Bolsonaro should keep rapporteur amendments in 2023 at more than BRL 19 billion

President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) must sanction the 2023 Budget Guidelines Law, maintaining the rapporteur’s amendments, an instrument used as a bargaining chip in political negotiations with the National Congress.

With the sanction, the amount reserved for the rapporteur’s amendments should be R$ 19.4 billion – above the R$ 16.5 billion forecast for this year. The figures exceed the budget for maintenance expenses and investments of several ministries.

The president could veto the device — this was even the recommendation of the Ministry of Economy —, but he chose not to pick a fight with the centrão subtitles, which are usually contemplated with the budget.

The distribution of this money is currently made from political agreements conducted by the top of Parliament, mainly by the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Arthur Lira (PP-AL). Aides from the Planalto Palace say that, for Lira, the issue is indisputable.

On Monday night (8), Bolsonaro sought to disassociate himself from any decision involving the rapporteur’s amendments, although the maintenance of the instrument is the result of the president’s decision to sanction the device.

“I have nothing to do with the secret budget. I am obliged to execute the secret budget. A congressman had this idea. I vetoed it, then it came back and they overturned the veto”, said Bolsonaro, referring to the first attempts by Congress to institute the rapporteur amendments, in 2020 and 2021. The statement was given in an interview with the Flow podcast.

Since 2022, however, the forecast of the rapporteur’s amendments is included in the LDO under Bolsonaro’s signature at the time of the law’s sanction.

This type of amendment is usually distributed based on political criteria, favoring parliamentarians allied with the government or close to the top of the Chamber and Senate. More influential names manage to irrigate their electoral strongholds with higher values.

The maintenance of the rapporteur’s amendments contradicts the position of the Ministry of Economy, which recommended a veto to the device, implemented for the first time in the 2020 Budget.

The view of Minister Paulo Guedes’s (Economics) team is that the rapporteur’s amendments make budget management difficult by consuming a good part of the resources that could be allocated to public policies or structural investments.

Politically, however, a veto would be something delicate for Bolsonaro, who turned the rapporteur’s amendments into a foundation of his relationship with the centrão, a bloc of parties that gives him political support in the votes in the Legislative.

Speaker of the Chamber, Lira is one of those who control the release of this money to allies. He is also considered a great guarantor of the approval of proposals of government interest in the Legislature.

A veto on the maintenance of the device could generate wear and tear and put Bolsonaro on a collision course with the interests of the center, at a time when the president will put the campaign on the street in search of reelection.

The topic is considered something so sensitive that, generally, these resources are shielded when budget cuts are needed. This year, however, mandatory expenses grew significantly, and the economic team had to block BRL 8 billion from these amendments.

The measure generated unease, although interlocutors minimized any dissatisfaction, saying they trusted the alliance with Lira. Even so, Palácio do Planalto rushed to issue a signal that it is working to free up resources soon after the elections, so as not to undermine the plans of its allies.

The president of the Chamber’s intention is to use part of the budget to consolidate support in the plenary and guarantee his re-election to the command of the House, regardless of who is elected to the Presidency of the Republic.

First placed in the polls of voting intentions, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) has criticized the rapporteur’s amendments. PT’s allies express their intention to reorganize the political forces in the Legislature to ensure greater control over the Budget, if Lula is elected.

Bolsonaro even vetoed the creation of rapporteur amendments twice, in the 2020 and 2021 Budgets, but in both cases there was strong pressure from parliamentarians. In one of them, the government had to sew an agreement and pass a new law, giving in to congressmen. In another, the veto was overturned.

For 2022, the Chief Executive decided to directly sanction the creation of the rapporteur’s amendments, avoiding attrition with his allies in Congress. The indication is that this strategy will be repeated for 2023.

The rapporteur’s amendments are a tool criticized by experts, who see low transparency, unequal division of resources and inefficient spending. Actions contemplated with these funds do not necessarily observe technical criteria or the priorities of the ministries

The application of resources has already motivated a series of investigations on suspicion of misuse of the amendments.

In one of the cases, the government allocated R$ 26 million of MEC (Ministry of Education) resources to purchase robotics kits for schools in small towns in Alagoas that suffer from a series of deficiencies in basic infrastructure, such as lack of classrooms. classrooms, computers, internet and even running water.

Each kit was purchased by the city halls for R$ 14 thousand, a value much higher than that practiced in the market and that of cutting-edge products of international level, as revealed by the Sheet in April. The resources came from the rapporteur’s amendments.

Four months ago, the Sheet It also showed that the state-owned construction company Codevasf — which received R$ 3 billion from the public coffers through parliamentary amendments during the Bolsonaro administration, half of which were amended by the rapporteur — reached the end of 2021 without proving in the balance sheet the real value of the works it performs. . The problem was identified in a report by independent auditor Russell Bedford.