The senator Rogério Marinho (PL-RN), leader of the opposition in the Federal Senate, sent a representation to the TCU (Union Court of Auditors) requesting that an emergency audit be carried out to investigate the public spending by the federal government on advertising campaigns about the end of the 6×1 work schedule. The document was presented this Tuesday (23).
“There is evidence that the advertising campaign was structured not to inform the population, but to defend a specific political flag of the Federal Government, directly associated with the agenda of the President of the Republic, its support base and clearly electoral character”, points out the parliamentarian in the request. As , target of the senator’s requests, who also requests the application of appropriate sanctions.
In addition to the audit, Rogério Marinho asks the TCU to investigate the “existence of a legitimate reason for this electoral expenditure” and “request information regarding advertising expenditure in the first 6 months of the year 2026”. The senator claims that the campaign has an electoral impact as reducing working hours is “a topic of great popular appeal”.
In the parliamentarian’s view, this type of communication, when financed by public resources, can violate impersonality because it personalizes an agenda, transforms institutional advertising into an electoral agenda and unbalances the
A CNN requested a position from Secom on the topic, but so far has not received a response.
MP’s questioning
Last week, a representation from the Public Ministry requested that the Court investigate the use of R$80 million in public resources allocated to the communication campaign to end the 6×1 work schedule. The request was presented by Deputy Attorney General Lucas Rocha Furtado, who also requests the analysis of a possible precautionary suspension of advertising.
In the representation, Furtado argues that the campaign launched by the federal government to promote the proposal to reduce working hours has characteristics similar to those that led the TCU to suspend, in 2019, an advertisement by the then government Jair Bolsonaro (PL) about the so-called “anti-crime package“.
According to the prosecutor, the Court considered at the time that there was not sufficient public interest to justify the use of public resources in the dissemination of a legislative proposal that was still being processed in the National Congress. The understanding was that advertising went beyond the merely informative character and came closer to promoting a political agenda.
Now, the representative of the Public Ministry maintains that the campaign to end the 6×1 scale also deals with a matter that has not yet completed its legislative processing. Although the proposal was approved by the Chamber of Deputies, it still needs to be analyzed by the Senate to come into force.
The document mentions that Secom (Secretariat of Social Communication of the Presidency of the Republic) had allocated around R$80 million for the campaign, an amount eight times higher than the approximately R$10 million estimated for advertising the anti-crime package that was suspended in 2019.
