Six weeks after being sworn in as Venezuela’s interim president and successor to Nicolás Maduro, Delcy Rodríguez appears to be carving a new path for the country she was appointed to lead after the U.S. capture of its former dictator.
Last week, the state news print publication, Official Gazette, announced major reforms by executive decree in Miraflores, effectively eliminating several key signature social programs instituted under the Chávez regime, and perpetuated under the now-indicted Maduro, who is awaiting trial on trafficking and conspiracy charges in New York City.
Shortly after ascending to office in 1999, Hugo Chávez, the late father of Venezuela’s Marxist Bolivarian movement, put into action a series of grass-roots, community-based social programs that incentivized community organizing and local task forces to coordinate with the central government to help provide local communities their most basic needs.
Years later, mismanagement and government incompetence at the local, state, and national levels undercut these programs while the Chávez government tightened control over the state-owned oil company, the P.D.V.S.A, and reallocated the firm’s revenues to the newly formed social programs as part of the administration’s effort to buy support from the people‘s communales.
When the state’s spending became too bloated, and the P.D.V.S.A.’s oil revenues dried up, Venezuela’s social programs faltered, leaving residents to clean up the pieces.
On February 9, 2026, the Rodríguez government issued executive orders to dismantle several of these key social programs, following through on the acting administration’s renewed effort to normalize relations with the United States and institute democratic norms as Venezuela’s state oil industry appears to liberalize under the thumb of the U.S. State Department under Marco Rubio and the Department of the Treasury under Scott Bessent.
The programs dismantled are listed below:
- The Propatria 2000 Foundation, which was responsible for vital infrastructure projects, was announced to be shelved in accordance with last week’s decree. The foundation underwent chronic corruption allegations under the Chávez and Maduro governments, and was criticized for awarding multi-million dollar contracts to dubious companies with links to the Bolivarian government.
- The Robert Serra Youth Mission Foundation, which promoted workforce training, production, and entrepreneurship projects aimed at young people. The program was criticized by opposition groups as a socialist-backed community organizing body focusing on revitalizing the “Revolutionary Struggle” of Venezuela’s youth population.
Other key programs dismantled by the Rodríguez government include:
- José Félix Ribas Foundation (Fundaribas)
- General-in-Chief Felix Antonio Velasquez Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement Foundation of the Active Reserve, which, enacted in 2016 under Maduro, promoted socio-productive development programs in agri-food, pharmaceutical, and industrial areas; & the Socialist Mission New Frontier of Peace, created in 2015 to address border and security issues.
The reforms follow several high-profile dismissals and replacements at the upper echelons of the interim government in Caracas.
The executive arm of the new post-Maduro government announced that it seeks to reorganize the functioning of the Ministry of the Presidency, and that the new administration “must adapt its organizational structure to the new social guidelines and policies,” in the aftermath of the controversial arrest and capture of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in early January.
The regime is also cooperating with U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who visited Rodríguez in Caracas last week and toured an oil refinery in the nation’s capital, where the secretary called for a new age of U.S.-Venezuelan relations as part of the Trump administration’s agenda to “Make the Americas Great Again.”
Last week, the U.S. Department of the Treasury also issued licenses approving the resumption of oil and gas activities in Venezuela to five major multinational companies on Thursday to help revitalize investments in the South American nation’s crumbling oil infrastructure.
