José Guerra, a member of the opposition-controlled National Assembly, said on Twitter that the appointment showed that the country “is in bad hands, that there is no planning for important positions.”

The state-owned company has lost some of its most experienced managers through firings, imprisonments and emigration in recent years, and some analysts said that the ceding of control to military officers might accelerate the flight of talent.

The reshuffling at the top of Venezuela’s energy sector came a week after Mr. Maduro’s attorney general announced the arrest on corruption charges of the acting president and five senior executives at Citgo, the United States refining subsidiary of Pdvsa.

The company has directed its employees to cut costs in half as it faces possible default on billions of dollars in bond debt.

Shannon K. O’Neil, a Latin America analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations, said, “Quevedo’s appointment can’t be good for stopping the current production declines.”

“What it does is ensure military loyalists are now in charge not just of food distribution but also now of oil — the two main levers of power in Venezuela’s shrinking economy,” she said. “Despite Maduro’s rhetoric, this choice was all about political power and control, not the revitalization of production.”

The Maduro administration, seeking to ease Venezuela’s dizzying economic crisis, is trying to restructure Venezuela’s $63 billion in bonds, most of them issued by the government and Pdvsa. Debt payments have helped drain the government’s coffers of foreign currency that might otherwise be used to import food, medicine and other critical imports.