"No joke. On Tuesday, President Donald J. Trump issued an extraordinary Executive Order that would give “the DOGE Administrator,” that is, Elon Musk, access to the voter files of every state for the purpose of purging millions of Americans from voter rolls as suspected “non-citizens.”
The Brennan Center for Justice of New York University’s School of Law warned, when Trump first suggested this plan, “the lie of non-citizen voting…could lead to the purging of hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls.” But Brennan wildly underestimated Trump’s and Musk’s ambitions. “Hundreds of thousands” could be purged in a single state.
Take Georgia. In a pre-dawn call today, Gerald Griggs, the President of the NAACP of Georgia, told me that the Georgia Secretary of State is about to remove 466,000 voters from the rolls, notably, four times Trump’s “victory” margin last year."
Shipments surged into Gaza after Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire,
even if they weren’t enough. Then Israel blocked the border again to
pressure Hamas in truce talks.
Outside
the Zadna Bakery in central Gaza one recent afternoon, the long lines
of people waiting for bread were threatening to dissolve into chaos at
any minute.
A security guard shouted at the crowds that pushed toward the bakery door to wait their turn. But no one was listening.
Just
a few steps away, scalpers were hawking loaves they had gotten earlier
that day for three times the original price. The sunset meal that breaks
Muslims’ daylong fast during the holy month of Ramadan was approaching
and across Gaza, bread, water, cooking gas and other basics were hard to
come by — once again.
Lines had not
been this desperate, nor markets this empty, since before the
Israel-Hamas cease-fire took hold on Jan. 19. The truce had allowed aid
to surge into Gaza for the first time after 15 months of conflict during
which residents received only a trickle of supplies.
But no aid has gotten in since March 2. That was the day Israel blocked all goods in a bid to pressure Hamas into accepting an extension of the current cease-fire stage
and releasing more hostages sooner, instead of moving to the next
phase, which would involve more challenging negotiations to permanently
end to the war.
Now, the aid cutoff,
exacerbated by panic buying and unscrupulous traders who gouge prices,
is driving prices to levels that few can afford. Shortages of fresh
vegetables and fruit and rising prices are forcing people to once again
fall back on canned food such as beans.
Though
the canned food provides calories, experts say, people — and children
in particular — need a diverse diet that includes fresh foods to stave
off malnutrition.
Image
A
family preparing food to break the daytime fast for the holy month of
Ramadan in the rubble of their destroyed home in Beit Lahiya, northern
Gaza, this month.
Image
Children filling water bottles in Gaza City last month.
For
the first six weeks of the cease-fire, aid workers and traders
delivered food for Gazans, many still weak from months of malnutrition.
Medical supplies for bombed-out hospitals, plastic pipes to restore
water supplies and fuel to power everything also began to flow in.
Data
from aid groups and the United Nations showed that children, pregnant
women and breastfeeding mothers were eating better. And more centers
started offering treatment for malnutrition, the United Nations said.
These were only small steps
toward relieving the devastation wrought by the war, which destroyed
more than half of Gaza’s buildings and put many of its two million
residents at risk of famine.
Even with
the sharp increase in aid after the truce began, Gaza health officials
reported that at least six newborn babies had died from hypothermia in
February for lack of warm clothes, blankets, shelter or medical care, a
figure cited by the United Nations. The reports could not be
independently verified.
Most hospitals remain only partly operational, if at all.
Aid groups, the United Nations and several Western
governments have urged Israel to allow shipments to resume, criticizing
its use of humanitarian relief as a bargaining chip in negotiations
and, in some cases, saying that the cutoff violates international law.
Instead, Israel is turning up the pressure.
Image
Tents for displaced Palestinians in northern Gaza last month.
Image
Refilling
gas bottles in Gaza City last month. With fuel blocked, it has been
tough to find gas for vehicles and cooking gas for food.
Last Sunday, it severed electricity
supplies to the territory — a move that shuttered most operations at a
water desalination plant and deprived about 600,000 people in central
Gaza of clean drinking water, according to the United Nations.
The Israeli energy minister has hinted that a water cutoff might be next.
Some wells are still functioning in central Gaza, aid officials say,
but they supply only brackish water, which poses long-term health risks
to those who drink it.
Israel had
already closed off all other sources of electricity that it used to
provide for Gaza, a measure that followed the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led
attack on Israel that began the war. That left essential services to run
on solar panels or generators, if power was available at all.
Now there is no fuel coming in for anything, including generators, ambulances or cars.
Israel argues that about 25,000 truckloads of aid that Gaza has received in recent weeks have given people sufficient food.
“There is no shortage of essential products in the strip whatsoever,” the Foreign Ministry said last week.
It repeated assertions that Hamas is taking over the aid entering Gaza
and that half the group’s budget in Gaza comes from exploiting aid
trucks.
Hamas has called the aid and electricity cutoffs “cheap and unacceptable blackmail.”
Gaza residents say that, for the moment, at least, they do have food, though often not enough.
But supplies that humanitarian groups amassed in the first six weeks of the cease-fire are already dwindling,
aid officials warn. That has already forced six bakeries in Gaza to
close and aid groups and community kitchens to reduce the food rations
they hand out.
The order to block aid also cut off Gaza’s access to commercial goods imported by traders.
In
the city of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, a street market was quiet
this week as the vendors’ stocks of fruits, vegetables, oil, sugar and
flour ran low. Vegetable sellers said the price of onions and carrots
had doubled, zucchini had nearly quadrupled and lemons cost nearly 10
times as much. Eggplants were hard to find and potatoes impossible.
Image
Food handouts in Beit Lahiya this week.
Image
A Palestinian man carrying food aid back to his family in northern Gaza last month.
As
a result, the sellers said, the few customers who still came bought
only a couple of vegetables, not by the kilogram as many once did.
Others had not had the means to buy anything for months.
Many Gazans lost their jobs and spent their savings to survive the war. When prices skyrocketed, they were left almost completely reliant on aid.
Yasmin
al-Attar, 38, and her husband, a driver, wandered from stall to stall
in the Deir al-Balah market, looking for the cheapest prices on a recent
day. They have seven children, a disabled sister and two aging parents
to support.
It
had been hard enough to afford the bare minimum of ingredients for
iftar, the meal that breaks the daily fast during Ramadan, Ms. al-Attar
said. But with fuel blocked, it was also getting tough to find fuel for
her husband’s car and for cooking.
“Just
three days ago, I felt a little relief because prices seemed
reasonable,” she said. Now, the same money would only be enough for a
much smaller quantity of vegetables.
“How can this possibly be enough for my big family?” she said.
That night, she said, they would probably make do with lentil soup, with no vegetables. And after that? Maybe more canned food.
Stall
owners and shoppers alike blamed large-scale traders for the shortages,
at least in part, saying they were hoarding supplies to push up prices
and maximize their profits. Any vegetables available at reasonable
prices were being snapped up and resold for much more, said Eissa
Fayyad, 32, a vegetable seller in Deir al-Balah.
It
did not help that people rushed out to buy more than they needed as
soon as they heard about the Israeli decision to blockade aid again,
said Khalil Reziq, 38, a police officer in the city of Khan Younis in
central Gaza whose division oversees markets and shops.
Image
Palestinians returning to their homes in northern Gaza last month.
Image
A Palestinian family setting up a tent beside their destroyed home in northern Gaza.
Hamas
police officers have warned businesses against price-gouging, vendors
and shoppers said. In some cases, Mr. Reziq said, his unit had
confiscated vendors’ goods and sold them for cheaper on the spot.
