Overview
- Alejandro Vilches submitted his immediate resignation in a note to Health Minister Mario Lugones, a decision that was made public Monday and described by Vilches as for “strictly personal reasons.”
- His departure leaves a vacancy at the Secretaría Nacional de Discapacidad at a sensitive moment in budget talks and removes the official who had led recent normalization efforts in the agency.
- The draft Presupuesto 2027 included technical but consequential changes to the disability regime, notably altering pension conditions, changing the benefit scheme and proposing the removal of automatic updates to disability payments.
- Those provisions provoked objections from coalition allies, including Senator Patricia Bullrich who said she was not consulted, prompting the government to announce it will withdraw the contested articles and work on a revised "proyecto superador" with partners.
- The dispute risks delaying congressional approval of the budget and could directly affect beneficiaries if automatic indexation and financing rules are altered, while Vilches’s short tenure — he was appointed on Jan. 23, 2026 and testified to the Diputados disability commission less than three weeks ago — underscores the political strain on the portfolio.