Indonesia's government is rewriting some of its core financial laws, and the first question investors and credit analysts asked was the obvious one: is President Prabowo Subianto about to remove the guardrails on how much the country can borrow?

The short answer, according to a senior lawmaker, is not yet.

Mukhamad Misbakhun, who heads parliament's financial commission, told reporters on Monday that lawmakers will soon begin drafting an omnibus revision to several financial laws at once. Asked directly whether the country's deficit limits are on the table, he said: "We are not heading into that situation yet."

That's a careful phrase. Not "no." Not "never." Just: not now.

What the bill actually does

Indonesia currently caps its annual budget deficit at 3% of gross domestic product and its total public debt at 60% of GDP. Those rules have acted as a credibility anchor for the country's finances for years, signaling to foreign investors that Indonesia won't borrow its way into a crisis.

The revision Misbakhun described has a narrower, but still significant, purpose. It would shift the legal owner of state investments away from the finance minister and hand that role to Danantara, the sovereign wealth fund Prabowo launched in February of last year. Danantara already manages all of Indonesia's state-owned companies, which together hold assets of more than $900 billion.

Under the proposed changes, dividends from those state companies would flow to Danantara rather than into the government's general budget. That's money that currently shows up as public revenue and helps keep the official deficit number within legal limits. Moving it to a separate fund changes the accounting in ways that analysts will scrutinize carefully.

Danantara has also been given a mandate to become the sole exporter of Indonesia's strategic commodities, starting with coal, palm oil, and ferroalloys. The fund is not a peripheral experiment. It is becoming a central pillar of how Indonesia manages its industrial and financial assets.

Why markets are watching this closely

Two credit rating agencies have already revised their outlook on Indonesia's debt this year, citing concern that Prabowo's ambitious spending plans could eventually push toward loosening the fiscal rules. Fitch Ratings specifically flagged potential changes to the deficit and debt limits as a factor in its outlook revision.

Prabowo has set a target of 8% annual economic growth within his presidential term. That's an aggressive number, roughly double the pace Indonesia has sustained in recent years, and achieving it through public investment would require spending at a scale that current rules may not easily accommodate.

The omnibus bill won't move forward immediately. Parliament's financial commission plans to finish a separate revision first, one expanding the central bank's mandate to more actively support economic growth. The sovereign wealth fund bill follows after that.

So the deficit ceiling survives this round. But the architecture around it is changing. Dividends that once counted as government income are being rerouted. The legal structure of state ownership is being redrawn. Each of those changes is individually defensible as a technical update. Together, they give Danantara more resources, more autonomy, and more economic power over sectors that ordinary Indonesians depend on, from the energy embedded in coal exports to the cooking oil refined from palm.

The 3% ceiling is still standing. What it's measuring, though, is slowly being rearranged around it.