There is a silent practice, but with noisy consequences, that has taken root in the heart of the Brazilian federal public administration: the freezing of funds allocated to regulatory agencies — a measure that, in addition to being technically flawed, is expressly prohibited by current legislation.
Law No. 9,986/2000, which governs the management of human resources in regulatory agencies, and the specific laws creating each agency, categorically guarantee administrative and financial autonomy to these entities. The withholding of their budget allocations is not merely bad public policy—it is an act outside the bounds of legality. Ignoring this fact is, at the very least, a worrying demonstration of a lack of understanding of the role these institutions play in the Brazilian State.
Regulatory agencies are not bureaucratic appendages of the State. On the contrary, they are the most refined expression of the pact that society makes with public power when it delegates the provision of essential services to private sectors. They exist to ensure that the citizen—and not just the market—is the true beneficiary of the concession of services in the areas of electricity, basic sanitation, civil aviation, telecommunications, health surveillance, transport, mining, and so many others that structure daily life and national development.
Weakening regulatory agencies is tantamount to removing society's main line of defense against tariff abuses, service failures, and risks to public health and safety. Ultimately, it is a silent transfer of power—from the citizen to the interests that should be regulated.
Strategic vulnerability
Among all the consequences of the budget cuts, the one that inspires the greatest concern relates to the management of water resources—an area under the responsibility of the National Water and Basic Sanitation Agency (ANA). Water is not just an economic input. It is a condition of life, a vector of food sovereignty, the backbone of energy generation, and the foundation of industrial development. Treating it with budgetary negligence is a civilizational risk.
ANA (National Water Agency) currently operates under increasingly precarious conditions. The staff is depleted, with retirements not being replaced and recruitment processes postponed. Strategic hydrometeorological monitoring contracts have been canceled or suspended, compromising the ability to produce reliable real-time data—precisely the data that informs critical decisions in climate emergencies: severe droughts, floods, and dam breaks.
The oversight of water resource use has weakened. The integration of databases on national water sources—whose management is shared between the federal government and the states, in one of the most complex challenges of cooperative governance in Brazilian federalism—is threatened. Without integrated, reliable, and up-to-date data, planning is impossible. And without planning, all that remains is crisis management—expensive, inefficient, and often tragic.
There is no shortage of examples of how the weakening of regulatory and monitoring apparatuses turns into tragedy. Dam collapses that claimed lives and destroyed entire ecosystems revealed, among other factors, severe gaps in oversight. Extreme weather events found municipalities and states without the necessary information to act in time. These are not accidents—they are, to a large extent, consequences of misguided budgetary choices.
Every canceled monitoring contract is a blind spot in our alert network. Every unfilled civil servant position is an oversight that doesn't happen. Every data integration system that isn't maintained is a piece of national territory that ceases to be governed with technical rationality and institutional responsibility.
Regulation as an ancillary expense?
There is a perverse logic in the decision to freeze the resources of regulatory agencies as a fiscal adjustment measure. It assumes that regulation is a manageable cost, reducible without systemic consequences. This is a grave mistake.
Effective regulation reduces costs for society. It prevents market failures, ensures efficient allocation of public resources, protects lives and property, and provides predictability to the business environment—a fundamental element for attracting long-term investments, precisely the type of capital that essential infrastructure demands. Weakening regulatory agencies is, therefore, a policy that comes at a high price—not in the Treasury's balance sheet, but in society's bill.
This is not a corporate request or a defense of institutional interests. It is an appeal for rationality and compliance with the law. What is expected of the Federal Government is that it recognizes regulatory agencies not as a bureaucratic burden, but as a strategic asset—and that it treats their resources with the seriousness that the Constitution and sub-constitutional legislation dictate.
It is urgently necessary to review the illegal budget cuts to the agencies, ensure the replenishment of technical staff, resume strategic monitoring contracts, and invest in the integration of water resources information systems. These are not demands from a bureaucracy seeking to preserve itself—they are the minimum conditions for the State to fulfill its most basic function: protecting the lives and well-being of Brazilian citizens.
History will judge us not by the austerity with which we cut essentials, but by the wisdom with which we knew how to distinguish the superfluous from the indispensable. Secure water resources, quality services, and efficient regulation are not luxuries of a rich country—they are the path for Brazil to become one.
Leonardo Góes is the CEO of the National Water and Basic Sanitation Agency (ANA), former president of Embasa, former Secretary of Water Infrastructure and Sanitation for the State of Bahia, and former National Secretary of Water Security for the Ministry of Integration and Regional Development (MIDR).
