Why do they need reserves? Abolish all federal obligations. Let the exporters accept only USD for their goods and allow them to figure out how it gets distributed through the Argentinian economy.
Note, India has its own currency and was able to print alternative notes. However, because the government, against all the advice from its economists decided to do this in secret, it did not have enough of the new notes to replace the old notes for at least a few months after making this decision.
This simple act, which only involved replacing old notes with new ones, in a currency that the Indian government controlled, led conservatively to tens of thousands of deaths, arrested economic growth in a fast growing country immediately, destroyed hundreds of thousands of businesses, and set the economy back conservatively by 5-10 years, although the significantly reduced growth in the subsequent years since (at least until the pandemic...it's likely the pandemic where India enforced amongst the strictest lockdowns in the world would have reset the economies in both cases) probably has a continued compounding effect on economic growth.
Of course, a large part of the damage to India was a result of the massive size of the informal sector relative to most other countries in the world and Argentine may not be anything like that, but I think it's a very relative comparison as to how easily such a transition can go bad if not handled extremely carefully.
Yet Modi is still in office. Amazing.
this would result in the country having no money to pay for a proper functioning goverment.
who is going to pay all govermental employees? the police, the army etc if the country has no reserve currency?
1. Retirements funds 2. Health care 3. Education
No program that seriously contemplates cost reductions can do without cutting back with these. Guess who the beneficiaries of these expenses are.
If Argentina actually had honest exchange rates they would have about the right reserves. However they are using a false rate for most and so switching will force them to use the real rates which would devalue specific things. (They have export restrictions on many products because they can't control the exchange rate)