Brazil has become reasonably adept at reforming everyone else. It has privatized companies, overhauled pensions, loosened labor laws, introduced fiscal rules and redesigned the tax system. What it has yet to do is apply the same reformist zeal to the powerful groups embedded within the state itself.
The justice system offers the clearest example of this resistance. A study by the Justa research center, first reported by Brazil Journal, found that Brazilian states spent R$94 billion in 2024 on state courts, prosecutors’ offices and public defenders’ offices. About 67% went to personnel costs. In Rondônia, these institutions absorbed the equivalent of 12.8% of the state budget.
The problem is not that Brazil has a strong, independent and well-paid judiciary. Democracies need one. The problem arises when autonomy — designed to protect judges and prosecutors from political pressure — is turned into institutional leverage to expand budgets, create benefits and negotiate funding with the very officials these bodies are supposed to oversee.
Governors control state coffers. Courts rule on their actions. Prosecutors can bring cases against them. Public defenders can force their administrations to provide constitutionally mandated services. When the leaders of these institutions negotiate additional funding directly with the executive branch, a two-way dependency emerges: the watchdog needs money from the government it oversees, while the government has an interest in avoiding conflict with those who can make its life difficult.
There is no need to imagine an explicit conspiracy. The incentives are enough. Court presidents, chief prosecutors and chief public defenders are selected through internal processes in which promises to secure pay raises, bonuses and new benefits help build support. Delivering on those promises requires negotiating with the government. Institutional independence becomes subordinate to competition for corporate privileges.
The same logic applies to the armed forces, which have preserved a separate pension system, and to elite careers in the executive and legislative branches, where bonuses and payments classified as reimbursements can become a permanent layer of compensation. It would be wrong to treat public servants as a homogeneous bloc: teachers, nurses, police officers and municipal employees are often poorly paid. The biggest advantages are concentrated precisely among the careers with the greatest access to decision-makers.
This helps explain why administrative reform almost always begins with lower-ranking employees or people who have yet to enter public service — never with those already protected. Acquired rights, budgetary autonomy, organizing power, access to the courts and influence over Congress form successive lines of defense. The result is reform diluted by exemptions and largely unable to reach the top.
The answer is not to appeal for moderation, but to change the incentives. Additional funding for autonomous institutions should require a specific legislative vote, with a clearly identified funding source and a long-term cost estimate. Payments classified as reimbursements should correspond to documented expenses, while all compensation should be disclosed through a single, standardized and comparable database.
Special pension systems, including the military regime, should disclose their costs and actuarial deficits. New benefits should be funded from each institution’s existing budget, making clear which investment, hiring plan or public service will be sacrificed to pay for them. Those who grant a benefit must face its cost; those who receive it must accept scrutiny.
Public-sector corporatism thrives because it concentrates benefits, spreads costs across society and conceals decisions. As long as each career group can capture the upside and pass the bill to everyone else, demanding more will remain rational. Reforming the state requires making those choices visible, contestable and costly for the people who make them.
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