The Dutch government has a DOGE-style plan to cut 25,000 jobs. Will it work?

European countries are feeling the fiscal pressure. Eleven out of the 27 E.U. member states had budget deficits of at least 3 percent of GDP last year, breaching the bloc’s maximum threshold. One country says it intends to fix its budgetary woes by slashing government jobs.

Last week, the Netherlands announced a plan to cut 25,000 full-time government jobs over the next decade, reducing its public workforce by about 16 percent. The Dutch hope to cut 900 million euros (more than $1 billion) in central government spending by next year, and 3.5 billion euros (about $3.9 billion) by 2035. The government aims to make these spending reductions through a combination of layoffs, deregulation, and improvements in productivity, including the use of AI.

“We cannot keep doing what we have been doing,” announced State Secretary Eric van der Burg. “With too many rules, exceptions, and procedures, we sometimes make it unnecessarily difficult for ourselves to solve problems. Yet residents and businesses should be able to count on a government that does what is necessary.”

“We are going to make tough choices for a central government that really works: simpler, smarter, and smaller.”

In a 15-page letter to the Dutch Parliament, Van der Burg outlined just how bloated the central government has gotten. From 2018 through 2025, the size of its civil service increased by 41 percent; about 46,500 full-time jobs were added. From 2019 through 2025, policy and support staff increased by 56 percent, inspection staff by 48 percent, and staff responsible for government programs by 28 percent. Under the new plans, many departments could see staffing reductions of anywhere from 20 to 60 percent, according to the letter.

The government also wants to eliminate or simplify at least 500 regulations annually, reduce its 28 permanent advisory councils and 150 advisory committees, and dramatically cut back on the roughly 400 policy evaluations conducted each year. It plans to reduce office space to one workstation for every two civil servants, and it intends to review its sprawling collection of nearly 1,700 government websites.

The government also wants to deploy AI more widely across the civil service, and to fundamentally redesign administrative processes to improve productivity. How it will deliver those savings remains unclear; it is expected to publish detailed plans for deploying AI to improve public-sector productivity in early 2027, followed by a broader strategy for restructuring the civil service by April.

The Dutch plan does not say anything about reining in the broader growth in public expenditure in the country. In 2025, public spending as a proportion of GDP was 45.2 percent, up from 42.4 percent in 2018. As is many European countries, a significant source of spending pressures comes from age-related expenditure, such as state pensions. With the number of people receiving these pensions growing, and with spending on healthcare and long-term care on the rise, this problem will likely continue without of a change in policy.

These proposals have attracted criticism. Arjan Noorlander, a Dutch political correspondent, argued in Nieuwsuur that politicians themselves are responsible for much of the administrative burden, with Parliament’s 17 political groups continually submitting questions, motions, and demands that generate additional work for civil servants. He argued that the government has “no concrete plan” to cut 3.5 billion euros, and that it is simply “building castles in the air.” The plans, he said, are “a false promise.”

Indeed, as the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has shown, simply reducing the public sector’s headcount is not necessarily enough to reduce overall government spending. Although Elon Musk initially promised to slash federal spending by as much as $2 trillion, DOGE ultimately claimed just $170 billion in savings, a figure that has itself been questioned. As Reason‘s Eric Boehm wrote last year, DOGE failed because it focused more on cutting the federal workforce than cutting government expenditures, such as entitlements. (Ironically, DOGE itself was at least partially responsible for the increase in paid administrative leave last year. In 2025, federal employees were paid $9.5 billion not to work, a 435 percent increase from 2023.)

Conversely, Argentinian President Javier Milei actually did target programs like public sector pensions. He was able to cut government spending from 20.04 percent of GDP in 2023 to 14.53 percent in 2025.

The Netherlands is right to want to break away from Europe’s fiscal spiral, and its plans to reduce the government workforce and the regulatory burden are encouraging. But it won’t be enough without fundamentally rethinking the role of the state.