Dutch bid to replace government jobs with AI set to test technology and society

The Dutch government’s artificial intelligence-led efficiency drive to cut 25,000 civil servant jobs is perhaps the most ambitious government plan yet to use technology to reduce the state’s payroll. Making it work — and rolling out similar programs in other countries — could prove tricky.

The Netherlands intends to lose roughly 15% of its civil servants to save €3.5 billion ($3.9 billion) a year from 2035, the government said Monday. Police and defense are among the exempted areas, while ministries, inspectorates and implementing agencies could see headcount reductions of as much as 60%.

Translated to the U.S., that would mean about 150,000 job cuts, calculations show. That’s around half the number of federal employees who left their jobs in 2025 after efforts by Elon Musk’s DOGE, in the early days of the second Trump administration, to reshape the government workforce.

The equivalent in the U.K. would be approximately 75,000 jobs, while in France it would be slightly above 50,000, although it’s hard to directly compare civil servant numbers and roles across countries.

The size of government bureaucracies is a political issue in many advanced economies. Dutch government headcount surged 41% between 2018 and 2025. The U.K.’s civil service has grown by more than a third in the last decade to more than 500,000. There, the opposition Conservatives promise to reverse that increase, while Reform U.K. has pledged to go even further.

Some argue that such ambitious and controversial targets can be achieved. The Tony Blair Institute, set up by the former U.K. prime minister, argued in a report published in July 2024 that AI could partly automate over 40% of public sector tasks, saving a fifth of workers’ time. (The report itself was criticized for using AI in its analysis). “The speed with which these gains are realized is within the government’s gift to determine,” it said.

Blair this summer called for “not civil-service retraining, but a new cadre of workforce.” He’s argued that AI can help to square the circle of being able to afford aging populations and the increasing cost of health and pensions, and that a politics focused on issues such as tax, spending and nationalization rather than AI is decades out of date.

While private companies have already announced waves of AI-driven job cuts since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, governments are some way behind. Their AI use “trails the private sector” and initiatives “often remain in pilot phases,” according to a September 2025 report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). They’re behind on adopting the technology, getting more work from AI rather than less, and there are plenty of tasks they don’t want automated.

Until AI Minister Kanishka Narayan intervened this month, the U.K.’s official AI guidance recommended keeping prompts short, using smaller models, not saying thank you, and only using AI when needed, to lessen its environmental impact. Guidance provided by the country’s Environment Department still refers to Google Bard, a brand that was retired in favor of Gemini almost three years ago.

U.K. Artificial Intelligence Secretary Kanishka Narayan, in Liverpool, U.K., on Sept. 29 | Bloomberg

In a U.S. Treasury announcement last week detailing £16 billion ($21 billion) of efficiencies and savings, AI gets relatively scattershot mentions, and no price tag. And in places, talking about AI is a bit like putting the cart before the horse. As recently as February 2025, almost 10% of English health trusts still lacked an electronic patient record.

The French government said in June that it was rolling out a conversational AI assistant to all public sector workers after a ten-month trial. During the test phase, the assistant cut the time spent on writing tasks by about 12% and by 16% for summarizing documents. However, France’s government has said it will not accept an AI that replaces civil servants or dehumanizes relations between citizens and the administration.

Meanwhile, governments are finding that AI is creating more work, not less, as voters and businesses embrace the technology.

A study by a team including Chris Schmitz of Berlin’s Hertie School and co-authors published in August documented 84 cases across 11 countries of what they call “agentic flooding”: an AI-facilitated surge in complaints, court claims and other requests to government. Most involve chatbots drafting polished, legal-sounding text. The quickest fixes, such as fees, risk shutting out people with genuine claims, the authors warn.

Even where AI could technically do the job and respond to that deluge, there are tasks governments may decide it shouldn’t. The U.K. faced a massive backlash to proposals to curb trial by jury, let alone trial by AI judge.

“The big question is whether this government will be able to meet its targets,” ING Chief Economist Marieke Blom said of the Dutch plan, adding that previous cuts to civil servant headcount have been followed by increased hiring. “AI can lower the amount of people working in the government, but it can also lead to ‘needs,’ such as when government institutions are bombarded by complaints as people use AI-agents to file them.”

Then there’s sovereignty. With few cutting-edge AI models built in Europe, policymakers might be reluctant to outsource swaths of the civil service to American or Chinese products. (The Dutch say they will favor domestic and European suppliers.) The U.K.’s reliance on U.S. cloud giants is already alarming its politicians, while a flagship £330 million data contract with Palantir for the health service has grown increasingly contentious over questions of value for money and data security.

“The thing the British public really doesn’t like is their private sensitive data, particularly their healthcare data, going to foreign billionaires,” Narayan said last month.

Governments are also seeking to reassure their citizens that AI will not lead to widespread job cuts, and to encourage them to adopt rather than fear the technology. Narayan regularly talks about developing and adopting technology “in line with Labour values.”

Even if a government tries to cut swaths of jobs, civil servants are often highly unionized and likely to resist. Across high-income countries, union membership among civil servants was on average more than double that of the workforce as a whole. More than a quarter of U.S. federal employees belong to a union, versus a tenth of all workers. In South Korea, it’s two-thirds versus 13%.

Perhaps AI is simply a convenient cover. Labour MP Anneliese Dodds spoke last week of a growing number of “performative mentions of AI as a reason for redundancy” among companies. “It seems like perhaps the redundancies were already in train, but there’s a belief that using the term AI will somehow make the company look more cutting edge,” she said.