On MS NOW, Media Matters' Angelo Carusone explains how DOGE created “a veneer” to push the Project 2025 agenda
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From the January 11, 2026, edition of MS NOW's Velshi
ALI VELSHI (HOST): Angelo, is it a failure in the eyes of Russell Vought and the Heritage Foundation, the people who really believe that we shouldn't be spending money on these things, that if you stop giving people SNAP and you stop giving people benefits, they'll pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get a job?
ANGELO CARUSONE (PRESIDENT, MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA): No, it wasn't a failure in their minds because in a few ways — one, Russell, any of the vestiges that were left in DOGE were moved into right directly under Russell Vought. But in broad terms, you know, they had an actual agenda and a plan with Project 2025 and what DOGE basically did was sort of break the inertia, speed these things up, normalize them, make them more acceptable. So, for example, we left 65 international bodies over the last week, That is directly out of Project 2025. That should be gigantic news, right? But DOGE made that such a sort of this random hodgepodge common practice, it normalized it. It made it less splashy that as they start to implement more of the specifics of Project 2025, it sort of loses that newsworthy punch because it's old news. DOGE has already been there and done that. So Russell Vought is not unhappy about it. You know, Heritage Foundation is not unhappy about it because it created a bit of a veneer, some cover, some camouflage cover for them to continue to drive through a lot of the minutiae that is within Project 2025. And that's the long tail. When we talk about all the consequences, the costs — the costs are almost impossible to assess right now because they're still doing a lot of the things on the back of what DOGE paved the way for, and estimating those costs is going to take years because they have a long tail.