But such measures have done little to solve the underlying supply problem.
Beyond
the immediate challenge of supplying food, water, medical supplies and
tents to Gazans — many thousands of them still displaced — aid officials
said their inability to bring in supplies had set back longer-term
recovery efforts.
Some had been
distributing vegetable seeds and animal feed to farmers so Gaza could
start raising more of its own food, while others had been working on
rebuilding the water infrastructure and clearing debris and unexploded
ordnance.
None of it was easy, aid officials said, because Israel had restricted or barred items
including the heavy machinery required to repair infrastructure,
generators and more. Israel maintains that Palestinian militants could
use these items for military purposes.
For many Gazans now, the focus is back on survival.
“There’s
no bombing at the moment, but I still feel like I’m living in a war
with everything I’m going through,” said Nevine Siam, 38, who is
sheltering at her brother’s house with 30 other people.
She
said her sister’s entire family had been killed during the fighting.
Her children ask her to make Ramadan meals like the ones they remember
from before the war. But without an income, she can get nothing but
canned food in aid packages.
Where she is, she said, there are no celebrations and no festive decorations for the holy month.
“It feels as if the joy has been extinguished,” she said.
Image
A
tent in the rubble in northern Gaza last month. Hamas has called the
aid and electricity cutoffs “cheap and unacceptable blackmail.”
Maya S. has spent three years combing through “Severance” subreddits and is ready to reintegrate into society.
The “Severance” rabbit hole online is deep, with fans sharing theories about the meaning of the notes used for elevator dings, the true nature of the Lumon Industries office (is it actually a hospital?) and other arcana. Would any of them pay off in the Season 2 finale?
Yes,
as it turned out. In fact, one of the most popular predictions
prevailed in the explosive episode: The numbers Mark S. had been
diligently sorting on his terminal were indeed the building blocks of
his wife Gemma’s mind. With every file he completed, a new consciousness
— or “innie” — of hers was created to be tortured on the testing floor.
The
effort culminated in Cold Harbor, his 25th and final file, which Mark
S. completed as part of a greater scheme and collaboration between his
innie and outie to free her.
This
work, which relied on Mark S.’s gut instinct, was — as Harmony Cobel
confirmed — tied to “the four tempers,” a philosophy developed by the
Lumon founder Kier Eagan: woe, frolic, dread and malice. Hats off to the
“Severance” enthusiasts who saw that coming!
And
while the big Cold Harbor revelations will satiate devotees for a
moment, many other questions remain, and many more were introduced.
Yes,
we learned that the goats serve some sort of ceremonial and sacrificial
purpose. “This beast will be entombed with a cherished woman whose
spirit it must guide to Kier’s door,” the Lumon fixer Mr. Drummond tells
Lorne, of the Mammalians Nurturable department, as he hands her a bolt
gun to kill the animal.
But surely
this is just one element of a much bigger arc — one that may include the
riddle of the pompous author Ricken, Mark’s brother-in-law, who
“Severance” enthusiasts grew increasingly interested in as Season 2 unfolded. (Some of my co-workers even hoped the finale would be devoted entirely to him.)
Of the many goat-related theories
and clues attached to Ricken, my favorite is that his phone alarm,
which we hear during the Season 1 book reading, is a cowbell: the same
sound that was used in the Mammalians Nurturable room this season to get
everyone’s attention. Is Ricken a goat’s outie? (Also, is it too
conspiratorial to find a connection between cowbell and Cobel? When it
comes to “Severance,” almost anything goes.)
We
also learned that the comically creepy Jame Eagan, the Lumon chief
executive and Helena Eagan’s father, has “sired” many children “in the
shadows.” But who exactly? And why, in the finale, does he tell Helly R.
that he no longer loves Helena and that he, instead, sees the “fire of
Kier” in her?
After Mark and Gemma
break out of the testing floor, a breathless Dr. Mauer (reminder: he was
a doctor in the fertility clinic flashback) yells, “You’ll kill them
all!” Is he referring to all of the innies (including the dozens in her
head), all of the outies or some other group we haven’t even begun to
imagine?
Image
Other significant lingering questions that will require fans’ patience:
Where is Irving? Recall that in the penultimate episode, he was sent off on a train to presumably never return.
How
did Gemma become a prisoner of Lumon, and what was that she signed at
the fertility clinic? (There was a Lumon logo on her intake form.)
And
will she escape the premises after her brief, poignant reunion with
Mark ended with her being forsaken by her husband’s innie? Or will she
end up back on the testing floor?
How many other minds are being severed to bits down there?
Is full reintegration even possible?
Will Mr. Milchick, who did the very
most during the celebration of Mark S.’s Cold Harbor completion, sour
on Lumon after enduring a barrage of microaggressions from higher-ups
and outright aggressions from his subordinates? Or will he hold tighter
than ever to his post as manager?
Why exactly did the Lumon leaders call the completion of Cold Harbor one of the greatest moments in the history of Earth?
And
for all of their grandiose claims about eliminating pain from the human
experience, while inflicting unspeakable pain on the innies, will we
learn what they really want and whom they consider to be human?
As
for me, I can’t shake the feeling that Helly R., who risked everything
to help Mark S. free Gemma, would never have derailed his escape at the
last minute. She even seemed to have come to terms, begrudgingly, with
the fact that she and Helena are the same person, dispelling any notion Mark S. had of them finding happiness together in the end.
Was the Glasgow Block (again)
initiated? Was that actually Helena running hand in hand with Mark S.
into the inescapable bowels of the office? Or did Jame Eagan, no longer
seeing Kier in Helena, somehow replace or integrate her with Helly R.?
The good news is that Apple on Friday announced that “Severance” has been officially renewed
for a third season. The great news is that Ben Stiller, an executive
producer and frequent director, has assured fans that they won’t have to wait three more years for Season 3, as they did between the first two.
But please, try to enjoy both pieces of news equally.
t is hard to calculate all the good that Atul
Gawande has done in the world. After training as a surgeon at Harvard,
he taught medicine inside the hospital and in the classroom. A
contributor to The New Yorker since 1998, he has published widely on issues of public health. His 2007 article in the magazine and the book that emerged from it, “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right,” have been sources of clarity and truth in the debate over health-care costs. In 2014, he published “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End,”
a vivid, poetic, compassionate narrative that presents unforgettable
descriptions of the ways the body ages and our end-of-life choices.
Gawande’s
work on public health was influential in the Clinton and Obama
Administrations, and, starting in November, 2020, he served on President
Joe Biden’s COVID-19 Advisory Board. In July, 2021, Biden
nominated him as the assistant administrator for the Bureau of Global
Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where he worked
to limit disease outbreaks overseas. Gawande, who is fifty-nine,
resigned the position on the day of Donald Trump’s return to the
Presidency.
When we spoke recently for The New Yorker Radio Hour,
Gawande, usually a wry, high-spirited presence, was in a grave mood.
There were flashes of anger and despair in his voice. He was, after all,
watching Trump and Elon Musk dismantle, gleefully, a global health
agency that had only lately been for him a source of devotion and
inspiration. As a surgeon, Gawande had long been in a position to save
one life at a time. More recently, and all too briefly, he was part of a
vast collective responsible for untold good around the world. And now,
as he made plain, that collective has been deliberately cast into chaos,
even ruins. The cost in human lives is sure to be immense. Our
conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
President
Biden appointed you as the assistant administrator for global health at
U.S.A.I.D., a job that you’ve described as the greatest job in
medicine. You stepped down on Trump’s Inauguration Day, and he
immediately began targeting U.S.A.I.D. with an executive order that
halted all foreign aid. Did you know, or did you intuit, that Trump
would act the way he has?
