During a hearing at the Commission for State Reform and Local Power, requested by Chega and the PS, the minister clarified that the technological and digital transformation underway is intended to enhance workers and not to dismiss them.
“This government has no plan for layoffs of public administration workers,” he assured.
According to Gonçalo Matias, thousands of the approximately 700,000 public employees currently engaged in bureaucratic tasks such as paper circulation and review will transition to higher-value functions like analysis and strategic decision-making.
“There will be no layoffs. What we want is to free people from low-value tasks for more qualified activities,” he emphasized, rejecting PS’s criticisms that the reform might replicate old “requalification” models used by previous governments that resulted in dismissals.
The official further highlighted that Portugal is on par with the OECD average in the number of public employees, dismissing the notion of an “excess” of workers. The problem, he explained, often lies in poor resource allocation, which will be corrected through the so-called “level 2” of the ministry reform, providing a detailed survey of functions, procedures, and personnel in each entity.
At the beginning of the hearing, Gonçalo Matias explained that the reform is organized into two levels. The first focuses on analyzing each ministry and their respective entities, identifying redundancies, outdated functions, or structures that can be merged, “as happened in the [Ministry] of Education,” he exemplified.
The so-called level 2 goes further and envisions a detailed survey in each entity, evaluating the procedures followed, response times, identified bottlenecks, and available human resources, he explained.
It will also analyze the distribution of workers to understand if there is an excess in one sector and a shortage in another, allowing for correct reallocation.
“It is this granular survey that will give us the real vision of the Public Administration,” stated the minister, assuring that Portugal “does not have too many employees” overall, but rather a poor distribution among sectors.
With this reorganization, the government’s goal is to “free human resources from low-value tasks for more qualified activities, returning authority and legitimacy to the state in the eyes of citizens,” he stated.
The minister added that digitization and artificial intelligence will allow for the elimination of redundancies, speeding up decision times, and enabling employees to focus on more relevant tasks.
The minister emphasized that this strategy is not only aimed at reducing bureaucracy and costs but also at making the state more transparent and predictable.
“A slow and bureaucratic state is fertile ground for corruption. By simplifying processes, we increase trust and clarity,” he reinforced.
“When someone cannot get a decision, it is easier to go around and circumvent,” he remarked, referring to the current “bureaucratic burden.”
In this regard, the minister also appealed for this reform to be seen as a national goal, arguing that by simplifying processes and reducing bureaucracy, the state will become more transparent and less prone to corruption.
The hearing of the Deputy Minister for State Reform, Gonçalo Matias, took place at the request of Chega and the PS as part of the creation of the new ministry, and to “obtain clarifications on the ministry’s action plan, defined strategic axes, and measures.”
