JOHN YANG: Tonight on PBS News Weekend, shake up at the Pentagon.

What the potential consequences are for the military and the nation.

Then which parts of the Project 2025 blueprint is the Trump administration already implementing and how they could touch Americans lives.

And we explore how generational trauma affects African American women.

INGER BURNETT-ZEIGLER: It's important to recognize the ways that stigma related to having a mental health condition as well as participating in treatment might be a barrier to one engaging and helping to normalize some of those activity.

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: Good evening.

I'm John Yang.

President Trump's shakeup of Washington reached the Pentagon as he fired several top military leaders, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the admiral leading the Navy.

Last night, Mr. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said they were dismissing Air Force General C. Q.

Brown as the country's senior military officer, Admiral Lisa Franketti, the first woman to lead the Navy, General James Slife, the vice chair of the Air Force, as well as the top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force.

The president has selected retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan Kaine to be the new Joint Chiefs chairman.

That job requires Senate confirmation.

Mr. Trump has spoken highly of Caine since meeting him in Iraq during his first term, Eric Edelman has served in several senior positions in the State and Defense Departments under both Republican and Democratic presidents.

He's now at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Mr. Edelman, how unusual is this, a new president coming in his first month, getting rid of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and a bunch of other leaders?

ERIC EDELMAN, Former Undersecretary of Defense For Policy: It's unprecedented, John, as far as I'm aware, we've had presidents relieve other senior commanders of positions.

Of course, President Truman relieved General MacArthur during the Korean War.

President Obama relieved General Stan McChrystal.

But that was for cause and in this instance, no cause has been given.

So it's really unprecedented as far as I can see.

We've had previous presidents who wanted to put their own chairman in.

President Kennedy, for instance, wanted to have Max Taylor become chairman, but he waited until General Lyman Lennitzer, who was the chairman in those days, complete his term before replacing him.

JOHN YANG: What do you think the effect is going to be on the military of this?

Not only the changing of the command, but also the message that President Trump appears to be sending?

ERIC EDELMAN: Well, overall, I think, you know, this is going to be very disruptive.

Along with the exercise that Secretary Hegseth announced for 8 percent either cuts or reallocation of funds, I think people are still very uncertain about that.

The firings that have been announced and the appearance that what the president's looking for is personal loyalty rather than institutional loyalty that, you know, all of the senior military officers have undertaken as a result of their oaths when they took their positions.

They swear an oath to the Constitution, not to an individual president, although they clearly understand that they are under civilian control.

JOHN YANG: What can you tell us about Dan Caine, the man that President Trump wants as the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs?

ERIC EDELMAN: I don't know General Caine.

I know General Brown reasonably well.

I really can't comment on General Caine other than to say he's had an honorable and distinguished career in the military as well.

But he is not a four star general.

He retired as a three star.

And under the Goldwater Nichols statute, the chairmanship traditionally and by law has been a four star who was either vice chairman, a service chief, or one of the combatant commanders under the Unified Command Plan.

JOHN YANG: The, the top lawyers of the three services were also dismissed, the Judge Advocate Generals, or JAGs, as they're known.

During his confirmation hearings, Hegseth talked about what he didn't like about some military lawyers.

Let's take a listen to what he had to say.

PETE HEGSETH, Secretary of Defense: It would be a JAG officer who puts his or her own priorities in front of the war fighters, their promotions, their medals in front of having the backs that those are, making the tough calls on the front lines.

JOHN YANG: What's he talking about there?

ERIC EDELMAN: It's hard to know specifically what he's talking about, but he may be talking about some of the court martials for war crimes that took place during the Trump first term, which the president interceded in and pardoned the people who were involved.

You know, I think that's a dangerous, actually precedent, dangerous attitude.

I mean, the JAGs are there essentially to make sure that orders are followed, that orders conform to the laws of armed conflict, to Title 10, the U.S. code that outlines the responsibilities of the Department of Defense and the military, the Constitution and whatever international obligations the United States has under treaties.

And so, you know, I fear that what is happening here is that they are looking for JAGs who will essentially commit to validate and adjudicate any order coming out of the White House as a lawful order.

JOHN YANG: Talk a little bit more about that.

What are the dangers?

What are the possible consequences of that?

ERIC EDELMAN: Well, you know, during the campaign in 2016, President Trump said that he might order the military torture people who are captured, terrorists captured on the battlefield.

That is a war crime.

That is illegal under U.S. statutes, and it would be an unlawful order.

