Government wants to reform Public Administration

The main highlight of this Government Program is naturally the announced reform of the State. In this chapter, the Executive commits to eliminating redundancies, merging entities, attracting more young people and rewarding the best in Public Administration.

Divided into five subchapters (“fighting bureaucracy”, “digitalization”, “organic-institutional” reform, the “budgetary” dimension and “workers”), the team led by the new minister Gonçalo Matias proposes, among other measures, the following:

1. Reduce bureaucracy and speed up licensing, authorization and public procurement regimes, eliminating excessive prior decisions (including opinions, binding or not), prioritizing a posteriori monitoring, adopting tacit approval whenever possible, and penalizing unjustified rejections;

2. Review and simplify the rules applicable to companies and social institutions and facilities, from their creation and registration, eliminating acts required for their activity and seeking simplification, digitalization and elimination of redundancies;

3. Complete the reform of the Government center and the top of the State's Direct Administration, with the elimination of sectoral general secretariats;

4. Reorganize functions and eliminate duplicate structures, observatories and redundant working groups, with a review of associated expenditure and an assessment of organizational rationality throughout the Public Administration. Achieve a net reduction in the number of entities in the Direct Administration of the State;

5. Complete the review of public administration careers in accordance with the terms agreed with the trade union structures representing general careers in Public Administration;

6. Focus on the increased value of management positions and more qualified workers, particularly where the salary differential compared to the private sector is greater;

7. Adopt mechanisms to attract highly qualified young people to the Public Administration, including through rapid progression paths;

8. Develop and generalize practices of material compensation for workers for individual performance and their respective service;

9. Evolve towards a simple, unbureaucratic evaluation system, giving autonomy and responsibility to evaluators and greater weight to performance as a progression criterion as opposed to seniority.