I had no idea. In the previous
Trump Administration, they had embraced what they themselves called the
“normals.” They had a head of U.S.A.I.D. who was devoted to the idea of
development and soft power in the world. They had their own wrinkle on
it, which I didn’t disagree with. They called it “the journey to
self-reliance,” and they wanted to invest in Africa, in Asia, in Latin
America, to enable stronger economies, more capacity—and we weren’t
doing enough of that. I actually continued much of the work that had
occurred during that time.
Tell me a little bit about what you were in charge of and what good was being done in the world.
I
had twenty-five hundred people, between D.C. and sixty-five countries
around the world, working on advancing health and protecting Americans
from diseases and outbreaks abroad. The aim was to work with countries
to build their systems so that we protected global health security and
improved global outcomes—from reducing H.I.V./AIDS and other
infectious diseases like malaria and T.B., to strengthening primary
health-care systems, so that those countries would move on from
depending on aid from donors. In three years, we documented saving more
than 1.2 million lives after COVID alone.
Let’s pause on that. Your part of U.S.A.I.D. was responsible, demonstrably, for saving 1.2 million lives—from what?
So, COVID
was the first global reduction in life expectancy in seventy years, and
it disrupted the ability across the world to deliver basic health
services, which includes H.I.V./AIDS [medications], but also
included childhood immunizations, and managing diarrhea and pneumonia.
Part of my target was to reduce the percentage of deaths in any given
country that occur before the age of fifty. The teams would focus on the
top three to five killers. In some places, that would be H.I.V.; in
some places that would be T.B. Safe childbirth was a huge part of the
work. And immunizations: forty per cent of the gains in survival for
children under five in the past fifty years in the world came from
vaccines alone. So vaccines were a big part of the work as well.
What was the case against this kind of work? It just seems like an absolute good.
One
case is that it could have been more efficient, right? Americans
imagine that huge sums of money go to this work. Polls show that they
think that a quarter of our spending goes to foreign aid. In fact, on a
budget for our global health work that is less than half the budget of
the hospital where I did surgery here in Boston, we reached hundreds of
millions of people, with programs that saved lives by the millions.
That’s why I describe it as the best job in medicine that people have
never heard of. It is at a level of scale I could never imagine
experiencing. So the case against it—I woke up one day to find Elon Musk
tweeting that this was a criminal enterprise, that this was money
laundering, that this was corruption.
Where would he get this idea? Where does this mythology come from?
Well,
what’s hard to parse is: What is just willful ignorance? Not just
ignorance—it’s lying, right? For example, there’s a statistic that they
push that only ten per cent of U.S.A.I.D.’s dollars actually got to
recipients in the world. Now, this is a willful distortion of a
statistic that says that only ten per cent of U.S.A.I.D.’s funding went
to local organizations as opposed to multinational organizations and
others. There’s a legitimate criticism to be made that that percentage
should be higher, that more local organizations should get the funds. I
did a lot of work that raised those numbers considerably, got it to
thirty per cent, but that was not the debate they were having. They’re
claiming that the money’s not actually reaching people and that
corruption is taking it away, when, in fact, the reach—the ability to
get to enormous numbers of people—has been a best buy in health and in
humanitarian assistance for a long time.
Now the over-all
agency, as I understand it, had about ten thousand people working for
it. How many are working at U.S.A.I.D. now?
Actually, the
number was about thirteen thousand. And the over-all number now—it’s
hard to estimate because people are being turned on and off like a light
switch—
Turned on and off, meaning their computers are shut down?
Yeah,
and they’re being terminated and then getting unterminated—like, “Oops,
sorry, we let the Ebola team go.” You heard Elon Musk say something to
that effect in the Oval Office. “But we’ve brought them back, don’t
worry.” It’s a moving target, but this is what I’d say: more than eighty
per cent of the contracts have been terminated, representing the work
that is done by U.S.A.I.D. and the for-profit and not-for-profit
organizations they work with, like Catholic Relief Services and the
like. And more than eighty per cent of the staff has been put on
administrative leave, terminated, or dismissed in one way or the other.
So it’s been obliterated.
It
has been dismantled. It is dying. I mean, at this point, it’s six weeks
in. Twenty million people with H.I.V., for example—including five
hundred thousand children—who had received medicines that keep them
alive have now been cut off for six weeks.
A lot of people are going to die as a result of this. Am I wrong?
The
internal estimates are that more than a hundred and sixty thousand
people will die from malaria per year, from the abandonment of these
programs, if they’re not restored. We’re talking about twenty million
people dependent on H.I.V. medicines—and you have to calculate how many
you think will get back on, and how many will die in a year. But you’re
talking hundreds of thousands in Year One at a minimum. But then on
immunization side, you’re talking about more than a million estimated
deaths.
I’m
sorry, Atul. I have to stop my cool journalistic questioning and say:
This is nothing short of outrageous. How is it possible that this is
happening? Obviously, these facts are filtering up to Elon Musk, to
Donald Trump, and to the Administration at large. And they don’t care?
The
logic is to deny the reality, either because they simply don’t want to
believe it—that they’re so steeped in the idea that government officials
are corrupt and lazy and unable to deliver anything, and that a group
of young twentysomething engineers will fix it all—or they are
indifferent. And when Musk waves around the chainsaw—we are seeing what
surgery on the U.S. government with a chainsaw looks like at U.S.A.I.D.
And it’s just the beginning of the playbook. This was the soft target.
This is affecting people abroad—it’s tens of thousands of jobs at home,
so there’s harm here; there’s disease that will get here, etc. But this
was the easy target. Now it’s being brought to the N.I.H., to the
C.D.C., to critical parts of not only the health enterprise but other
important functions of government.
So the National
Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
and other such bureaucracies that do equal medical good will also get
slammed?
Are being slammed. So here’s the playbook: you take the Treasury’s payment system—DOGE
and Musk took over the information system for the Treasury and the
payments in the government; you take over the H.R. software, so you can
turn people’s badges and computer access on and off at will; you take
over the buildings—they cancelled the leases, so you don’t have
buildings. U.S.A.I.D.—the headquarters was given to the Customs and
Border Protection folks. And then you’ve got it all, right? And then
he’s got X, which feeds right into Fox News, and you’ve got control of
the media as well. It’s a brilliant playbook.
But from the
outside, at least, Atul, and maybe from your vantage point as well:
this looks like absolute chaos. I’ve been reading this week that staff
posted overseas are stranded, fired without a plane ticket home. From
the inside, what does it look like?
One example:
U.S.A.I.D. staff in the Congo had to flee for their lives and watch on
television as their own home was destroyed and their kids’ belongings
attacked. And then when they called for help and backup, they could not
get it. I spoke to staff involved in one woman’s case, a pregnant woman
in her third trimester, in a conflict zone. They have maternity leave
just like everybody else there. But because the contracts had been
turned off, they couldn’t get a flight out, and were not guaranteed safe
passage, and couldn’t get care for her complications, and ended up
having to get cared for locally without the setup to address her needs.
One person said to me, as she’s enduring these things, “My government is
attacking me. We ought to be ashamed. Our entire system of checks and
balances has failed us.”
What’s
been the reaction in these countries, in the governments, and among the
people? The sense of abandonment must be intense on all sides.
