2025 Budget: The return of the threat of job cuts in the civil service

Click, the alarm clock starts playing, a voice with a familiar ring slips into your ears. It's not Sonny and Cher's I Got You Babe , which wakes Bill Murray every morning in Groundhog Day , but a column, an editorial, or a report guided by an almost daily question: "Are there too many civil servants in France?" A permanent background debate, relaunched this weekend by two ministers preparing the 2026 budget and minds of 40 billion euros in savings.

It was Amélie de Montchalin, the Minister of Public Accounts, who opened the hostilities in a far-right newspaper (the Vincent Bolloré version of the JDD ) by explaining that "the ministries will have to spend less next year than this year," and that, "at this stage, to be very clear, the numbers are not there." While saying she refused a "blind cut," she indicated that she wanted to ask, "ministry by ministry, to review recruitment needs on the one hand and salary increases on the other." But also to "review [the] trend" towards an increase in the number of civil servants. To the point of cutting positions? "We must begin reducing the number of civil servants," added the Minister of the Economy, Eric Lombard, on France Inter on Sunday, specifying that "the numbers are not yet fixed."

Five weeks before the presentation by Prime Minister François Bayrou of his