Dutch Plan 25,000 Civil Service Job Cuts With AI

The Dutch cabinet has done the honest thing and published the destination before the map. Twenty-five thousand full-time central government posts are going — about 16% of the total — and the savings arrive on a schedule: €900 million in 2027, climbing to €3.5 billion a year from 2035. Meanwhile the concrete AI targets will follow in the first quarter of 2027. So the letters go out before anyone has written down what the software is meant to do. That isn't workforce planning; it's a slide deck with a headcount.

"AI is one tool among several," the cabinet says, the several being standard IT systems, simpler rules and fewer advisory bodies. Which is the tell. Strip the three-card trick and the saving is almost certainly "we stopped commissioning consultants and stopped writing quite so many circulars" — but AI is the word that gets the press release and the future tense. Then there's the exemption list: police and defence keep their people. The two departments where a bad afternoon means a body or a border are precisely the two the cabinet has declined to hand to a model. Admirable caution, or an accidental confession.

And then the arithmetic: €3.5 billion a year from 2035, nine years of compound optimism applied to a technology that requires a human to check whether it has counted the letters in "strawberry" correctly. Somewhere in The Hague an official is drafting the memo that justifies all this and will, one assumes, be among the 25,000. The Dutch have a word for this sort of arrangement and it is invariably longer than the plan. Meanwhile the "concrete AI targets" land in the first quarter of 2027 — a clean, respectable deadline that arrives comfortably after the savings have started being booked. Everyone gets a number to point at, nobody has to say what the machine actually does, and the €900 million is already in the spreadsheet.