The Netherlands Wants to Cut 25,000 Government Jobs With AI. It Just Can't Say How Yet.
The Dutch cabinet told parliament on October 26 that it plans to remove 25,000 jobs from the central government payroll by 2035, a 16 percent reduction, with artificial intelligence cited among the tools for getting there, alongside IT standardization and other efficiency measures. State Secretary for Kingdom Relations and Effective Government Eric van der Burg framed it bluntly in his letter: "We cannot keep doing what we did." The government expects €900 million a year in savings by 2027, rising to €3.5 billion a year by 2035.
It is a notably specific number from a government that has, until now, talked about AI-driven efficiency mostly in the abstract. Parliament has already passed non-binding motions calling for a 20 percent productivity gain through AI across central government. Van der Burg's letter is the first time officials have attached a headcount figure and a savings schedule to that goal, rather than leaving it as an aspiration.
The AI part is still mostly a placeholder
What's missing from the October 26 announcement is almost everything about the AI itself. No tools, no vendors, no pilot results, no department-by-department rollout. The cabinet says it will present its actual AI deployment plan in the first quarter of 2027 — which means the 25,000-job target and the savings curve were published more than a year before the government has committed to saying what, specifically, the AI is supposed to do. Van der Burg's own letter concedes the gap isn't fully closeable by automation anyway: "Some choices will have to be made regarding what the government should be doing less or not at all," he wrote, meaning part of the 25,000 is simply service reduction wearing an AI-efficiency label.
The other half of the plan reads as much like a sovereignty policy as a jobs policy. Per The Next Web's reporting, the Dutch tax authority is migrating off Microsoft 365 onto its own servers and open-source software, and the government is building an in-house Linux desktop, explicitly to reduce dependence on non-European technology providers. The efficiency pitch and the digital-sovereignty pitch are being bundled into a single letter, which makes it hard to tell whether AI is cutting headcount or whether headcount cuts are being justified by a policy that was coming anyway.
Who actually loses a desk
Police and defense budgets are excluded from the cuts. Everyone else is not evenly exposed, though how unevenly is contested: The Next Web, citing Bloomberg's reading of the letter, reports that ministries, inspectorates, and policy-implementing agencies could see the steepest reductions, with some departments facing cuts of 45 percent or more and a few as high as 60 percent. DutchNews, reporting on the letter directly, says no department-level percentages were actually given — the minister did not specify which departments would bear the most. The tax office and the UWV, the employment-benefits agency, are widely expected to be exposed given they're already running under strain, but that's inference, not something either the letter or the cited reporting states outright. The number of permanent advisory councils is set to fall from 28, and advisory committees from roughly 150, alongside a push to scrap or simplify at least 500 rules a year and consolidate office space to one desk per two employees — all of which are consistent across the available reporting.
The context that makes the announcement land harder: Dutch central government headcount hit a record 160,000 at the end of 2025, up 41 percent since 2018 — a figure The Next Web and TechRadar Pro both attribute to Bloomberg's reporting — despite a string of earlier cabinets promising to shrink it. This is not the first time a Dutch government has said it would cut the civil service. It is the first time one has attached AI, a specific number, and a decade-long timeline to the promise simultaneously — which makes it easier to track if it fails, and gives officials a decade to attribute any shortfall to AI not delivering fast enough.
The Netherlands isn't alone in this shape of bet. New Zealand has a parallel plan to cut 8,700 core public-service roles by 2029, taking headcount down to 55,000, also citing AI as part of the rationale. What distinguishes both from the private-sector layoffs dominating AI-jobs coverage this year is the time horizon: a company cutting 5 percent of staff this quarter is wagering on AI tools that already exist. A government promising a 16 percent reduction by 2035, with the AI roadmap due in 2027, is wagering on tools that don't yet have a name, a vendor, or a budget line — and asking voters to judge the bet over three election cycles rather than one earnings call. No union or opposition reaction to the October 26 letter had surfaced in Dutch coverage as of this writing, which is its own kind of signal: the fight over this plan hasn't started yet.