Buenos Aires, March 3 (NA) – With the reform of the Glacier Law as the top priority for the start of the parliamentary year in the Chamber of Deputies, the ruling party has put on hold the new University Funding and Teacher Salary Recomposition bill. This bill aims to replace the law that the opposition voted for and managed to enact last year, despite the government's refusal to implement it. "I don't see the debate accelerating," high-ranking parliamentary sources from the ruling coalition told the Noticias Argentinas agency. In the coming weeks, the ruling coalition's machinery in the Chamber of Deputies will fully focus on turning the Glacier Law reform into law, which already has Senate approval. President Javier Milei will use this law to try to attract international investors at the “Argentina Week” event, which will take place next week in New York. According to this order of priorities, the government has cooled on an issue that, once its treatment begins, will mobilize the university community, which has a tradition of struggle in Argentina and threatens to carry out large-scale forceful actions. "He was warming up on the bench to get into the game, but they sent him to sit down," a Libertarian deputy, unaware of the timeline the government wants to follow on this issue in Congress, summarized to the NA agency with a football analogy. The vicissitudes of the University Funding Law In December, the National Interuniversity Council (CIN), which brings together more than 40 rectors of public universities, filed an injunction for the government's non-compliance with Law 27.795, and federal judge Enrique Cormick issued a precautionary measure suspending the Executive's decree that enacted the law but suspended its application until Congress specified the funding sources. To avoid judicial troubles that could cause budgetary management hiccups, since there is a law in force that the government resists implementing, it decided to send its own University Funding project with much more modest salary recomposition parameters than those in Law 27.795, passed by the opposition. This is because the project the ruling party seeks to consolidate recovers the real salary lost by teaching and non-teaching staff at university institutions during 2025, but it validates the phenomenal cut that occurred in 2024. In the text sent to Congress, the Executive explains this intention with a euphemism to disguise the adjustment: it states that the objective of the proposed norm is to "harmonize the funding needs of National Universities" with "the real possibilities of funding". This will be the third time during Milei's term that a university funding bill will be debated, with a key difference that favors the ruling coalition in 2026. With the parliamentary turnover, the balance of forces in both chambers has changed, and La Libertad Avanza has gained significant ground, to the point that since December it has been building majorities that allow it to achieve its goals. If in 2024 and with even greater force in 2025 the opposition managed to exert a parliamentary dominance on the university issue, forcing Milei to use his veto (the second time unsuccessfully, as the insistence on its enforcement with a two-thirds majority was achieved), this year the ruling coalition will be able to set its own pace for the discussion and impose its own terms. Key points of the project and the game of differences with the current law Regarding salary recomposition, the government's initiative establishes a staggered update in three tranches of 4.1% (March 1, July 1, and September 1) to recover last year's losses (12.3% in real terms), completely ignoring that the greatest loss of purchasing power occurred in 2024 (around 38%). The current law mandates the recovery of losses since December 1, 2023, as it took into account that the highest inflationary spikes occurred at the end of that year and in the first quarter of 2024. The Casa Rosada project, on the other hand, aims to update the allocations for university operating expenses in 2026 only if inflation exceeds 14.3%, which is "the annual average value used to prepare the 2026 Budget Bill." This means there will be no recomposition of the 2024 and 2025 operating expense allocations, as the current law enacted last year orders. Meanwhile, the new project maintains the obligation to call sectoral negotiations "with a periodicity that cannot exceed 3 calendar months," but it removes the part of the current law that requires them to be held "ensuring in all cases and stages of negotiation a monthly update not lower than the inflation published by INDEC." Regarding funding sources, the Executive's proposal specifies that expenditures will be covered by the corresponding budgetary items for university education, and if that is insufficient, the rest will be taken from Treasury Obligations. The current law, in contrast, states that "the National Executive Branch will allocate budgetary credits to ensure the continuity and efficiency of the services (...) without impacting the distribution of the federal tax-sharing agreement with the provinces or the contributions of the National Treasury," and that the law "may be financed with the increases in current revenues collected above the budgeted (or extended) amounts as income." Another point in the government's project is that it sets a amount of a little over 80 billion pesos ($80.072.460.000) to reinforce allocations for the university health system, regardless of the inflationary dynamics and adjustments in previous years.
