After three terms as federal deputy, Eduardo Gomes (PL-TO) began his term as senator in 2019 with 54 commissioned employees (without a public examination). In four years, he increased the cabinet to 82 advisors. Gomes employs as much as a medium-sized company in the services sector. According to Sebrae (Brazilian Support Service for Micro and Small Businesses), an average company has 50 to 99 employees. The number of employees does not correspond to legislative activity: in 2023, the senator presented three bills.
The “bloating” of the cabinet is allowed by “loopholes” in the Senate’s rules, which allow the multiplication of positions. A survey by Estadão identified that another 12 senators also have more than 50 advisors paid with public money. This is the case, for example, of Rogério Carvalho (PT-SE) and Randolfe Rodrigues (no party-AP), with 77 and 67 commissioners, respectively. Parliamentarians say they need the employees for legislative work, but the fact is that the posts end up being used to appoint allies and canvassers.
The Senate’s administrative regulations establish a limit of 12 commissioners per senator, but allow a rearrangement that could lead to the cabinet having 50 advisors. If the parliamentarian assumes other functions in the House, such as chairing a committee, party leadership or position on the Board of Directors, he has the right to make more appointments and multiply them. The president of the Senate, for example, can have up to 260 commissioners, if he wants. Rodrigo Pacheco (PSD-MG) has 36 advisors.
The “loophole” in the regulations does not require all senators to rearrange their team into smaller positions. If the parliamentarian opts for this change, he needs to ensure that the total amount of salaries is the same, regardless of the number of employees. This means he can employ more people, but with lower salaries. Expenses on food vouchers for these new advisors are not considered in this limit, which results in extra expenses for the Senate.
Senator Randolfe Rodrigues (no AP party) has 67 commissioned advisors. In addition to the employees who help in the cabinet, the parliamentarian has the right to more employees as he is the leader of the government in Congress, deputy leader in the Senate and leader of a party bloc.
The office of senator Omar Aziz (PSD-AM) has 64 commissioned employees. He is president of the Transparency, Governance, Inspection and Control and Consumer Protection Commission and deputy leader of the PSD in the House, which guarantees him the possibility of requesting more servers.
In a note, Carvalho stated that he has 47 commissioned employees working in the support office and 30 in the cabinet and the First Secretariat. According to the parliamentarian’s office, the position on the Board of Directors “requires a greater number of civil servants, both civil servants and commissioned employees”. The note also states that, even though they are assigned to the First Secretariat, employees work in the office mainly due to “the technical convenience of accessing systems restricted to each office”.
Estadão contacted all the parliamentarians mentioned to understand the reason for the high number of civil servants and what functions they performed. The other senators did not return until the publication of this text.
Compromised work efficiency
Associate professor at the Department of Public Management at FGV EAESP Cláudio Couto states that, from the moment a senator disperses resources to multiply the number of civil servants, work efficiency decreases. “In the end, the cabinet will have a lot of people doing low-skilled work, instead of prioritizing functions that are effectively relevant to parliamentary exercise,” he said.
The “bloat” in offices also makes it difficult to control the exercise of functions, which opens up the possibility of informality in the use of public money, as political scientist Rafael Cortez explains.
“Managing a larger number of people is more difficult, and more difficult than that is managing the resources of this consultancy. This does not necessarily mean that there is an illegal practice, but it is a possible invitation to be more inefficient in the use of this This dispersion also expands the strategies for parliamentarians to eventually make illegal use of resources, as we have already seen in the practice of ‘rachadinhas’, for example.”
‘Loopholes’ in the law
According to the Administrative Regulations of the Federal Senate, each parliamentarian has, in principle, 12 committee positions to fill and a limit to spend on hiring – R$240,803.04 per month. However, the document allows senators to rearrange these initial hires to increase the number of employees. They must follow two rules: the sum of remuneration for derivative positions cannot exceed the monthly amount and the maximum number of commissioned employees in each parliamentary office must not exceed 50 people.
Senators can also expand the number of advisors available for the mandate if the parliamentarian assumes other positions in the House, such as a role on the Board of Directors, party leadership or committee presidency. For example, the president of a permanent committee has the right to have three additional parliamentary advisors, which can be divided into up to 30 lesser positions. These new servers are added to the staff as an “extra number”, in addition to the one mentioned previously, whose limit is 50 people.
Political scientist Rafael Cortez explains that the number of employees in a cabinet can help to understand how the parliamentarian intends to exercise his mandate: in the production of public policy or in representation. “The senator takes the volume of resources allocated to hiring staff and, instead of reducing the number of people to bring in important specialists for certain areas, which is expensive, the parliamentarian prefers to share this value among more people, with the salary smaller, to expand this political dimension of the mandate”, he said.
Thus, the senator expands the points of contact he can have with the population through, for example, an advisor in a city with a large electoral college. “Thus, this high number of advisors can translate this parliamentarian’s option of using the parliamentary mandate as a platform for building electoral politics,” said Cortez.
To Estadão, the Senate stated that the distribution of commissioners is the responsibility of the parliamentarian. “It is worth noting that there is supervision regarding the number of civil servants commissioned in parliamentary offices,” he said, in a note.
The House also stated that the resources used to pay civil servants originate from the annual budget allocations authorized for the Legislature in the Union Budget.
Lack of transparency
The Senate Transparency Portal does not differentiate which employees are working within the office itself and which ones provide services to a senator in another structure, such as the Board of Directors or a committee. In the Casa’s employee database, there are only two classifications regarding capacity: “office” or “support office”.
This lack of detail prevents citizens from monitoring cabinet hiring to understand whether senators are respecting, for example, the rule of a maximum of 50 civil servants in committee positions.
Asked about the lack of description about the division of positions, the Senate stated that “the transparency website informs the employees who are actually working at the disposal of each senator’s office, which, in the House’s understanding, brings greater transparency to the relevant information public interest”.
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