He also said that the Government is considering an increase in the minimum wage for public sector employees.
The Minister of Public Administration (MAP), Sigmund Freund, revealed yesterday that in the coming weeks President Luis Abinader will announce a broad process of restructuring the State that includes merging some ministries and eliminating some directorates.
The official assured that the process would not involve mass layoffs of employees in the public administration, but that they will be relocated. Freund did not give details of the institutions that will be impacted by the measures because, according to him, it will be President Luis Abinader who will announce it when he considers it appropriate.
“The president has a view that a smaller state is a more efficient state,” Freund said.
“What is certain is that there will be mergers of important ministries; there will be the elimination of some directorates, of some ministries and there will also be a relocation of powers between institutions that currently have duplicate functions,” said the head of the MAP.
He also explained that some public institutions have already fulfilled the role for which they were created and that they will be eliminated in the strategy to reduce the state apparatus.
“The idea is that those administrative entities, which by their nature require relocating their powers to others, will be doing so; those administrative entities in which by their very nature, their competence has already passed due to other laws that have been approved or in an administrative manner, then we have to put them aside, it is a rationalization and streamlining of public administration, and the scope will be important, that can be said,” he said.
Sigmund Freund said that in the evaluation of the state apparatus they have found many cabinets that were created in previous administrations and that carry out tasks that correspond to entities that have those purposes.
“The President’s goal in this administration, and he has said it on different occasions, is to leave a legacy as a reforming president, and one of the elements of this reform is to address what should be the efficiency and rationalization of public administration in the Dominican Republic,” he said.
The MAP minister was the guest of this week’s special interview with elCaribe and CDN.
The conversation was led by the director of elCaribe, Nelson Rodríguez; the director of CDN, Alba Nely Familia, and the commentators of Despierta con CDN, Katherine Hernández and Federico Jovine.
He said that the public sector is the largest employer in the country and that this is a social reality that cannot be changed overnight. “What we are going to do is improve the working conditions and the conditions of the entities that offer services,” he said.
Freund elaborated on President Abinader’s idea of making the State more efficient. “The objective is to make the State more functional, more efficient, so that in one way or another, it is not such a heavy burden on the treasury; and also to carry out a complete review of the structure of the public administration. Many of the institutions that we have, some are duplicated with other institutions, in the same way, there are cases of institutions whose useful life has already ended because they were created in very specific circumstances,” explained the official.
He said that since the first Abinader government he has had the idea of reducing the size of the State.
“Since the first government of President Abinader, he has sought to streamline and rationalize public administration. During his first term, some institutions were eliminated, such as the CDEEE (Dominican Corporation of State-owned Electric Companies) and other institutions, such as the OISOE, were eliminated when the Ministry of Housing was created; that task remained unfinished and the president is now understanding that there are different situations in Dominican society; we have gone through situations such as Covid, also the war in Ukraine, now is the time to fully implement that proposal that the president had from the beginning when he was a presidential candidate in 2019,” said the official.
Increase in minimum wage
Sigmund Freund explained that the labour reform is led by the Ministry of Labour and said that the role of the MAP is limited to the announcements that will be made regarding salary improvements in the minimum wage and teleworking.
“The increase in the minimum wage in the public sector is a necessity, that is a necessity and I understand that public servants deserve it; and one of the criticisms I make is that society is constantly demanding an increase in salaries in the private sector, but in the public administration, which performs an extremely important job, a modification to the General Salary Law is necessary, which is what has caused the stagnation in the improvement of salaries in the public administration, and why not, an improvement at least to the minimum wages of public employees, which were last touched twelve years ago,” he said.
On another topic, the official said that the Fiscal Responsibility Law was necessary to streamline public spending. “To control public spending, we needed a law that would require the public administration to comply with what it establishes and allocate a large part of the budget to capital investment and not to current spending investment as has been happening in the Dominican Republic. The idea is that we, as a government, should put controls on ourselves,” Freund said.
The official acknowledged that there have been some increases in the public payroll, but that it has been the growth of the education, health and police personnel.
“With this upcoming restructuring, we will evaluate which staff will have to move to other institutions. We are not talking about a mass layoff, it is important to clarify and not leave any doubts. What we are going to do is a diagnosis, an analysis, of the public administration to make it more efficient. We can determine that if the staff that is there today is the same as that required, that is probable, and it will have to be increased in some sectors,” Freund explained.
He said that the government is committed to sending a message to Dominican society that the largest amount of resources will be allocated to investment expenses such as infrastructure, education and health and that this requires organizing the house in relation to current expenses.
A different reform
The Minister of Public Administration said that the reform and modernization of the State promoted by President Abinader is different from those that have been carried out in the last 20 years. He considered that the congressional majority he has will allow him to address many of these reforms in greater depth. He also said that the president has the political will to move forward with the reforms that the State requires.
“In order to address some aspects of public administration, laws are required, and at certain times they did not have the possibility of having a Congress that shared the same vision as the President of the Republic, his vision of reform, of which there are more than ten that have already been discussed in the CES,” he said.
He also said that the necessary assessments have already been made on the needs for reform of the public administration.
He stressed that he is an official of action and results, not of philosophy. “I am convinced that the scope of what we are going to achieve in the next two years will be very different from what has been seen in the last 20 years, they will be tangible, concrete results and they will be pleasing to Dominican society in general,” he said.
Will modernize MAP processes
The new Minister of Public Administration said that he is working to streamline and modernize the institution. “If we want to organize and modernize from the outside, the first thing we have to do is organize the house, and the reality is that despite the Ministry’s progress, we have many tasks to address, there is a lack of use of technology, a shortage of systems to address all that demand,” he acknowledged. Sigmund Freund said that they handle more than a thousand requests a month and that to respond to them, the implementation of technology is required. “I think that the Ministry has not been addressed from the financial point of view in everything that it deserves; the president has promised to give us a larger budget, in the sense that we can make use of innovations to provide a better service to the State and to the citizen,” he revealed. He said that due to a lack of tools, the number of public employees is not known with certainty.
Transparency
The president has reaffirmed the ethical behavior of the officials and urged them to submit their sworn statement”
Challenges
Decentralization has not been implemented as such, there is a concept of dependency that does not allow them to fully develop these functions”