There are broadly three areas. The biggest part of U.S.A.I.D. is the FEMA
for disasters abroad. It’s called the Bureau for Humanitarian
Assistance, and they bring earthquake response; wildfire response;
response in conflicts, in famines. These are the people who suit up, and
get assistance, and stabilize places where things are going wrong.
The
Global Health Bureau, which I led, is the second-largest part of the
agency, and that does work around diseases and health threats, as well
as advancing health systems in low- and middle-income countries around
the world. There’s coöperation on solving global problems, like stopping
pandemics, and addressing measles outbreaks, and so on.
The third
is advancing countries’ economies, freedom, and democracy. John F.
Kennedy, when he formed U.S.A.I.D. in 1961, said that it was to counter
the adversaries of freedom and to provide compassionate support for the
development of the world. U.S.A.I.D. has kept Ukraine’s health system
going and gave vital support to keep their energy infrastructure going,
as Russia attacked it. In Haiti, this is the response team that has
sought to stabilize what’s become a gang-controlled part of the country.
Our health teams kept almost half of the primary health-care system for
the population going. So around the world: stopping fentanyl flow,
bringing in independent media. All of that has been wiped out
completely. And in many cases, the people behind that work—most of the
people we’re working with, local partners to keep these things going—are
now being attacked. Those partners are now being attacked, in country
after country.
What
you’re describing is both human compassion and, a phrase you used
earlier in our conversation, “soft power.” Describe what that is. Why is
it so important to the United States and to the world? What will
squandering it—what will destroying it—mean?
The tools of
foreign policy, as I’ve learned, are defense, diplomacy, and
development. And the development part is the soft power. We’re not
sending troops into Asia and Africa and Latin America. We’re sending
hundreds of thousands of civilians without uniforms, who are there to
represent the United States, and to pursue common goals together—whether
it’s stemming the tide of fentanyl coming across the border, addressing
climate disasters, protecting the world from disease. And that soft
power is a reflection of our values, what we stand for—our strong belief
in freedom, self-determination, and advancement of people’s economies;
bringing more stability and peace to the world. That is the fundamental
nature of soft power: that we are not—what Trump is currently trying to
create—a world of simply “Might makes right, and you do what we tell
you,” because that does not create stability. It creates chaos and
destruction.
An immoral universe in which everybody’s on their own.
That’s right. An amoral universe.
Who
is standing up, if anyone, in the Administration? What about Secretary
of State Marco Rubio, whom you mentioned. What’s his role in all of
this? Back in January, he issued a waiver to allow for lifesaving
services to continue. That doesn’t seem to have been at all effective.
It
hasn’t happened. He has issued a waiver that said that the subset of
work that is directly lifesaving—through humanitarian assistance,
disaster relief, and so on, and the health work that I used to lead—will
continue; we don’t want these lives to be lost. And yet it hasn’t been
implemented. It’s clear that he’s not in control of the mechanisms that
make these things happen. DOGE does not approve the payments going out, and has not approved the payments going out, to sustain that work.
The
federal courts have ruled that the freeze was likely illegal and
unconstitutional, and imposed a temporary restraining order saying that
it should not be implemented, that it had to be lifted—the payment
freeze. Instead, they doubled down. And Marco Rubio signed on to this,
tweeted about it earlier this week—that over eighty per cent of all
contracts have now been terminated. And the remaining ones—they have not
even made a significant dent in making back payments that are owed for
work done even before Trump was inaugurated.
There’s
always been skepticism, particularly on the right, about foreign aid. I
remember Jesse Helms, of North Carolina, would always rail about the
cost of foreign aid and how it was useless, in his view, in many senses.
I am sure that in your time in office, you must have dealt with
officials who were skeptical of the mission. What kind of complaints
were you getting from senators and congressmen and the like, even before
the Trump Administration took over in January?
It was a
minority. I’ll just start by saying: the support for foreign-aid work
has been recognized and supported by Republicans and Democrats for
decades. But there’s been a consistent—it was a minority—that had felt
that the U.S. shouldn’t be involved abroad. That’s part of an
isolationist view, that extending this work is just charity; it’s not in
U.S. interests and it’s not necessary for the protection of Americans.
The argument is that we should be spending it at home.
They’re
partly playing into the populist view that huge portions of the budget
are going abroad, when that’s not been the case. But it’s also
understandable that when people are suffering at home, when there are
significant needs here, it can be hard to make connections to why we
need to fight to stop problems abroad before they get here.
And yet we only recently endured the COVID epidemic, which by all accounts did not begin at home, and spread all over the world. Why was COVID not convincing as a manifestation of how a greater international role could help?
Certainly that didn’t convince anybody that that was able to be controlled abroad—
Because it wasn’t.
Because it wasn’t, right. And COVID
did drive a significant distrust in the public-health apparatus itself
because of the suffering that people endured through that entire
emergency. But I would say the larger picture is—every part of
government spending has its critics. One of the fascinating things about
the foreign-aid budget, which has been the least popular part of the
budget, is that U.S.A.I.D. was mostly never heard of. Now it has high
name recognition, and has majority support for continuing its programs,
whether it’s keeping energy infrastructure alive in Ukraine, stabilizing
conflicts—whether it’s Haiti or other parts of the world—to keep
refugees from swarming more borders, or the work of purely compassionate
humanitarian assistance and health aid that reduces the over-all death
rates from diseases that may yet harm us. So it’s been a significant
jump in support for this work, out of awareness now of what it is, and
how much less it turns out to cost.
So it took this disaster to raise awareness.
That’s human nature, right? Loss aversion. When you lose it is when you realize its value.
Atul,
there’s been a measles outbreak in West Texas and New Mexico, and
R.F.K., Jr.—who’s now leading the Department of Health and Human
Services—has advised some people, at least, to use cod-liver oil. We
have this multilayered catastrophe that you’ve been describing. Where
could the United States be, in a couple of years, from a health
perspective? What worries you the most?
Measles is a good
example. There’s actually now been a second death. We hadn’t had a
child death from measles in the United States in years. We are now back
up, globally, to more than a hundred thousand child deaths. I was on the
phone with officials at the World Health Organization—the U.S. had
chosen measles as a major area that it wanted to support. It provided
eighty per cent of the support in that area, and let other countries
take other components of W.H.O.’s work. So now, that money has been
pulled from measles programs around the world. And having a Secretary of
Health who has done more to undermine confidence in measles vaccines
than anybody in the world means that that’s a singular disease that can
be breaking out, and we’ll see many more child deaths that result from
that.
The over-all
picture, the deeper concern I have, is that as a country we’re
abandoning the idea that we can come together collectively with other
nations to do good in the world. People describe Trump as transactional,
but this is a predatory view of the world. It is one in which
you not only don’t want to participate in coöperation; you want to
destroy the coöperation. There is a deep desire to make the W.H.O.
ineffective in working with other nations; to make other U.N.
organizations ineffective in doing their work. They already struggled
with efficiency and being effective in certain domains, and yet they
continue to have been very important in global health emergencies,
responding and tracking outbreaks. . . .
We have a flu vaccine
because there are parts of the world where flu breaks out, like China,
that don’t share data with us. But they share it with the W.H.O., and
the result is that we have a flu vaccine that’s tuned to the diseases
coming our way by the fall. I don’t know how we’ll get a flu vaccine
this fall. Either we’ll get it because people are, under the table,
communicating with the W.H.O. to get the information, and the W.H.O is
going to share it, even though the U.S. is no longer paying, or we’re
going to work with other countries and be dependent on them for our flu
vaccine. This is not a good answer.
