Federico Sturzenegger He is in charge of operating the “deep chainsaw” of President Javier Milei. The economist has led the Ministry of Deregulation and Transformation of the State since its creation in July 2024 with one main task: reduce public spending, simplify procedures and bureaucracy, and increase the efficiency of the State.
In this context, the national government sanctioned until September 2025 (latest official data available) 437 standards (considering decrees, resolutions and laws) with the objective of modifying or eliminating more than 1,300 previous measures.
Of that total, Checked and elDiarioAR analyzed 160 published standards in the Official Gazette from December 10, 2023 to May 31, 2025, with the aim of establishing the impact that these policies had in the economic and commercial sphere, and in the daily lives of Argentines.
The conclusion: 6 out of 10 deregulations promoted by the Milei government have had a moderate or low impact so farwhile 12% of the analyzed regulations are held back by judicial decisions. 28% of the remaining initiatives were considered high impact.
More than 160 deregulation rules published between December 2023 and May 2025 were analyzed.
38% had a medium impact, 28% had a high impact, 22% had a low impact and 12% had no impact due to judicial or regulatory obstacles.
Chequeado and elDiarioAr They analyzed what happened in each sector.
Economy and finance concentrated 27% of the regulations and was the main area affected by the deregulations.
Transportation represented 19% of the deregulatory measures applied by the Government.
The State reform explained 23% of the regulations; The eliminated entities represented only 2.9% of total spending in 2023.
The deregulations in the world of work all had zero impact, given that they were intervened by Justice.
The result of this research was analyzed and captured in a display within the framework of the Data Journalism Visualization (DJV) Bootcamp project of the Argentine Journalism Forum (FOPEA).
Chequeado and elDiarioAR They consulted the press area of the Ministry of Deregulation and Transformation of the State, and the Secretariat of Communication and Press for this investigation, but did not receive a response.
A deregulatory agenda with an emphasis on economics
Based on the 160 standards analyzed, 7 major areas were identified in which regulatory changes were implemented. The main item was Economy and Finance, which explained 27% of the body analyzed and includes foreign trade deregulations (such as the simplification of import procedures) and taxes (such as the reduction or elimination of taxes).
What happened to Milei’s deregulations in rents, flights, football, medicines and supermarkets
They were followed by Public Administration and State Reform (22.5%); Transportation (18.5%); Energy and mining (8%); Health (8%) and Work and social security (7%). Other sectors (which include regulations linked to areas such as tourism, publishing or copyright), explained 9% of the regulations analyzed.
What was the impact of the measures?
To measure the impact of each regulation, Checked and elDiarioAR They used a qualitative criterion with 4 levels (high, moderate, low and null), according to the degree of scope and the magnitude of the changes it generated within a productive activity or in people’s daily lives. To do this, they were based on the analysis of official data, reports and specialists, and the duration of each measure was taken into account.
Of the total measures analyzed, 38% of the standards had a moderate impact. This applies to cases in which the reforms were implemented partially and/or caused limited changes..
For example, the Decree 959/24 eliminated hereditary positions in access to public administration. As of this modification, the Ministry of Labor will not approve the collective labor agreements that maintain this benefit.
However, this practice occurs in a small universe of State organizations and companies, such as the Central Bank, the Customs Collection and Control Agency (ARCA), ANSES, Customs, Banco Nación, YPF and Ferrocarriles Argentinos, which together explain 17.5% of the total of state employees. The Government could not specify -in response to a request for access to information made by Checked– How many employees of those departments had taken up the position for this benefit.
Other examples of moderate impact measures are: the authorization for pharmacies to display over-the-counter medications on shelves and the updated price list – which had a partial implementation -, and the self-dispensing of fuel at service stations, because only YPF is applying it and as a pilot test.
In addition, 22% of standards had low impact (restricted scope and minimal changes), given that it was legislated on a practice or issue that before the change was already obsolete in the sector involved, and, therefore, the reform cannot be sized because it already existed in practice. In these cases, deregulation fulfilled a cleaning and ordering function.
This is the case of the modification to the Tax Evasion Prevention Law contained in DNU 70/2023. There, an article was eliminated that established a maximum limit of $1,000 for operations that could be carried out in cash, a value that had become obsolete and was no longer met in practice, according to the experts consulted.
The repeal of the Gondola Law is another example of low-impact deregulation.
12% of the rules analyzed had zero impactgiven that its effects were neutralized by Justice or by another subsequent norm. This is the case of the labor chapter of DNU 70/2023, which was declared unconstitutional in court.
Finally, 28% of the 160 standards analyzed were considered high impact: were implemented in their entirety and caused substantial changes that fundamentally altered the operation of a particular activity or group of people.
This is the case of Decree 1039/24which canceled the loans to retirees made by ANSES through the Sustainability Guarantee Fund. According to details of the Chief of Staffin 2024 (prior to suspension) loans of more than $1 billion were made.
The view of the specialists
The economist Miguel Braun, former Secretary of Economic Policy of the Ministry of Finance during the administration of Mauricio Macri, highlighted in x that “the Government registered more than 1,300 adjusted regulations and more than 9,600 modified articles in less than 2 years. That is an unprecedented regulatory shock.” And he added: “Milei is rewriting formal and informal rules of the economic game at the same time.”
For his part, Juan Negri, director of the Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science and Government at the Torcuato Di Tella University (UTDT), highlighted in dialogue with Checked: “The government’s deregulation policy combined 3 pillars: market opening, the elimination of controls in general and the relaxation of rules.”
Negri pointed out that “the deregulations with the greatest impact were those that touched on the most sensitive issues in daily life, such as the elimination of the rental law.”
According to data of the Buenos Aires Institute of Statistics and Censuses, after the repeal of this rule, there was a drop in the price of real estate locations in real terms. On the other hand, the INDEC registered increases above inflation. The difference It is explained because the Buenos Aires organization collects the publication data on real estate portals and the INDEC measures the prices actually paid by tenants, whose contracts were drawn up under the different laws applied in recent years.
Meanwhile, Marcelo Bermolén, director of the Institutional Quality Observatory of the School of Government of the Austral University, raised to Checked: “There were visible successes, such as the deregulation of rents, but also errors such as the permission for free movement of meat throughout the country, even in Patagonia, which is a region considered free of foot and mouth disease, which caused the Chilean Ministry of Agriculture to resolve suspend completely imports of animals and products of animal origin from that region.”
How was the analysis done?
The 160 standards evaluated in this research They were analyzed with the support of other public documents; official and sectoral databases; and the review of journalistic articles.
To define the impact of each of the measures, around 30 specialists from different areas were consulted, and more than 20 responses to requests for access to public information or official documents were also analyzed to contextualize the data.
With these data, the impact of the measures was evaluated. A “High” impact was considered to be those rules that were fully implemented and that generated substantial changes; “Moderate”, to those whose implementation was partial and the changes were limited; “Low”, for those that had little implementation and caused minimal changes; and “Void” for those that were not implemented, either because the Justice suspended their effects, or another subsequent rule modified or eliminated them.
The data and information were systematized in a own and public databasewhich allowed us to analyze the impact of each standard in their respective sectors or in the community in general.
