President Javier Milei's government has installed a technologist atop its innovation policy apparatus at the exact moment that apparatus lost most of its regulatory reach. Decree 730/2026, published in the Boletín Oficial on August 13, 2026 and signed by Milei and Chief of Staff Diego Santilli, names Adriana Baravalle as Secretary of Innovation, Science and Technology, replacing Darío Genua, whose resignation had been accepted effective July 27, 2026.
Baravalle is not a party operative. She holds a doctorate in artificial intelligence from American Andragogy University, a master's in data science from Universidad Austral — where she spent more than two decades on faculty and directed the Laboratory of Exponential Technologies — and is completing a doctorate in engineering there, according to La Nación. Her research focus is post-quantum cryptography and critical-infrastructure security, and she founded synapsIA, a regional network of Latin American AI specialists. She was brought to Santilli's attention by Globant CEO Martín Migoya, per Infobae — a private-sector pipeline into government that, on its face, is a better sourcing model for tech policy than the usual party-list appointment.
A secretariat with less to run
The appointment lands three weeks after a separate restructuring of the Chief of Staff's office. Decree 581/2026, published July 13, 2026, eliminated the Interior Ministry and split the Chief of Staff role into two vice-chiefs. According to reporting from Infobae and lu17, the same reshuffle pulled ENaCom, the telecom and spectrum regulator, and the AAIP, the Agency for Access to Public Information — which also enforces Argentina's personal-data-protection law — out of the Innovation Secretariat and placed them under Santilli's direct, personal authority. Arsat, the state satellite operator, and the postal service Correo Argentino went to Vice Chief Gustavo Coria instead. Genua, who was seen as aligned with presidential advisor Santiago Caputo, was left overseeing little beyond a satellite-vehicle program before his ouster; the reshuffle read, to most Argentine outlets, as a Caputo-versus-Santilli power move as much as an administrative one.
The practical result: Baravalle inherits a secretariat that sets AI and science policy but no longer regulates the sectors that policy touches. It can propose; it cannot license a spectrum band or rule on a data-protection complaint. Those levers now sit inside the Chief of Staff's own office.
The case for centralizing — and its limits
There's a real efficiency argument here. Milei's government has moved fast on tech policy — most visibly Milei's Financial Times op-ed pitching Argentina as a haven for AI investment through a new "non-human corporation" category and a commitment to keep AI free of "premature" regulation. Coordinating spectrum policy, data governance, and AI strategy under one accountable office, rather than across competing secretariats with their own turf incentives, is a defensible way to keep an ambitious agenda from stalling in bureaucratic friction — and previous governments' sprawl of semi-autonomous agencies is exactly the kind of overlap Milei was elected to cut.
But the AAIP isn't just another program office. Since its creation under Law 27,275 in 2016, it has operated as an ente autárquico — an autonomous body with functional independence precisely because part of its job is ruling on public-information and data-protection complaints against the executive branch itself. Global norms for data-protection authorities, from the EU's GDPR to the OECD's privacy guidelines, converge on the same design principle for the same reason: a regulator that polices how the government handles citizens' data loses credibility the moment it reports directly into the political office it may need to rule against. Folding the AAIP into the Chief of Staff's personal chain of command, alongside the telecom regulator, trades that buffer for speed.
That trade-off cuts against the light-touch-but-credible model this publication generally favors. Proportionate regulation doesn't mean no regulation — it means rules that are predictable, evidence-based, and insulated enough from daily politics that businesses and citizens can trust an enforcement decision is about the law, not the cabinet's internal balance of power. Milei's AI strategy is betting foreign investors will read Argentina as a jurisdiction with legal certainty; a data-protection regulator that answers to whichever advisor currently controls the Chief of Staff's office is a harder sell on that point than the deregulation pitch alone would suggest.
Baravalle's technical credentials are a genuine upgrade over a policy operative running AI strategy, and Argentina's innovation ambitions benefit from that kind of expertise at the table. The open question is whether the institutions meant to check that ambition — spectrum licensing, data-protection enforcement — stay credible once they're managed as instruments of cabinet politics rather than independent regulators. Baravalle will write Argentina's AI policy. She won't referee it.