Netherlands plans to cut 25,000 civil service jobs using AI

Netherlands plans to cut 25,000 public jobs and Spain does the math

How much does it cost to maintain an administration that is no longer needed? The Dutch government has put a figure on the experiment: eliminating 25,000 central government jobs, more than 15% of its workforce, with a claimed saving of 3.5 billion euros a year. The plan arrives with artificial intelligence as its justification and with a detail that raises eyebrows: the country has one of the lowest public debts in Europe. This is not a bailout. It is a political decision.

The first reaction is back-of-the-envelope math. If 25,000 jobs save 3.5 billion, each position eliminated equals 140,000 euros a year on average. A figure that does not match a standard public salary and suggests the saving includes more than payroll: facilities, supplies, vehicles and external contracts. The full calculation, item by item, leaves a gap that invites distrust of the official headline.

How many civil servants does the Netherlands really have

The figure of 160,000 employees that has gone viral refers only to central government. The total volume of Dutch public employment is around 1.1 million full-time equivalent workers, close to 12% of those employed. Spain, with 3.65 million, stands at 17%. Per 1,000 inhabitants, the Netherlands has about 60 public employees; Spain, 73. The comparison debunks the idea of a minimal Dutch state, but also the notion that Spain is a global anomaly.

The explanation lies in the structure. In the Netherlands, teachers are not civil servants: they are hired by school boards and foundations under a sectoral agreement. Healthcare works as an insurance system and its workers are not public staff. Two thirds of schools resemble Spain's concertada (state-subsidized private schools). In other words, half of the Dutch administration does not appear in the statistics, whereas here it would.

Layoffs, early retirement or simply zero replacement

The story of mass layoffs falls apart when you read the fine print. The plan runs until 2035 and works by not replacing retirements and departures, not through a redundancy program. Positions for archivists, typewriter calibrators and profiles left without a function by digitalization are being eliminated. The pruning is real, but it is a rationalization of human resources, not a civil service massacre.

Even so, the precedent is unsettling. Some recall the early retirements at Telefónica, Santander or Iberdrola as a mirror: paying those who leave so as not to pay those who stay. And others point out that the data centers that support AI are not free either, so the net saving remains to be seen. The electricity bill of automation does not make the headline.

What Spain is watching out of the corner of its eye

The Dutch case works as an uncomfortable mirror. The Dutch central administration grew 41% between 2018 and the record of 160,000 employees at the end of 2025, despite the cut promises of previous cabinets. If a country with low debt and healthy accounts decides to prune, the question for Spain is not whether it can afford the cut, but whether it can afford not to consider it. The answer, for now, is the usual one: zero replacement and wait.

The final irony comes from the plan itself. Public employees are laid off to be replaced by machines that consume electricity, saving on payroll and spending on servers. No one has yet proposed applying the same logic to politicians. There, AI has not yet arrived.