The Dutch government has, for the first time, put a number on how many civil servants it intends to take off the payroll: 25,000 positions by 2035. According to DutchNews.nl, State Secretary Eric van der Burg (VVD) confirmed the figure in a letter to parliament on Monday, tied to a savings target of €3.5 billion a year by 2035 — with standardised IT systems and AI named among the tools expected to make a smaller bureaucracy workable.
The official government announcement, published Monday morning, frames the programme as making the state “simpler, smarter and smaller” (“eenvoudiger, slimmer en kleiner”). Van der Burg’s own words set the tone: “We cannot keep doing what we have been doing. With too many rules, exceptions and procedures, we sometimes make it needlessly difficult to solve problems.”
What is actually being cut
The 25,000 figure covers the national civil service (Rijksoverheid), not the whole public sector, and the cuts will be phased in over the rest of the decade. As international coverage of the announcement notes, the savings ramp from roughly €900 million by next year to the €3.5 billion annual run-rate by 2035. Police and security services are excluded; agencies already under strain, such as the tax office (Belastingdienst) and the benefits agency UWV, are reportedly not spared. Van der Burg has not said which departments will bear the brunt.
Alongside the job cuts, the cabinet wants to reduce the number of advisory bodies (currently 28) and policy evaluation committees (150), scrap at least 500 rules per year, and trial a German-style reversing of the burden of proof for regulation: a ministerial department must demonstrate a rule is still needed, or it lapses. Van der Burg also conceded the uncomfortable part out loud — efficiency alone will not cover the cuts. “Some choices will have to be made regarding what the government should be doing less or not at all,” he wrote.
Notably, the same letter proposes tightening the Woo freedom-of-information law, which Dutch citizens and journalists rely on to probe exactly this kind of restructuring — on the grounds that requests have become too broad to answer.
The wider pattern, and the honest caveat
The Netherlands is not doing anything unprecedented; it is doing it with unusual precision. Estonia has run a lean digital state for two decades, and Dutch outlets had reported in October that AI would help slash the civil service before the number existed. What distinguishes the Dutch plan is that a European welfare-state government is now publicly pricing bureaucratic AI adoption in jobs, not just savings — a figure voters can hold a coalition to. The honesty of Van der Burg’s framing is worth noting too: AI and system standardisation handle some of the reduction, but the number only closes if the state stops doing things. That is a more defensible argument than the usual “the algorithm pays for itself” pitch, and rarer for it.
There is a real failure-mode precedent, though. The Dutch tax authorities’ childcare benefits scandal — in which an automated risk model flagged tens of thousands of families, double-income households and dual nationals among them, driving many into financial ruin — remains the clearest European demonstration of what happens when the state’s zeal for efficiency outruns its accountability. A cabinet that wants fewer civil servants processing fewer requests with more automation, while narrowing the freedom-of-information law its citizens use for oversight, is stacking three risk factors from that playbook onto the same roof. Cutting 25,000 jobs is a policy choice; doing it while weakening transparency is the part that should worry people.
For New Zealand, the mirror is uncomfortable in both directions. This morning we covered Microsoft offering buyouts to 60,000 employees as AI spending reshapes its workforce — a company making the same trade at corporate speed. Public sectors move slower, but they carry obligations markets do not: benefits you cannot opt out of, taxes you cannot shop away from. Wellington’s own approach to AI in the public service has so far been guidance rather than targets — the Ministry for Regulation’s AI guidance from May being the closest local analogue — and no NZ government has dared to name a number of public jobs AI is expected to absorb. The Dutch have at least made their trade-off legible. That legibility is precisely what makes it worth watching: whatever a government promises AI will “absorb”, the test is whether services quietly degrade for the people least able to opt out.