And if there are no JAGs to impose that interpretation and make it clear that is not lawful, the president might be able to force military officers into doing things that they know are not correct, not right.

JOHN YANG: Former Pentagon official Eric Edelman, thank you very much.

ERIC EDELMAN: Thanks for having me, John.

JOHN YANG: In tonight's other news, President Trump spoke at the final day of the Conservative Political Action Conference, known as CPAC.

Mr. Trump touted his administration's achievements, including what he said is a deal with Ukraine that will end the war and repay the United States the money it spent on the war effort.

DONALD TRUMP, U.S. President: I'm dealing with President Zelenskyy, I'm dealing with President Putin.

I'm trying to get the money back that or secured, because, you know, Europe has given $100 billion, the United States has given $350 billion.

So we're asking for rare earth and oil, anything we can get.

JOHN YANG: Mr. Trump also praised the work of the DOGE team and said it's already found billions of dollars in wasteful spending.

New FBI Director Kash Patel is quickly making good on his pledge to shift agents away from the Washington, D.C. Area.

1,500 employees are expected to be reassigned to FBI offices around the country.

Patel told senior administration officials about his plan on Friday after being sworn in.

Patel has long talked about wanting to shrink the bureau's presence in Washington and focus more on fighting crime across the country.

In the Middle East, Hamas released the last six living hostages who were promised in the first phase of the ceasefire with Israel.

Four of the hostages had been taken in the October 7 Hamas attacks.

Families cheered the release.

Freed hostage Omer Shamtov said he had dreamt of this moment.

Two other hostages released today had been held by Hamas for about a decade, ever since they crossed into Gaza on their own.

Their families said they suffered from mental health issues.

As part of the ceasefire agreement, Israel was to release more than 600 Palestinian prisoners, but that exchange has been delayed without explanation.

Tensions mounted this week when Hamas handed over the wrong body for Shiri Bibas, an Israeli mother abducted with her two young sons.

On Friday, Hamas handed over another set of remains and Israel has now confirmed that they are hers.

Pope Francis is in critical condition after suffering a long asthmatic respiratory crisis.

The Vatican said the 88-year-old was in more pain today and had to be given supplemental oxygen and blood transfusions.

The pontiff entered the hospital about a week ago with bronchitis and then developed pneumonia.

Doctors say Pope Francis is not out of danger and faces the risk of developing sepsis.

Outside the hospital, members of the church and the faithful have held prayer vigils.

All his public engagements have been canceled, including his appearance at the weekly Angelus Prayer.

The West Texas measles outbreak is getting worse.

There are now 90 confirmed cases, according to the state's health department, with at least 16 people hospitalized.

Neighboring New Mexico is reporting nine cases, although there's no known tie between the two outbreaks.

The highly contagious respiratory virus can stay in the air for about two hours, making it highly likely that unvaccinated people who are exposed to it will get it.

And in a city in southern Sudan, a cholera outbreak has killed 60 people over the past three days and sickened 1,300 others.

The outbreak is being blamed on contaminated drinking water after attacks by a paramilitary group knocked out the city's water supply.

That paramilitary group has been fighting the country's military for nearly two years.

Doctors Without Borders said its treatment center is overwhelmed and that the situation is about to get out of control.

Still to come on PBS News weekend, the Project 2025 policies that the Trump administration is already implementing and the history of generational trauma in the black community.

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: In the first month of his second term, President Trump has reshaped the government with a flurry of executive orders.

As William Brangham reports, many of them echo the language of a policy blueprint he once disavowed.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: During the heat of the presidential race, the 900-page Project 2025 became a rallying cry for Democrats and a focal point for their warnings about a second Trump term.

It was published by the Conservative Heritage Foundation, and it outlined plans to reshape the federal government, expand presidential power and enact right leaning social policies.

In polls, it proved widely unpopular with voters, and then candidate Trump distanced himself from it, calling parts of it ridiculous and abysmal.

DONALD TRUMP: I have nothing to do with Project 2025 that's out there.

I haven't read it.

I don't want to read it purposely.

I'm not going to read it.

WILIAM BRANGHAM: But a recent analysis by POLITICO found dozens of instances where President Trump's executive actions have closely aligned with Project 2025.

Megan Messerly is a White House reporter for POLITICO and co-authored the piece.

Megan, so good to have you on the program.

Let's start with a big picture overview here.

What, what policy aspects of the second Trump administration most dovetail with Project 2025?

According to your reporting.

MEGAN MESSERLY, POLITICO: we found significant overlap on social issues, on immigration, on government staffing, energy, foreign affairs, the economy.

