MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi said in a weekend broadcast that the Biden administration’s successor, President Donald Trump, has already moved to implement many of the recommendations in the Heritage Foundation–led Project 2025 blueprint and warned that further actions modeled on the plan may be coming.
Velshi noted that Project 2025 is a roughly 900-page policy playbook produced by conservative think tanks and interest groups and that "many of the authors who contributed" to the document are now leading the federal departments and agencies they wrote about. He said those contributors must feel "their time was worth it," arguing that the administration has "rammed through many of their ideas."
Velshi cited, as examples of proposals appearing "straight from these pages," the dismantling of the Department of Education and what he described as the White House's "war on climate research." He said the pace of implementation has amounted to what he called a "wildly successful first eight months for the conservative interest groups and think tanks that joined up to write Project 2025." "And by the way, we're not done," Velshi added.
The anchor also pointed to a forthcoming Heritage Foundation book that, he said, will take on the Constitution. He closed his segment with the rhetorical question, "What could possibly go wrong?"
Project 2025 was produced as a comprehensive set of recommendations for reshaping the federal government along conservative lines. During the 2024 campaign,then-candidate Trump sought to distance himself from the plan; Velshi's segment contends the administration has nevertheless advanced a number of its policy prescriptions by placing plan authors in key agency positions.
Observers have noted the influence of outside policy shops on administrations historically, and Velshi framed Project 2025 as an example of organized, ideologically aligned groups translating long-term planning into governance. The segment did not provide a detailed inventory of each policy implementation tied to specific pages of the blueprint, but Velshi emphasized the pattern of personnel and policy overlap between the plan's authors and the executive branch.
Representatives of the Heritage Foundation and administration officials did not appear in the segment. Coverage of Project 2025 has been a focal point in debates about the role of conservative think tanks in shaping government action and the degree to which campaign rhetoric aligns with governing priorities.
Velshi's comments add to ongoing discussions about the reach of Project 2025 and the trajectory of the current administration's policy agenda. The anchor's warning that the effort is not finished underscores concerns among critics who say that a coordinated set of policy proposals, once translated into executive action and leadership appointments, can produce rapid institutional change.
Reporting on Project 2025 will likely continue as researchers, journalists and policymakers seek to trace which elements of the blueprint have been implemented, who within the federal government authored or is advancing those elements, and how future publications from conservative groups may influence the next phases of the administration's agenda.