I
must ask you this, more generally: You’re watching a President of the
United States begin to side with Russia over Ukraine. You’re watching
the dismantlement of our foreign-aid budget, and both its compassion and
its effectiveness. Just the other day, we saw a Columbia University
graduate—you may agree with him, disagree with him on his politics, but
who has a green card—and ICE officers went to his apartment and
arrested him, and presumably will deport him. It’s an assault on the
First Amendment. You’re seeing universities being defunded—starting with
Columbia, but it’ll hardly be the last, etc. What in your view
motivates Donald Trump to behave in this way? What’s the vision that
pulls this all together?
What I see happening on the
health side is reflective of everything you just said. There is a
fundamental desire to remove and destroy independent sources of
knowledge, of power, of decision-making. So not only is U.S.A.I.D.
dismantled but there’s thousands of people fired—from the National
Institutes of Health, the C.D.C., the Food and Drug Administration—and a
fundamental restructuring of decision-making so that political judgment
drives decision-making over N.I.H. grants, which have been centralized
and pulled away from the individual institutes. So the discoveries that
lead to innovations in the world—that work has a political layer now.
F.D.A. approvals—now wanting a political review. C.D.C. guidance—now
wanting a political review. These organizations were all created by
Congress to be shielded from that, so that we could have a professional,
science-driven set of decisions, and not the political flavor of the
moment.
Donald Trump’s
preference, which he’s expressed in those actions and many others, is
that his whims, just like King Henry VIII’s, should count. King Henry
VIII remade an entire religion around who he wanted to marry. And this
is the kind of world that Trump is wanting to create—one of loyalty
trumping any other considerations. So the inspectors general who do
audits over the corruption that they seem to be so upset about—they’ve
been removed. Any independent judgment in society that would trump the
political whims of the leader. . . . The challenge is—and I think is the
source of hope for me—that a desire for chaos, for acceding to
destruction, for accepting subjugation, is not a stable equilibrium.
It’s not successful in delivering the goods for people, under any line
of thinking.
In the end, professionally organized
bureaucracies—that need to have political oversight, need to have some
controls in place, but a balance that allows decision-making to
happen—those have been a key engine of the prosperity of the country.
Their destruction will have repercussions that I think will make the
Administration very unpopular, and likely cause a backlash that balances
things out. I hope we get beyond getting to the status quo ante of a
stalemate between these two lines of thinking—one that advances the
world through incremental collective action that’s driven around checks
and balances as we advance the world ever forward, and one in which a
strongman can have his way and simply look for who he can dominate.
Right
now, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is the head of H.H.S. His targets include
not only vaccine manufacturers but the pharma industry writ large. But
he’s talked a lot, too, about unhealthy food in the American diet—to
some extent, he’s not wrong. Do you see any upside in his role in
pushing this so-called Make America Healthy Again idea?
Of
course there is good. I mean, we as a country have chronic illness that
is importantly tied to our nutritional habits, our exercise, and so on.
But for all our unhealthiness, we’ve also had an engine of health that
has enabled the top one per cent in America to have a ninety-year life
expectancy today. Our job is to enable that capacity for public health
and health-care delivery to get to everybody alive, I would argue, and certainly to get it to all Americans.
What’s
ignored is that half the country can’t afford having a primary-care
doctor and don’t have adequate public health in their communities. If
R.F.K., Jr., were taking that on, more power to him. Every indication
from his history is that this is an effort to highlight some important
things. But how much of it’s going to actually be evidence-driven? He’s
had some crazy theories about what’s going to advance chronic illness
and address health.
I’d
say the second thing is the utter incompetence in running things and
making things work. They’ve utterly destabilized the National Institutes
of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the F.D.A.
Explain that destabilization—what it looks like from inside and what effects it’ll have.
One small example: DOGE
has declared that all kinds of buildings are not necessary anymore.
That includes the headquarters of the Department of Health and Human
Services. They’re saying, “Oh, everybody has to show up for work now,
but you won’t have a building to work in anymore.”
No. 2 on the
list is F.D.A. specialized centers around the country. There’s a
laboratory in St. Louis where they have specialized equipment for
testing food and drugs for safety. And so that whole capability—to
insure that your foods and your medications are able to be tested for
whether they have contaminants, whether they are counterfeit—that’s a
basic part of good nutrition, good medicine, that could be pulled away.
Whether
it’s maintaining the building infrastructure, maintaining the staff who
are being purged sort of randomly left and right, or treating them not
like they’re slaves but actually bringing good work out of everybody, by
good management—that is what’s not happening.
I
have the feeling that you, even in a short time, loved being in the
federal government. What I hear in our conversation is a sense of
tragedy that is not only public but that is felt very intimately by you.
I did not expect that going into government would be as meaningful to me as it was. I went into government because it was the COVID
crisis and I was offered an opportunity to lead the international
component of the response. We got seven hundred million vaccines out to
the world. But what I found was a group of people who could achieve
scale like I’d never seen. It is mission-driven. None of these people
went into it for the money; it’s not like they’ve had any power—
I assume all of them could have made more money elsewhere.
Absolutely.
And many of them spent their lives as Foreign Service officers living
in difficult places in the world. I remember that Kyiv was under attack
about eight weeks after I was sworn in. I thought I was going to be
working on COVID, but this thing was erupting. First of all,
our health team, along with the rest of the mission and Embassy in Kyiv,
had to flee for safety. But within a week they were already saying, “We
have T.B. breaking out, we have potential polio cases. How are we going
to respond?” And my critical role was to say, “What’s going to kill
people the most? Right now, Russia has shut down the medical supply
chain, and so nearly a hundred per cent of the pharmacies just closed.
Two hundred and fifty thousand H.I.V. patients can’t get their meds. A
million heart patients can’t get their meds. Let’s get the pharmacies
open.” And, by the way, they’ve attacked the oxygen factories and put
the hospitals under cyberattack and their electronic systems aren’t
functioning.
And this
team, in four weeks, moved the entire hospital record system to the
cloud, allowing protection against cyberattacks; got oxygen systems back
online; and was able to get fifty per cent of the pharmacies open in
about a month, and ultimately got eighty per cent of the pharmacies
open. That is just incredible.
Yes, are there some people that I
had to deal with who were overly bureaucratic? Did I have to address
some people who were not performing? Absolutely. Did I have to drive
efficiency?
As in any work . . .
In every
place you have to do that. But this was America at its best, and I was
so proud to be part of that. And what frustrated me, in that job, was
that I had to speak for the U.S. government. I couldn’t write for you
during that time.
Believe me, I know!
I
couldn’t tell the story. I’ve got a book I’m working on now in which I
hope to be able to unpack all of this. It is, I think, a sad part of my
leadership, that I didn’t also get to communicate what we do—partly
because U.S.A.I.D. is restricted, in certain ways, from telling its
story within the U.S. borders.
If
you had the opportunity to tell Elon Musk and Donald Trump what you’ve
been telling me for the past hour, or if they read a long report from
you about lives saved, good works done, the benefits of soft power to
the United States and to the world and so on—do you think it would have
any effect at all?
Zero. There’s a different world view
at play here. It is that power is what matters, not impact; not the
over-all maximum good that you can do. And having power—wielding it in
ways that can dominate the weak and partner with your friends—is the
mode of existence. (When I say “partner with friends,” I mean partner
with people like Putin who think the same way that you do.) It’s two
entirely different world views.
But this is not just an
event. This is not just something that happened. This is a process, and
its absence will make things worse and worse and have repercussions,
including the loss of many, many, maybe countless, lives. Is it
irreparable? Is this damage done and done forever?