But really the biggest category that we saw was this sort of social issues category, you know, as President Trump has really taken this aggressive posture on culture war issues in the early weeks of his presidency.

So I'm thinking about policies like ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs, using the Civil Rights Act to remove gender ideology and critical race theory from schools, and also ending government efforts to fight misinformation and disinformation.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: And again, these were all things that Donald Trump promised that he would do what he could to eradicate when he got into office.

On those DEI examples, are there some examples you can cite that illustrate the connection between the two?

MEGAN MESSERLY: Right.

So I think a really clear One is Project 2025 calls for deleting the term sexual orientation, gender identity, diversity, equity, inclusion for really every federal rule, every agency regulation, contract, grant that exists.

And one of the president's early executive orders similarly called for terminating DEI mandates, policies, programs under whatever name they appear.

Another one that jumps out to me, Project 2025 really asserts that DEI has become this vehicle for what it calls unlawful discrimination in federal agencies.

And we saw a corresponding executive order saying that federal hiring should not be based on race under what it describes as sort of the guise is the word it uses the guise of equity.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Last week, as you know, a federal judge blocked this executive order that aims to restrict gender transition care for young people.

What did Project 2025 say specifically about that issue?

MEGAN MESSERLY: Yes, it really talks quite a bit about gender identity.

So one of the big things it talks about is, you know, rescinding health care protections for sexual orientation gender identity, which were issued by the Biden administration.

And it uses this language to, you know, quote, protect minors from gender mutilation.

We see that reflected very clearly in an executive order that really focuses on, you know, transgender health care, using that similar language of chemical and surgical mutilation.

Really paralleling Project 2025 there and also specifically referring to that Biden administration guidance on sexual orientation and gender identity and rolling it back.

And then another example that comes to mind is Project 2025 really calls for, you know, defining sex to mean biological sex recognized at birth.

And the president very early on issued an executive order, you know, stating it's U.S. policy to recognize, you know, two sexes, male and female.

And we've really seen that already have, you know, ripple effects across the federal government.

JOHN YANG: One major tenet of Project 2025 was shrinking the overall federal government.

In specific, it talked a lot about USAID.

I believe it was saying, scale USAID back to pre-pandemic levels.

But it seems as if the Trump administration is going even further in this instance.

MEGAN MESSERLY: The administration really is, you know, the Project 2025, the way it phrased it, was, you know, the pre pandemic budget levels being sort of a minimum.

And the Trump administration has really gone far beyond that in its sweeping cuts to USAID.

It really has been working to dismantle the agency almost entirely, though a lot of that is obviously wrapped up in litigation right now.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: That project also called for really addressing government staffing and employment overall.

Can you tell us about the parallels?

Again, we've seen so much of this with Elon Musk's DOGE operations firing workers across the federal government.

What are the parallels there?

MEGAN MESSERLY: Right.

So, I mean, Project 2025 really lays out this sort of sweeping blueprint for remaking the federal government and the bureaucracy.

Of course, Trump's budget director, Russ Vought, being sort of the architect of that plan.

He authored a whole chapter of Project 2025.

But two really clear things that I think we've seen come directly out of that blueprint and translate into executive order policy.

One of them is Project 2025 called for this hiring freeze for federal career officials that was implemented from the president by executive order.

There's also this so called Schedule F proposal, which basically just makes it easier to fire career civil servants.

And we saw the president put that into place as well.

And this really just underscores the president's vision and Russ Vought's vision really for reshaping the federal bureaucracy and for getting rid of what Vought often refers to as the fourth branch of government, which he refers to as sort of the administrative state, but the career workforce, the bureaucracy, the regulatory apparatus that he and President Trump believe have way too much power independent from the president.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: All right, Megan Messerly of POLITICO, thank you so much for sharing your reporting with us.

MEGAN MESSERLY: Thanks for having me.

JOHN YANG: Most people will experience a traumatic event at some time during their lives, losing a loved one, being the victim of an act of violence, or surviving a life threatening natural disaster.

But what happens when the impact of trauma is indirect, the result of experiences of family and caretakers?

As part of our series Race Matters, Ali Rogan sat down with Inger Burnett-Zeigler, author of "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen: the Emotional Lives of Black Women," to look at the effects of generational trauma.

ALI ROGIN: Dr. Burnett-Zeigler, thank you so much for joining us.

First of all, can you explain what is generational trauma?

DR. INGER BURNETT-ZEIGLER, Author, "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen": Generational trauma is trauma that's passed down from one generation to the next.

