A few weeks ago, I attended the commencement ceremony of the University of Puerto Rico’s Río Piedras campus. One figure was omnipresent throughout the ceremony: the federally appointed Fiscal Control Board, whose enabling federal law, PROMESA, recently marked its 10th anniversary. Speech after speech emphasized how this anti-democratic body, imposed by the United States’ president and Congress, aimed its austerity cannons at the public education system from the beginning. At the graduation, student and academic leaders denounced the board’s demands for budget cuts, which have left the university system with barely half the public funding it had been allocated to operate before PROMESA.
During the ceremony, I kept thinking about how we should have the right to know why the Board has chosen to strip the university of its resources. Beyond the worn-out public explanations about the stability of UPR pensions or the need for the system to become more “self-sufficient,” we have the right to know how certain public policy decisions are prioritized over others. Who takes part in these decision-making processes? What data did they use to justify what has been done? Which board consultants are pushing a particular governance or fiscal model? Why do they ignore serious economic studies that question the “inevitable” cuts? In short, as thousands of young people filed past in their gowns, I could not stop thinking that we have the right to demand real and effective accountability for the Board’s management of the neoliberal policies it imposes on the University and the rest of Puerto Rico.
Those questions, however, are unlikely to be answered. In 2023, after a lawsuit filed by the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo to gain access to the board’s communications with public officials, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Fiscal Control Board has “sovereign immunity.” As a result of that decision, which the Court did not justify, the Board has no legal obligation to abide by our constitutional right of access to information. That is a power not even President Donald Trump, the Central Intelligence Agency or the Federal Bureau of Investigation can claim. At a minimum, they are required to respond to information requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which also does not apply to the Board.
That judicial decision makes sense only under a colonial logic that, legally, exists solely because of the perverse territorial clause of the U.S. Constitution. As professor Efrén Rivera Ramos has noted, the Board now stands as the most authoritarian governing entity Puerto Rico has had since the military government that ended in 1900.
We have seen the implications of this lack of transparency in many other decisions the Board has imposed, which have had profound consequences for Puerto Rico. It is not only about the cuts to the UPR. The Board also endorsed the privatization of the electric power system and has sided with LUMA Energy in the lawsuit the government filed to cancel its contract. Are the interests of Puerto Ricans what drive those Board decisions? I doubt it.
Likewise, the Board challenged in court a labor reform that expanded rights and benefits for private-sector workers and recently said it did not oppose eliminating the Minimum Wage Evaluation Commission. Is it a coincidence that the Board finds fiscal problems in measures that protect workers, but not in those that dismantle their working conditions? It is evident that the entity has a defined neoliberal socioeconomic policy vision that favors certain economic interests over others. It takes positions and makes determinations that affect the entire country, but does so outside the democratic deliberative process and without civil society’s participation.
The Board has frequently and creatively used the “legislative veto” powers granted to it by PROMESA. In a report published this month, the Puerto Rico League of Cities documented more than 90 instances in which the board has intervened in the country’s legislative process to block or nullify laws that had been approved. We are talking about objections that have reached practically every area of public life in the country: from the size of a classroom and a nurse’s salary to pension cuts and the structure of government agencies. What is this zeal to operate, in effect, as a supreme branch of government without having to answer to anyone? Are they our imperial masters?
Faced with this lack of government transparency, the 10th anniversary of PROMESA requires us to reflect, for example, on the investigations the CPI published between 2018 and 2019 in the series “The Board’s Emails,” in which it analyzed more than 18,000 pages of internal emails that the fiscal entity did have to disclose before invoking its “sovereign immunity” in court.
In those emails, the CPI showed that there was direct and constant coordination on decision-making about Puerto Rico between Board members and federal officials in Washington, particularly with the Treasury Department and congressional offices. Many proposals presented publicly as final, technical determinations on fiscal policy had already been discussed within federal entities.
The documents examined also revealed conflicts of interest in the debt restructuring process. For example, consulting firms such as McKinsey were advising both the fiscal entity and creditors during negotiations with bondholders. After that story was published, the Board conducted an internal investigation, and although a report “exonerated” the consulting firm, PROMESA was amended in 2022 to require greater conflict-of-interest controls.
The CPI confirmed in emails that Republican members of Congress took steps to promote the privatization of Puerto Rico’s electric power system just weeks after Hurricane Maria. Experts said the unethical intervention bordered on a subtle act of corruption, given that those members of Congress had received donations from the energy industry.
Taken together, these findings revealed a consistent but hardly surprising pattern within the colonial reality: Decisions that affect Puerto Rico’s economic and political future have always been made under strong U.S. influence, without the participation of Puerto Ricans and, in this case, outside public view. The sovereign immunity the court said in 2023 protects the board remains in effect. The communications we do know about are only a fraction of the decisions made behind closed doors in recent years, including those mentioned earlier.
A few days ago, we learned about the apparent lack of agreement between the governor and the Legislature over the revised budget for fiscal year 2026, and that the Board had unilaterally approved its own version. This created confusion in the country over the effect that difference would have on PROMESA’s requirement that Puerto Rico achieve four consecutive balanced budgets for the Board to leave. One would not want to think the Board is deliberately seeking ways to remain in power indefinitely.
I return again to the UPR commencement ceremony and ask myself: What would the emails we do not have say? With which federal and private actors might board members have discussed decisions before discussing them with the local government? Ten years after PROMESA, the young people graduating now are paying the price of decisions that neither they nor the rest of us have been able to evaluate or scrutinize. A decade into the Board’s existence, that way of governing without accountability has been normalized.
This translation was generated with the assistance of AI and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and clarity.
