twenty-five thousand

The Netherlands plans to cut 25,000 civil service jobs by 2035, and the headlines called it an AI overhaul. The cabinet’s letter to parliament says something else. The difference is worth learning to spot, because your employer is going to tell you the same story.

Bloomberg’s headline on 26 October read: “Dutch Government Plans to Cut 25,000 Jobs in AI-Led Overhaul.”

The letter the headline came from contains this sentence: Overschat de formatieve effecten van digitalisering en AI niet. Don’t overestimate what digitalization and AI will do to headcount.

Same document. Two different stories.

what the letter says

Eric van der Burg, the state secretary for efficient government, sent the progress letter to the Tweede Kamer on 26 October. By 2035 the central government is to have 25,000 fewer full-time positions, out of about 160,000. That’s roughly one in six. The previous cabinet wanted 35,000. The savings are meant to reach €900 million a year in 2027 and €3.5 billion by 2035. Police, defence, prisons, the public prosecutor and the security services are exempt, so the cuts elsewhere go deeper: around 20 percent per organization, and 45 to 60 percent at some, according to AI Insider’s reading of the letter.

Then the breakdown. Efficiency, meaning the same work done with fewer people, is capped at about half a percent a year. Over the decade that covers roughly one-third of the target. The other two-thirds have to come from what the letter calls strategic choices and task reduction: work the state stops doing, or does less of.

The examples are not about AI. More than 175 advisory councils, to be cut down. Four hundred policy evaluations a year, down to somewhere between ten and twenty. Nearly 1,700 government websites, consolidated. Two employees per desk. Fewer outside contractors. “You gain far more from ten well-received pieces of advice,” Van der Burg wrote, “than forty reports on identical topics gathering dust.” The concrete AI plans aren’t due until early 2027. And the letter notes, according to AI Insider, that earlier digitalization programmes didn’t deliver the savings they promised.

One more number. The central government grew by about 46,500 full-time positions between 2018 and 2026, up 41 percent. The cut gives back a bit more than half of that.

a choice dressed as a forecast

Here is what I think happened, said plainly. Two-thirds of this cut is a decision about what the Dutch state is for. Calling it AI turns that decision into a forecast.

The distinction matters. The government does several different kinds of things, and only some of them are work a machine can speed up. Processing a permit, answering a benefits query, drafting a routine letter: that’s administration, high-volume and rule-bound, and it’s where software has a real case. Deciding that the state no longer needs 175 advisory councils, or no longer evaluates 380 of its own policies a year, is a different act. It’s allocation. Somebody decides what gets done and what doesn’t, and somebody else loses something they used to get.

That decision is political. People can disagree with it. They can ask who stops being advised, which programmes stop being checked, which website their grandmother used. A forecast, on the other hand, isn’t anyone’s decision. AI will make the civil service more productive sounds like a weather report. You don’t vote on the weather.

Jürgen Habermas made this argument in 1968, in “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’.” His worry was that technical rationality would become the way modern states justify themselves. Questions that are really about what people should do together get recast as engineering problems, and engineering problems are for experts. The public argument doesn’t lose. It just never gets held.

What’s unusual about the Dutch case is that the cabinet didn’t do this. Its letter is careful and fairly honest about where the savings come from. The depoliticizing happened in the retelling, in the headline and in the parliamentary motions Bloomberg mentions asking for 20 percent productivity gains from AI. The choice was written down plainly, and by the time it reached most readers it had turned into a forecast anyway.

which third are you in

On the same day, Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 employees, roughly a quarter of its workforce. CNBC’s headline credited AI there too.

When your employer announces cuts and says AI, do the Dutch arithmetic. How much of this is the same work done faster, and how much is work that’s going to stop? The two call for different responses, and getting it wrong is how good people end up making the wrong argument.

If your work is being stopped, getting better with the tools won’t save the role. The question isn’t whether AI can do your job. It’s whether your job still gets done, and that’s a choice someone made. Choices can be argued with. Find out who made it and what they think they’re giving up. Sometimes they don’t know, and you’re the only one who can tell them.

If your work is being made efficient, the cut is a forecast, and forecasts get booked before they come true. The Netherlands set its headcount target in October 2026, and its AI plan arrives in 2027. Whoever is still there in between carries the difference. That might be you. Know it going in, and keep a written record of what you’re covering, so the gap shows up as a gap and not as you being slow.

Either way, write down the work nobody listed. Every cut starts from a list of tasks, and the tasks that aren’t on it get stopped by accident. The informal review, the person who knows why the old system does the strange thing, the website your grandmother used. If you do work like that, get it on the list, so that stopping it is at least a decision someone actually made.

A forecast can’t be argued with. A choice can. Find out which one you’re in.

Sources: AI Insider: the cabinet’s own warning on AI, the breakdown, per-organization cuts ↗ · Binnenlands Bestuur: 25,000 not 35,000, advisory councils, evaluations, websites, Van der Burg ↗ · Bloomberg via The Edge: headline, growth since 2018, AI productivity motions ↗ · CNBC: Microsoft offers buyouts to 60,000 ↗ · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Habermas, “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’” (1968) ↗