Government

Netherlands to Cut 25,000 Civil Service Jobs in A.I. Push

co-produced by AI27. October 2026, 07:19

The Binnenhof, seat of the Dutch government and parliament in The Hague — The Binnenhof in The Hague, seat of the Dutch government and parliament. © Stephan van de Schootbrugge on Unsplash

A leaner state, by design: The Dutch government plans to shrink its central administration by an estimated 25,000 full-time positions over the coming years. Eric van der Burg, the state secretary in charge, announced the plan in a letter to Parliament on Monday, the government said on rijksoverheid.nl. The administration is to become “simpler, smarter and smaller,” and artificial intelligence is meant to play a central role.

The Key Points of the Plan

Job cuts: About 25,000 full-time positions are to be eliminated over several years. With roughly 170,000 civil servants in the central administration, that is about one in seven jobs.
Savings: The administration must save €900 million in 2027, rising to €3.5 billion a year from 2035.
Exemptions: The police and the military are exempt from the cuts.
A.I.: In the first quarter of 2027, the government plans to present concrete targets and savings plans for using A.I. to work more productively.
Offices: There will be only one workstation for every two employees, and surplus buildings will be sold.
Advisory bodies: The number of 28 permanent advisory councils and about 150 advisory committees will be cut sharply, as will the roughly 400 policy evaluations conducted each year.

Mr. van der Burg said the government could not keep doing things the way it always had, arguing that too many rules, exceptions and procedures made it needlessly hard to solve problems.

Fewer Rules, One Point of Contact

Alongside the job cuts, the government is betting on deregulation. At least 500 rules a year are to be scrapped or simplified. The government is also studying a reversal of the burden of proof modeled on Germany: Each ministry would have to show that a rule is still needed, or it would lapse. Citizens and businesses are meant to experience the government as a single point of contact, and agencies such as the tax authority and the chamber of commerce are to be allowed to share data more easily. The government wants to draft a legal framework for that within two years.

Details on how the cuts will be distributed are due in the spring budget. A commission on the future of the civil service is also expected to present its proposals within six months.

Who Is Behind the Cuts

The plan comes from the political center. Since February, the Netherlands has been governed by the cabinet of Prime Minister Rob Jetten, who at 38 is the youngest head of government in the country’s history. His social-liberal party, D66, narrowly won the October 2025 election ahead of Geert Wilders’s far-right Party for Freedom. Mr. Jetten governs with the center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) and the Christian Democrats (CDA). Mr. van der Burg, who is leading the overhaul of the civil service, is a member of the VVD.

The coalition does not have a majority of its own: D66, the VVD and the CDA together hold only 66 of the 150 seats in Parliament, according to an analysis by the Hanns Seidel Foundation. The minority government needs opposition votes for every initiative. Its program calls for more spending on defense, education and agriculture, financed in part by billions in savings on health care and social insurance, and it aims to keep the deficit below 2 percent through 2030. The center-left opposition alliance of GreenLeft and Labor has been the fiercest critic of the welfare cuts.

A.I. as a Cost Lever, and the Doubts

The Netherlands is not alone. Companies are also increasingly turning to A.I. to cut staff; Microsoft recently offered buyouts to about 60,000 employees, and Deutsche Telekom aims to save about €2.5 billion with A.I. by 2030.

Whether the math works in the public sector remains to be seen. It is still unclear which tasks A.I. is supposed to take over, since the plans will not arrive until 2027. A government advisory commission has also warned that A.I. will help only if the thicket of rules and checks is cut back at the same time, the Dutch news site DutchNews reported. And the trend has recently gone the other way: The number of civil servants in the central administration rose from 140,000 in 2021 to about 170,000.