Reduce staff numbers and impose a “culture of evaluation”… What Michel Barnier is preparing for civil servants

This chestnut tree had disappeared from political speeches. But in these times of budgetary scarcity, it is discreetly returning to the table. While the government seeks to make some 60 billion euros in savings in the budget for 2025 – including 40 billion euros in state spending – the civil service could be one of the targets chosen to cut back on the costs. More concretely, Bercy is being told that the finance bill for 2025 could cut into the number of civil servants.

It is therefore a change of direction that the government of Michel Barnier seems to be making. Because if Emmanuel Macron had certainly planned the elimination of 120,000 civil servant positions during the 2017 presidential campaign, the promise disappeared in 2022. On the contrary, the year of his re-election, France had 178,000 more public employees than in his arrival at the Élysée, including 96,000 in the state civil service. Even more, last spring, the entourage of the then Minister of the Civil Service, Stanislas Guerini, argued that there had been on the government’s side “an awareness of the need to strengthen the efficiency of public services, and this requires an increase in staff numbers”.