look to to figure out what the true intention here is. Obviously, Project 2025. They're very clear about the amount of federal employees they intended to terminate, fire, and lay off. And we're not even halfway to the number that they put together in Project 2025. They've so far gotten rid of about 200,000.
But I think there's something more revealing, which is that if you look at next year's budget -- which, of course, that's not even really even being talked about right now, right? They're not even trying to pass a budget, but they still put together some version of a document. And if you look at what the Trump administration put together, assuming Congress as a Republican-controlled Congress would have passed it, they were talking about removing another 114,000 federal employees independent of the shutdown. That is if they got their ideal scenario, if they got their Christmas tree budget, it would still reduce the federal employee numbers by 114,000. So, this notion that somehow they're thinking about laying off employees or being forced to because of this position of the shutdown is nonsense. That's always the intention.
I think the only thing that the shutdown does that I think is sort of being lost -- and this is the part that I find especially sick about it -- is that Russell Vought was very clear that part of the strategy in the first year is to traumatize as many federal workers as possible, to truly make them feel traumatized. The ones that you can't get rid of, you make them feel traumatized so that they either leave, or that they eventually become a lot easier to maneuver and move or push out. And this is a part of that process, this idea that you're going to get fired, you better get -- it's torture. It's traumatizing. And that's a series of what they've been doing to bring people under heel, to make them soften. You know, it's like tenderizing meat. And that's the psychology of all this that's especially, I think, unsettling. But no, this is nonsense. They were going to get rid of as many people as they possibly could independent of the shutdown because they put their ideal right on paper.