This
damage has created effects that will be forever. Let’s say they turned
everything back on again, and said, “Whoops, I’m sorry.” I had a
discussion with a minister of health just today, and he said, “I’ve
never been treated so much like a second-class human being.” He was so
grateful for what America did. “And for decades, America was there. I
never imagined America could be indifferent, could simply abandon people
in the midst of treatments, in the midst of clinical trials, in the
midst of partnership—and not even talk to me, not even have a discussion
so that we could plan together: O.K., you are going to have big cuts to
make. We will work together and figure out how to solve it.”
That’s
not what happened. He will never trust the U.S. again. We are entering a
different state of relations. We are seeing lots of other countries
stand up around the world—our friends, Canada, Mexico. But African
countries, too, Europe. Everybody’s taking on the lesson that America
cannot be trusted. That has enormous costs.
It’s tragic and outrageous, no?
That is beautifully put. What I say is—I’m a little stronger. It’s shameful and evil. ♦
Sean Baker came equipped with extra speeches, and that was wise: On the night of the Oscars, he wound up onstage four times to receive four statues.
That’s not just unusual. It’s almost unheard-of.
Baker’s film “Anora,”
about a sex worker in the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn who
marries the son of a Russian oligarch and then watches it all go
sideways, earned five Oscars overall on Sunday. One went to its ingénue star, Mikey Madison, and four to Baker: best director, best original screenplay, best editing and best picture.
By
taking home four Oscars on a single night, Baker joins just one other
luminary: none other than Walt Disney, who pulled off the same trick in
1954. That year, Disney won best documentary feature (“The Living
Desert”), best documentary short subject (“The Alaskan Eskimo”), best
cartoon short subject (“Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom”) and best
two-reel short subject (“Bear Country”).
But
even Disney didn’t pull off Baker’s feat: earning four Oscars on one
night for the same movie. Doing so requires wearing a lot of hats, and
Baker, who started his career in ultra-low-budget independent films, has
a deep hatrack.
Movies
are a collaborative art, and even the most hands-on filmmakers work
with a team of artists and craftspeople. But writing, directing, editing
and producing a film leaves a distinctive personal mark. Disney, who
was heavily involved with his studio’s projects, certainly did so.
Similarly, “Anora” audiences who know Baker’s work probably spotted his
fingerprints from the moment the film starts. (And not just because
Baker emulates John Carpenter, Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick and Wes
Anderson by sticking with one typeface for the titles of all his films —
Aguafina Script Pro, if you were wondering.)
One
of Baker’s hallmarks, the one people most often associate with him, is a
focus on people who live on the margins of society, especially but not
exclusively sex workers.
His 2015 film “Tangerine,”
shot entirely on iPhones, is a zingy, zany comedy about transgender sex
workers who go on a wild chase on Christmas Eve, shot mostly in seedier
parts of Los Angeles. “The Florida Project,”
Baker’s moving 2017 drama that landed Willem Dafoe an Oscar nomination,
centers on a little girl named Moonee who lives with her single mother
in a budget motel just outside Orlando. Her mother can’t make ends meet,
and eventually begins soliciting sex work online. The star of “Red Rocket,” Baker’s 2021 film, is a middle-aged porn star who’s down on his luck.
But
it would be a mistake to imagine that Baker’s movies focus narrowly on
sex work. Those are his characters, but the stories have a wider lens.
He’s interested in the American dream, in the idea that if you just work
hard enough, you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps and make
something of your life. Every one of his films features characters
who’ve tried that and found it lacking. In his films, the American dream
is a fairy tale — a beautiful story we repeat to one another that for
many goes sour.
That’s the story of
“Anora,” in which the titular enterprising young woman, played by
Madison, seems to be alone in the world. She has family somewhere, but
we get the clear sense that she’s been making it on her own for a long
time. Her job at a high-end Midtown Manhattan strip club pays well
enough, but more important, it’s where she meets her prince, who sweeps
her into a fantasy world.
That’s
the first act of the film; the second is a screwball comedy, and in the
third we realize at one pivotal moment that our plucky heroine is not
going to win the day. It’s devastating, and it’s exactly in keeping with
the kind of tales Baker likes to tell. He dips into classic Hollywood
genres but reimagines them for the world his characters inhabit. They
live in worlds laced with neon and sunshine and last-ditch attempts to
stay positive, where the promised reward is always just out of reach.
That’s
a repeated theme across Baker’s films, and “The Florida Project” makes
it almost literal. The characters live in the Magic Castle, a
euphemistic name for a place that’s populated mostly by people who are
barely holding their lives together. All that Moonee can access, despite
her mother’s devoted attempts to raise them out of poverty, are cheap
imitations of the glittery world just beyond her home. Their motel is,
tantalizingly, just a stone’s throw from Walt Disney World.
When
fairy tales don’t pan out the way movies have promised, we feel
cheated. Walt Disney, and the world he created, is as responsible as
anyone for creating those expectations, for giving generations of
viewers the idea that Prince Charming is coming or that the evil villain
will be vanquished by true love.
Baker’s
take on those stories, which are full of love for his characters and
his audience, turns that pattern inside out. His extraordinary Oscar
night has a strange kind of resonance. It’s the sort only Hollywood can
dream up.
AO CONTRÁRIO DE OUTROS ESCÂNDALOS FABRICADOS, A FARRA DAS EMENDAS TEM TUDO PARA SE CONVERTER NA MAIOR INVESTIGAÇÃO DA HISTÓRI A
p o r ANDR É BA R ROCA L
Em março de 2020, o empresário Josival Cavalcanti da Silva, vulgo Pacovan, acompanhado de dois amigos, invadiu com sua caminhonete Hilux a garagem de uma casa em São José de Ribamar, terceira maior cidade do Maranhão, com 240 mil habitantes. Deixou um bilhete com seu nome e seu telefone. Giovani dos Santos Costa, o caseiro, entregou ao patrão, Eudes Sampaio, prefeito do município. “Meu deus, como é que esse cara tá aqui? Na minha casa! Como ele descobriu onde eu moro? Eu vou chamar a polícia”, reagiu Sampaio, conforme relato de uma advogada e de uma funcionária da prefeitura. A invasão foi uma tentativa de arrancar do prefeito 1,6 milhão de reais.
A quantia equivalia a 25% dos 6,6 milhões de reais em emendas parlamentares destinadas a São José de Ribamar, entre dezembro de 20219 e abril de 2020, por três deputados federais do PL: Josimar do Maranhãozinho e Pastor Gil, ambos do estado, e Bosco Costa, de Sergipe. Pacovan cobrava a propina em nome do trio. Dois meses antes da invasão da garagem, o empresário tinha estado com Sampaio na prefeitura, acompanhado de outro político, Antonio José Rocha Silva, que depois confirmaria à Polícia Federal a reunião. Pacovan achava que o prefeito não queria pagar a propina, pois outro grupo político, que não aquele de Josimar e associados, teria tentado convencer Sampaio de que era o verdadeiro padrinho das emendas. “Quero desmascarar esse cara que tá dizendo que é dele (a verba das emendas). Ele vai pegar uma bala na cara. Esse vagabundo. Eu fiquei ontem até meia-noite lá com o prefeito. Lá no Ribamar. Entendeu?”, disse Pacovan a Josimar via celular em 30 de janeiro de 2020. “Não posso ir na casa dele (Sampaio). É perigoso, pois pode ter câmeras para nos filmar… Não podemos ir em escritório dele”, respondeu o deputado. Sampaio denunciou a extorsão à PF naquele ano. Agora, os três parlamentares estão prestes a se tornar réus por corrupção passiva e organização criminosa.
