AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is out as President Trump takes his agenda to the American military. That's where we'll start this hour with NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Good morning, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Good morning.
RASCOE: So four-star Gen. Charles Q. Brown isn't the only military leader who got reassigned. And we should note this is not normal stuff for new administrations. Who else did President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth say will be removed?
LIASSON: Lisa Franchetti is also going to be removed. She is the chief of naval operations. They're also asking the JAGs - those are the top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force. They will be fired, too. Those are military lawyers whose job it is to make sure that the military conducts itself in accordance with the law and avoids committing war crimes.
But this is causing concern among Trump's critics, among national security experts who worry that Trump wants a military leadership that is loyal to him first and the Constitution second, and they are concerned that maybe he would ask the military to do things that the generals in his first term refused to do, like taking action by the military against civilian protesters.
Now, why were these people chosen? Charles Q. Brown is African American. Obviously, Lisa Franchetti is a woman. And Trump and Pete Hegseth have described non-white male hires as DEI hires and, therefore, somehow not competent. So now the Joint Chiefs of Staff is all white and male again, even though the military itself is over 40% African American and Hispanic people of color.
RASCOE: The Senate advanced a budget item that includes money for the Pentagon and Trump's border agenda. Republicans in the House are hoping to have something this week. But it's likely going to look very different from what came out of the Senate, right?
LIASSON: Yes, it is. And believe it or not, this is probably the only thing in Washington this week that was anything approaching normal. When Republicans have control of Congress, they try to pass big tax cuts. And in this case, they're trying to make Trump's first-term tax cuts permanent, and they also want to pass money for the border. But, as usual, they're having trouble making it all add up, figuring out how they're going to pay for it without exploding the deficit or without touching Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
RASCOE: OK, so the whole town is talking about the DOGE boys and the efforts by Elon Musk to slash the federal workforce. It's a subject now coming up at town halls across the country. What are you hearing about that in the politics of this slash-and-burn blitz?
LIASSON: Well, polling suggests that these cuts are very unpopular. Elon Musk is very unpopular. But Republicans say that the people who are turning out for their town hall meetings angry about this are mostly Democratic voters, and they say they are not worried about a backlash. So far, the cuts seem to have succeeded in demolishing the administrative state, giving Trump complete control of the executive branch, but they haven't saved much money. Actually, order of - orders of magnitude less than the tens of billions of dollars that Trump and Musk say have been saved.
And what we're waiting for is when they move beyond these first popular targets - foreign aid, undocumented immigrants, faceless bureaucrats. And when these cuts start affecting ordinary people and their Social Security checks or their preschool classes or more airline crashes, these kinds of town halls could continue, and we could be in a situation like we were in the first term, where people turned against Trump. And remember, 80% of federal workers live and work outside of the District of Columbia, including in a lot of red states.
RASCOE: U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer will be at the White House this week, meeting with the president. And Starmer says he'll stress the importance of Ukraine's sovereignty when he talks to Trump. Tell me about that.
LIASSON: Well, that's going to be a hard sell. This is the biggest, most profound change that Trump has wrought. One of the best - the biggest bipartisan agreements over the last eight years was that Ukraine's sovereignty was violated when Russia invaded. Ukraine deserves the support of the West. For generations, the foreign policy of the United States has been to stand with NATO against Russia, but now Trump is siding openly with Vladimir Putin.
He's called Zelenskyy a dictator. He's blamed him for starting the war. In fact, it was Russia's invasion that started it. He's said - parroted Kremlin talking points that somehow Zelenskyy is not a legitimate leader. And this is causing obviously tremendous concern among Europeans who think that Donald Trump wants to de facto pull out of NATO, and his defense secretary has suggested that the U.S. might start withdrawing troops from Europe. So when Starmer comes to the White House, he comes at a time when the whole Western Alliance is very much in question.
RASCOE: That's NPR's Mara Liasson. Mara, thank you so much.
LIASSON: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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