Lula vetoes LDO provisions that shielded parliamentary amendments

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) vetoed in the 2025 Budget Guidelines Law (LDO) a series of articles approved by Congress that, in practice, shielded parliamentary amendments. One of the provisions, for example, ended up prohibiting the blocking of mandatory amendments, such as individual and bench amendments. For the government, this differentiation would be at odds with the understanding of the Federal Supreme Court (STF), according to which “any rules, restrictions or impediments applicable to the discretionary programming of the Executive Branch apply to parliamentary amendments, and vice versa”.

“So that parliamentary amendments manage to have the same blocking and contingency treatment applicable to any discretionary expenditure of the federal Executive Branch”, wrote the Executive in the justification for vetoing the law, sanctioned and published in the Official Gazette of the Union (DOU) this Tuesday -Friday, 31.

The justification was the same as that given in Lula’s veto to one of the provisions of the complementary law of the fiscal package also published this Tuesday, 31st, which allowed blocking and contingency only of non-mandatory amendments. The Executive’s response comes amid a crisis over the handling of parliamentary amendments, which is stressing relations between the Judiciary, the federal government and the Legislature.

The president also vetoed the provision that established the mandatory execution of individual and bench amendments up to constitutional limits. For the government, the rule, as it is not accompanied by an exception, could be interpreted as limiting the possibility of blocking and reducing these expenses to comply with the fiscal framework.

Another problem identified by the Executive was the prediction according to which the execution of budget programs resulting from amendments should observe the indications of beneficiaries and the order of priorities made by their authors.

“The indication of beneficiaries and the order of priorities by the authors of the amendments, which would otherwise be established according to the parameters and guidelines of each public policy, would reduce flexibility in budget management, which takes into account the execution needs of each policy public”, he stated in justifying the veto, suggested by the Ministries of Finance and Planning.

The vetoes will be analyzed by Congress, which can maintain or overturn them. As Broadcast (Grupo Estado’s real-time news system) showed earlier, Lula also blocked a new calculation for the party fund in the LDO. For the government, the proposal “increases the amount of the Party Fund and compresses the value of other Electoral Justice expenses”, in addition to not being consistent with the fiscal framework.

“The approval of the proposition, which links the amount of Party Fund expenses to the real growth in revenue from previous years, would result in the growth of corresponding expenses at a level higher than the growth of the primary expense limits, provided for in Complementary Law No. 200, of 2023 , which contradicts the provisions of art. 138 of the Transitional Constitutional Provisions Act”, says the message.