No julgamento iniciado em 28 de fevereiro e previsto para terminar na próxima terça-feira 11, dois dos cinco juízes da Primeira Turma do Supremo Tribunal Federal votaram para acatar a denúncia da Procuradoria-Geral da República. Pacovan escapou por estar no cemitério. Foi assassinado à bala em junho de 2024, e a suspeita é que tenha sido justamente por dívida não paga. Josimar, Gil e Costa serão os primeiros réus no que tem sido classificado como o maior caso de corrupção da história do País. Assim gente graúda em Brasília vê o esquema das emendas parlamentares, em especial no formato “orçamento secreto”.
O magistrado Flávio Dino, do Supremo, usa palavras superlativas em decisões contrárias à farra das emendas. “É de clareza solar que jamais houve tamanho desarranjo institucional com tanto dinheiro público em tão poucos anos. Com efeito, somadas as emendas parlamentares entre 2019 e 2024, chegamos ao montante pago de R$ 186,3 bilhões de reais”, escreveu em 2 de dezembro do ano passado, ao impor restrições à liberação dos recursos.
No período citado por Dino havia 190 bilhões de reais previstos em lei para emendas. Do total, 186 bilhões foram empenhados, primeira etapa de um gasto público, e 158 bilhões, efetivamente pagos, conforme um site do Senado, o Siga. Um terço dos valores correspondeu a emendas RP 9, o orçamento secreto puro-sangue, e RP 8, utilizadas para driblar o fim do segredo decretado pelo STF em 2022. “Temos a gravíssima situação em que bilhões
de reais do orçamento da Nação tiveram origem e destino incertos e não sabidos, na medida em que tais informações, até o momento, estão indisponíveis no Portal da Transparência ou instrumentos equivalentes”, anotou Dino em 2 de dezembro.
Naquela decisão, o juiz destacou haver “malas de dinheiro sendo apreendidas em aviões, cofres, armários ou jogadas por janelas, em face de seguidas operações policiais e do Ministério Público”. São esquemas que não envolvem apenas congressistas. Uma rede de lobistas, empresários e servidores públicos chafurda na lama.
Investigar os malfeitos com verbas de emendas é “prioridade” da PF e há uma “equipe forte” para o caso, relata um delegado, que acrescenta: haverá muitas operações de rua nos próximos meses. Ele estima haver entre 15 e 20 investigações em curso – cada uma pode ter mais de um congressista envolvido – e fareja um escândalo de proporções inéditas no País, embora a mídia ainda não tenha enxergado o tamanho da encrenca. Segundo esse policial, a PF quer descobrir como foi montado o esqueleto das emendas e do orçamento secreto e quem são os personagens políticos principais da tramoia, ou seja, os cabeças. Quer dizer, aquele acordo entre governo e Congresso, validado por Dino em 26 de fevereiro, para o retorno das liberações de recursos pode até ter deixado muita gente aliviada, mas por pura precipitação ou autoengano.
Um inquérito policial aberto em dezembro desnuda o interesse da PF em chegar às vísceras do esquema. É a impressão do deputado Glauber Braga, do PSOL do Rio de Janeiro, ouvido na investigação em fevereiro pelo delegado Marco Bontempo.
A apuração começou por ordem de Dino, diante de fatos levados ao conhecimento do Supremo pelo PSOL e Novo. Em 12 de dezembro de 2024, Arthur Lira, então presidente da Câmara, fechou todas as comissões temáticas sob o argumento de que os deputados tinham de se dedicar ao pacote governista de controle de gastos.
No mesmo dia, 17 líderes partidários enviaram ao Palácio do Planalto, por obra de Lira, um ofício sigiloso. Diziam ratificar que as comissões temáticas tinham aprovado 4,2 bilhões de reais para 5.449 emendas e tomado a decisão com base em critérios estabelecidos pelo Supremo. O PSOL e o Novo alegam que o ofício foi uma farsa inventada para materializar a vontade e o poder de Lira e levaram o caso ao STF. A desconfiança é reforçada por uma denúncia feita em novembro pelo veterano deputado Zé Rocha, do União Brasil da Bahia. Rocha, com mandato desde 1995, era presidente da Comissão de Desenvolvimento Regional. Declarou à revista Piauí que Lira mandava a lista de emendas que a comissão deveria aprovar e que quem não a aceitasse seria destituído do cargo. O parlamentar prestou depoimento à PF em fevereiro e confirmou o que havia dito. Braga depôs também por duas vezes. Na segunda, para reafirmar o relato da primeira sobre uma cidade na terra de Lira, Rio Largo. Nessas ocasiões, o psolista ficou com a impressão de que a PF quer fazer a autópsia do esquema.
Rio Largo é a terceira maior cidade de Alagoas, com 93 mil habitantes, daí sua importância política. De 2019 a 2022, tempos de Jair Bolsonaro, recebeu 90 milhões de reais em emendas, dos quais 19 milhões carimbados com o nome de Lira. O resto, 70 milhões, não tem digitais, segundo Braga, por causa do orçamento secreto então vigente. O psolista contou à PF ter descoberto que a cidade foi a mais agraciada com o dinheiro daquele pacote de 4,2 bilhões de reais. A quantia, segundo ele, foi direcionada pela Comissão de Turismo da Câmara. Em 2024, não havia nenhum ala- goano na comissão. Conclusão: o envio dos 19 milhões tinha sido uma ordem de Lira.
Para Braga, Rio Largo não tem importância apenas política para Lira. Teria financeira também. O prefeito entre 2017 e 2024 era Gilberto Gonçalves, aliado e correligionário de Lira no PP. Seu sucessor também é pepista. Na véspera de Lira deixar o comando da Câmara, em 31 de janeiro passado, Gonçalves publicou nas redes sociais uma foto de ambos abraçados. Faz sentido. Seu prontuário criminal é recheado, e Lira estrela uma das histórias. Na primeira vez que foi em cana, o deputado foi junto. Era 2007, período de uma investigação da PF sobre desvio de verba da Assembleia Legislativa alagoana. Os dois tinham sido parlamentares estaduais pelo PMN entre 2003 e 2006, período investigado pela Operação Taturana. Durante as apurações, a polícia gravara um telefonema de Gonçalves para um funcionário da área de recursos humanos da Assembleia: “Quero meu dinheiro. E não venha com desconto de INSS, não, porque isso é dinheiro roubado”. Lira foi condenado em duas instâncias e só não se tornou ficha- -suja graças a uma liminar de 2018 do Superior Tribunal de Justiça. Gonçalves foi preso mais três vezes. Em 2010, por ameaçar de morte um funcionário que o havia denunciado à Justiça trabalhista. Em 2014, por facilitar a fuga de um motorista acusado de crime eleitoral. E em 2022, em uma investigação da PF sobre dinheiro recolhido em um beco na cidade de Rio Largo e levado à prefeitura. Nome da operação: “Beco da Pecúnia”.
Lira tirou proveito político das emendas em geral e do orçamento secreto em particular ao se tornar presidente da Câmara em 2021, mas não participou da arquitetura legal que fez explodir a verba para dotações parlamentares de 9 bilhões de reais em 2015 para 47 bilhões em 2024. O desenho foi levado adiante entre 2015 e 2019. Primeiro por Eduardo Cunha, presidente da Câmara de 2015 a 2016. Depois, por Davi Alcolumbre, comandante do Senado em 2019 e 2020 e de volta ao posto por mais dois anos. Há pistas de que o governo Bolsonaro se valeu dessa arquitetura para angariar apoio no Congresso.