Some of the ways in which that can be experienced is individuals who have experienced a trauma leave an imprint of that trauma experience on their genes that can be passed down to future generations, making them more vulnerable to mental health challenges.

That trauma experience can be passed down through the behaviors of individuals who have experienced the trauma, particularly if that trauma has been unidentified and not resolved, whereby some of the symptoms of trauma, such as anger, irritability, depression, are experienced by future generations.

And generational trauma can also be passed down behaviorally, whereby individuals who have experienced a trauma might then either expose their children to other traumatic experiences through their intimate partners or through community violence.

Or those individuals are more likely to get into relationships or be in societal circumstances where there's more poverty and they have more exposure to violence themselves.

One common way that I've seen generational trauma show up in the patients that I've worked with individual therapy is I might be working with a woman who has been exposed to their mother, for example, being the victim of intimate partner violence.

In that relationship, they may have also been the victim of childhood abuse and neglect.

Because of the trauma that person has experienced firsthand there's more of an urgency to leave that home environment to get to a place of safety.

But by leaving home as a teenager, they're more vulnerable to themselves being in an impoverished environment and more vulnerable to be entering into an unhealthy relationship themselves.

And I see that often pan out where the individual leaves the home early, move the home as a teenager.

They then get into a relationship where there's abuse, and the cycle then continues.

A child is born of that relationship, and the cycle of generational trauma continues in that root child's life.

ALI ROGIN: Many people in the United States experienced traumatic events, but Black women in the U.S. are more vulnerable to traumatic events and PTSD.

Why is that?

INGER BURNETT-ZEIGLER: Yeah.

So about 7 in 10 people in general will be exposed to a trauma at some point in their lifetime.

And those estimates for black women are about 8 in 10.

Black girls are more likely to experience childhood abuse and neglect, including sexual abuse and physical abuse.

And black women are more likely to experience intimate partner violence and other forms of sexual violence.

Across the trauma spectrum, which can include many things outside of sexual violence and intimate partner violence, black women are more vulnerable because of the social and economic conditions that many of us live including being more likely to live in poverty, where rates of community violence are higher.

Being more vulnerable to chronic stress, which is associated with experiences and exposures to trauma, and having less access to the healthcare system, whereby those individuals who have been exposed to a trauma are then more likely to develop PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder because they haven't gotten the necessary mental health care needs in order to reduce their likelihood of that progressing into a traumatic condition.

ALI ROGIN: There's also research that indicates black women are less likely to receive treatment even though they experience trauma and PTSD at higher levels?

What do communities of color, in particular black communities, need to know about how these sorts of traumas present themselves in order to spot the signs and access the care that they deserve and need?

INGER BURNETT-ZEIGLER: I think one barrier that's particularly salient in terms of individuals getting the necessary treatment for trauma is recognizing when they've been exposed to a traumatic event.

So when we talk about trauma, it could be childhood abuse, it could be intimate partner violence, it could be community violence, but it could also be dealing with a significant health condition that has led one to confront a life threatening circumstance.

It could be the traumatic loss or separation of a loved one, like a parent, to incarceration or death.

It could be something like the COVID-19 pandemic, or experiences with direct racism and discrimination.

And so when we think about the broad spectrum of traumatic exposures, a lot of people who have been exposed to trauma don't even recognize that exposure in themselves.

And they don't recognize the way some of those symptoms show up.

They don't realize that anger, that irritability, the difficulty sleeping, the being anxious and nervous and on edge might be related to their history of trauma exposure.

So in terms of helping people get the care that they need, it's one identifying when individuals have been exposed to trauma, Understanding how some of those symptoms might be showing up in their daily lives, and then helping them to make a warm handoff to treatment providers.

Additionally, it's important to recognize the ways that stigma related to having a mental health condition, as well as participating in treatment, might be a barrier to one engaging and helping to normalize some of those activities.

ALI ROGIN: Dr. Inger Burnett-Zeigler, author and lecturer at Northwestern University, thank you so much for joining us.

INGER BURNETT-ZEIGLER: Thank you.

JOHN YANG: Now on our TikTok, the European Space Agency's recent discovery of the Einstein ring 590 million light years away.

All that and more is on the PBS News TikTok page.

And that is PBS News Weekend for this Saturday.

On Sunday, we'll look at the anxieties in Europe over the Trump administration's shifting positions on Russia and Ukraine.

I'm John Yang.

For all of my colleagues, thanks for joining us.

See you tomorrow.

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