Netherlands Plans to Cut 25,000 Civil Service Jobs by 2035 as It Bets on AI to Save €3.5 Billion a Year

The Dutch government has put a number on how far artificial intelligence will shrink its bureaucracy: about 25,000 full-time civil service jobs, or roughly one in six of today's central government posts, by 2035. In a letter to parliament sent on October 26, State Secretary for Effective Government Eric van den Burg laid out savings targets of €900 million a year by 2027, rising to €3.5 billion a year from 2035, with AI named as one of the main levers for doing the same work with fewer people.

The scale of the plan is striking against the background of the past decade. The Dutch central civil service grew to a record 160,016 full-time equivalents at the end of 2025, up 41 percent from 2018, despite successive cabinets promising to slim it down. Van den Burg said the government "cannot keep doing what we have been doing" and would make tough choices for a central government that is "simpler, smarter, and smaller."

The cuts will not fall evenly. Police, defense, the prison service, the security services and the public prosecutor's office are exempt. But ministries, inspectorates and implementing agencies — including the tax office, the benefits agency UWV and the immigration service IND — face the deepest reductions. Some organizations are looking at staffing cuts of around 20 percent, others 45 percent, and one agency as much as 60 percent as temporary budgets expire.

AI is framed as a productivity lever rather than an immediate replacement program. The cabinet will present concrete targets "for using AI to work more productively" in the first quarter of 2027, responding to parliamentary motions calling for a 20 percent productivity gain through AI. AI projects already run in several parts of the government, and the letter says the aim is to apply AI "ever more broadly," within limits on security, data quality and sovereignty. Procurement will be systematically screened for tasks AI could take over, with a preference for Dutch and European suppliers to avoid dependence on non-European technology.

The plan pairs the AI push with structural austerity: at least 500 rules scrapped or simplified every year, a sharp reduction in the government's 28 standing advisory councils and roughly 150 advisory committees, standardized IT systems across departments, and an office standard of one desk for every two employees. Officials will also question whether each departing civil servant should be replaced at all, and reduce reliance on expensive external contractors.

The Netherlands is not acting from crisis — its budget deficit of 1.8 percent is among the smallest in the EU — but from a fiscal-conservative conviction that the state should not keep growing. The country's economic forecaster CPB estimates general efficiency gains of 0.5 percent a year, which the government says covers only about a third of the target, meaning real cuts to what the state does, not just how it does it, are still to come.

For the AI industry, the Dutch letter is a signal of where public-sector demand is heading: not chatbots, but document processing, citizen-service automation and back-office agents deployed at the scale of an entire national government. A multiyear implementation plan is due within six months, with details in the spring budget memorandum. If the targets hold, the Netherlands will become one of the first European countries to formally tie a five-figure share of its public workforce to AI-driven productivity — and every European government watching will be taking notes.