E o motivo chama-se Eduardo Gomes, atual vice-presidente do Senado. Gomes é do PL de Tocantins. A PF esbarrou no nome dele ao investigar Josimar Maranhãozinho. Numa operação batizada de “emendário”, apreendeu o celular de um assessor de Maranhãozinho na Câmara, Carlos Roberto Lopes. No aparelho havia conversas de Lopes, em 2022, com um contato identificado como “Lizoel assessor”. Lizoel Bezerra foi motorista na campanha de Gomes ao Senado.
1,3 milhão de reais. Numa delas, encaminhou a foto de uma conversa escrita com o senador. “O cara mandou?”, perguntava Gomes a Lizoel. Para a PF, “mandou” refere-se a dinheiro. O encontro fortuito de pistas levou o delegado Roberto Santos Costa a informar à Procuradoria-Geral. Não se sabe se o órgão tomou providências em relação ao senador.
Gomes foi líder do governo Bolsonaro no Congresso de outubro de 2019 a dezembro de 2022. É uma função na qual há muita negociação baseada em dinheiro do orçamento. Seis dias depois de o senador assumir a liderança, a área do Palácio do Planalto responsável à época por lidar com o Congresso, a Secretaria de Governo, contratou uma funcionária chamada Cristiane Leal Sampaio. Em junho de 2020, Cristiane foi trabalhar com Gomes na liderança. Nas investigações sobre o deputado Maranhãozinho, a PF descobriu um depósito de 5 mil reais na conta da funcionária, realizado em março de 2022 por um empreiteiro maranhense, Eduardo José Barros Costa, o Eduardo DP, sócio oculto de uma empresa, a Construservice, metida em estripulias com dinheiro de emendas na estatal Codevasf. Cristiane trabalha desde agosto de 2023 no Ministério do Turismo.
Oministro das Comunicações, Juscelino Filho, também é candidato a virar réu no Supremo por suspeita de aprontar com emendas no governo Bolsonaro. Ele é deputado pelo Maranhão desde 2015. Pertence ao União Brasil. Em junho do ano passado, a PF concluiu uma investigação sobre verbas enviadas ao município de Vitorino Freire. Na condição de deputado, Juscelino Filho separou recursos para a estatal Codevasf financiar a obra. A prefeita da cidade era sua irmã, Luanna Rezende. A empreiteira da obra foi a Construservice. O montante teria saído de Brasília via Codevasf, chegado a Vitorino Freire e uma parte ido parar no bolso da família do atual ministro, conforme a PF. Em setembro de 2023, ele foi alvo de uma operação, a Benesse, que provocou o afastamento temporário de sua irmã da prefeitura e o bloqueio de 835 mil reais da família. Os investigadores apontam crimes de corrupção passiva, lavagem de dinheiro e formação de quadrilha. Só a Procuradoria tem, no entanto, licença para acusar Juscelino Filho ao Supremo. Até agora, não se sabe a posição de Paulo Gonet.
O partido do ministro é protagonista de um dos mais vistosos casos de corrupção com emendas na mira da PF. Em dezembro, a polícia realizou a Operação Overclean, que apura fraudes no Departamento Nacional de Obras Contra a Seca, o Dnocs, na Bahia. Na semana anterior à batida,
os federais haviam monitorado um voo de Salvador a Brasília com o empresário Alex Parente, o ex-chefe do departamento no estado Lucas Lobão, e 1,5 milhão de reais.
Os dois deram versões conflitantes para a bolada. Parente alegou que ela provinha de vendas de equipamentos, enquanto Lobão afirmou desconhecer a existência da grana. A operação atingiu por tabela o atual segundo-vice-presidente da Câmara, Elmar Nascimento, do União Brasil da Bahia. Os agentes encontraram no cofre de outro investigado, o empresário Marcos Moura, conhecido como o Rei do Lixo, um contrato de venda de imóvel a Nascimento. Por isso, o caso acabou remetido ao Supremo. Está aos cuidados do juiz Kassio Nunes Marques, indicado por Bolsonaro.
AOverclean foi a última operação da PF a vasculhar o tema em 2024. A primeira de 2025 chamou-se “Emenda Fast” e atingiu o gabinete do deputado gaúcho Afonso Motta, do PDT. Em 13 de fevereiro, o chefe de gabinete de Motta, Lino Rogério da Silva Furtado, foi afastado do cargo e alvo de buscas, com autorização de Dino. O congressista demitiu-o dias depois. A polícia chegou a Furtado ao botar lupa em um lobista, Cliver André Fiegenbaum. A maior parte da papelada do caso está sob sigilo, por isso não se sabe o motivo de a PF estar no encalço de Fiegenbaum.
O fato é que foi encontrada no celular do lobista uma espécie de planilha com três notas fiscais de pagamentos recebidos de um hospital no Rio Grande do Sul, o Ana Nery, “referente a captação de recursos através de indicações de emendas”. As notas, que vão de julho de 2023 a fevereiro de 2024, somam 509 mil reais. A PF achou ainda conversas de Fiegenbaum com Furtado sobre o pagamento do primeiro ao segundo. A suspeita é de que Fiegenbaum conseguiu de Furtado a liberação de emenda para o hospital. A PF identificou 1,07 milhão de reais de dotações de Motta para o hospital entre novembro de 2023 e janeiro de 2024. Falta saber se o deputado estava a par da negociação de seu assessor e se embolsou grana também, algo a ser respondido com o aprofundamento da investigação policial.
O caso que resvala em Motta é curioso. Há uma espécie de “contrato de propina” entre o lobista Fiegenbaum e o hospital. Pelo acordo, Fiegenbaum embolsaria 6% do valor total de emendas obtidas para o Ana Nery. No Ceará, também aparece um porcentual: 15%. O responsável pela liberação é o deputado Júnior Mano, eleito em 2022 pelo PL e desde 2024 filiado ao PSB. Emendas providenciadas por Mano teriam virado caixa 2 e compra de votos na eleição municipal do ano passado. Foi o que denunciou, em setembro, ao Ministério Público, a então prefeita de Canindé, Rozário Ximenes. Segundo o depoimento, recursos de emendas do deputado direcionadas a algumas cidades teriam sido desviados via licitações fraudulentas, em um porcentual de 15%. O dinheiro surrupiado teria financiado campanhas de prefeitos, como a do candidato da oposição ao grupo de Rozário em Canindé. O operador do esquema seria Bebeto Queiroz, eleito em Choró, filiado ao PSB e aliado de Mano. E teria, conforme a prefeita, 58 milhões para financiar “colaboradores” em 51 das 158 cidades no estado.
A PF fez duas batidas para apurar a denúncia de Rozário, uma em outubro, a Mercado Clauso, outra em dezembro, a Vis Oculta. Entre uma e outra, Queiroz foi preso em caráter temporário. Depois de solto, teve a prisão preventiva decretada pela Justiça, mas fugiu. Nem ele nem seu vice, Bruno Jucá Bandeira, tomaram posse em Choró em 1º de janeiro. A cidade tem sido governada pelo presidente da Câmara de Vereadores. Em 14 de fevereiro, o caso virou assunto do Supremo, por decisão do juiz Gilmar Mendes. Motivo: a participação do deputado Mano.
O esquema das emendas promete, de fato, muitas emoções em 2025. E guarde um nome, leitor: João Batista Magalhães. É lobista e trabalhou com Gomes na liderança do governo Bolsonaro no Congresso. •
