This work aims to analyze the intergovernmental cooperation between the federal government and the state government of Rio de Janeiro in the period from 2007 to 2016. Such cooperation was the result of a historical context - and specific political conditions - in which a national political alliance was possible between PMDB and PT. Since the move of the capital to Brasília, in 1960, culminating in the merger of Guanabara-State of Rio de Janeiro, in 1975, it was imperative for the new state to reposition itself in the national federative game, which gained new dynamics with the redemocratization and with the environment inaugurated by the 1988 Constitution. The rise of the PMDB to the government of the state of Rio de Janeiro, in the 2000s, with the Sérgio Cabral Government, mobilized positive expectations, given the possibility of different treatment by the federal government, with favorable repercussions in the investments in infrastructure, social areas and public security. However, cooperation between the two federal levels has shown its limitations over time. On the political level, the partnership showed signs of exhaustion as of the 2014 election, with the rupture of the state alliance between the PMDB and the PT, and more effectively with the end of the Dilma Rousseff government, indicating its cyclical nature. In addition, problems of administrative impropriety within the scope of the state government, revealed in recent years, have shown the permanence of old and reprehensible political practices, and the absence of more effective control mechanisms in carrying out public works. At the economic level, the research showed evidence that intergovernmental cooperation did not build, in the period from 2007 to 2016, the necessary conditions for the state of Rio de Janeiro to make sustainable the good moment of development that it experienced at the beginning of the partnership, and also little has changed the reduced fiscal autonomy of the state of Rio de Janeiro, close to the states most dependent on the federal government, which largely explains the collapse of public accounts in June 2016.