President Trump Meets With Argentina’s President Javier Milei – February 22, 2025.
At the Cato Institute, Scott Lincicome discusses the astounding success Javier Milei has had by applying libertarian principles to Argentina. Lincicome credits Milei for slashing Argentina’s budget but emphasizes that reducing the size of the country’s ministries and cutting regulations have been real successes. He writes, noting the work of fellow Cato Institute scholar Ian Vasquez:
As Vásquez documents, however, it may be Milei’s deregulatory work that’s even more impressive—and important for Argentina’s future. In a new piece this week, he explains how the Peronists’ power is entrenched in the bloated Argentine bureaucracy, and that Argentina’s regulatory state is simply massive. Thanks to 300,000 different laws, decrees, and resolutions, the Human Freedom Index finds Argentina to be “one of the most regulated countries in the world,” with a regulatory burden ranking 146th out of just 165 countries.
This is where Milei’s chainsaw has been directed. Along with the ministry consolidation (now down to eight), Milei in his first year in office “fired 37,000 public employees and abolished about 100 secretariats and subsecretariats in addition to more than 200 lower-level bureaucratic departments.” He’s also rapidly deregulated across the economy, starting with the broad Decree 70/2023—the so-called Megadecreto (Megadecree!)—and then continuing unabated for the next year. In a December blog post, in fact, Vásquez and colleague Guillermina Sutter Schneider calculated that in Milei’s first year in office, his administration had implemented 672 regulatory reforms (331 eliminated and 341 modified), or around two per day for an entire year.
Argentina’s Ministry of Deregulation recently posted about Milei’s success in cutting senior positions (higher authorities), writing (translated via X.com):
In one year, President Javier Milei implemented a profound restructuring of the public sector, reducing the number of senior positions by 35% and the number of organizational units in the Senior Public Management of the Centralized National Public Administration by 15%.
This reflects the Government’s commitment to reducing public spending and streamlining administration.
Chart translated via Google Translate
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