Politics: Implications of the new reform proposal
A reform proposal advanced last week by the head of the Morena caucus in the Chamber of Deputies would significantly modify the federal government’s structure and mode of functioning, concentrating power, budget and authority in the hands of the President of the Republic, as various major government departments would come under the direct or indirect control of the National Palace.
Relations with state and municipal governments would shift from the Ministry of the Interior and other cabinet departments directly to the Presidency of the Republic, although it appears that the proposed Development Program Delegations under presidential control are not designed to replace the existing representative offices of the various ministries in each of the states, but instead will assume responsibility for “coordinating actions in priority areas". However, the intention is clearly to assure that a much greater share of relations between federal ministries and both state and municipal governments are controlled directly by the presidency.
The Ministry of Finance will be greatly reinforced, and in political terms will constitute a second power nucleus in the administration of President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador. In contrast, the Ministry of the Interior, which had long been the most politically powerful cabinet level institution, is to be reduced almost to insignificance. Many of its departments will be transferred to the new Ministry of Security and Citizen Protection, which is to become the third major pillar of power in the new governing structure.
The budgets of the internal administrative oversight bodies of ministries and state-owned companies will now come directly from the Ministry of Public Administration (SFP), an arrangement that could increase these bodies’ autonomy from the ministries and firms where they supervise the quality of accounting and financial reporting, but that will require a substantial budgetary commitment from the SFP.
They will also be dysfunctional in other ways, such as coming up with offices for close to 8,000 officials, as the idea is to extract them from the offices of the ministries and agencies where they currently work and transfer them to the SFP. Such a move means they would lose contact with and knowledge of the ministries they are overseeing.
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