Will the Federal Council dare to do this? The savings proposals made by its expert group do not stop at staff. The administration itself has also provided some savings ideas.
The federal government should not only base its salaries on high-wage sectors, says the group of experts led by Serge Gaillard.
Anthony Anex / Keystone
He knows what he’s talking about. Serge Gaillard worked in the federal administration for over ten years, most recently as head of the finance administration. Today he acts as the nation’s apostle of savings: as president of the group of experts that presented its proposals for restructuring the federal treasury on Thursday. For the group, there is no question that federal employees must also contribute to the savings package. Gaillard, for his part, also supports these proposals. And if he felt uncomfortable making life difficult for his former colleagues, he didn’t let it show.
On the contrary, he described the attempts to circumvent the situation with almost ruthless clarity, which he knows from his time at the federal level: the tricks and maneuvers that department heads use to prevent job cuts in their territory. For example, in recent years, in the absence of real austerity measures, parliament has repeatedly cut the administration’s budgets across the board in order to comply with the debt brake. This is also expected to continue in the coming years.
However, such requirements are often implemented in the individual offices in such a way that savings are made primarily on operating expenses, for example for external contracts or IT, while personnel expenses are kept to a minimum. A short time later, it is said that the cuts are causing problems with IT and that additional resources are therefore needed. “This means that the cuts are being reversed,” the Gaillard Group states succinctly in its report.
In order to avoid falling into this trap, she makes a suggestion that is not at all popular in the administration: Parliament should not simply cut the administration’s overall budget in the next few years, but should also set specific savings targets for personnel expenses. This idea is very unpopular within the administration. Department heads criticize it, calling into question the principle of global budgets. They fear a step back to earlier times, when they had less leeway and Parliament controlled the number of federal employees much more directly.
Retirement wave as an opportunity
Serge Gaillard and his colleagues were confronted with these reservations in their discussions with the administration, but they did not let themselves be dissuaded from their proposal. Their reasoning: In order for the federal government to be able to tackle new tasks and react flexibly in the future, it is imperative that it reduces its workforce. Over the last ten years, the number of full-time employees has increased from 34,800 to almost 39,000. From the experts’ point of view, the impending wave of retirements now offers the opportunity to stop this development by the federal government using synergies in the administration, setting priorities and foregoing certain tasks.
The expert report does not specify exactly how this will work, but it does define concrete savings targets. Total administrative expenditure, currently 10.9 billion francs, is to rise “only” to 11.3 billion instead of 11.6 billion by 2030. The Gaillard Group wants to make a good half of these savings in personnel expenses, wages and employer contributions. Today, they amount to 6.5 billion francs. In 2030, the experts believe that this should be 6.8 billion, 180 million less than previously planned. As in most areas, the federal government would therefore not be making savings in the literal sense, but merely slowing the growth in expenditure.
This can also be unpleasant. Compared to previous planning, the administration would have to make do with an estimated 1,300 fewer full-time positions from 2027 onwards. According to the experts, this would be 3 percent of all positions. The employees, in turn, would have to temporarily forego inflation compensation until 2028. And if the Federal Council wants to make real wage increases, it would have to compensate for this in the personnel budget.
The big question remains as to how and where the federal government should specifically slow down the growth in personnel spending. Even if the Gaillard report does not contain a detailed plan, it does outline several approaches. One of them is also likely to be met with widespread rejection in the administration: the federal government should put the brakes on wages. The expert group recommends limiting individual wage increases “to a level that is normal in the private sector and in the cantons, without increasing starting wages as a result.”
This would inevitably lead to a reduction in wage levels in the medium term. In 2023, the average gross wage at the federal level was 129,583 francs. The relatively high level is primarily due to the large proportion of academics and other highly qualified people.
The federal government is not the UBS
With their criticism, the experts are shaking up the current wage system, which the Finance Department has been working on revising for some time, but so far without any tangible results. The current regime provides the vast majority of employees who have not yet reached the maximum in their wage bracket with automatic wage increases year after year. However, the experts are not only questioning this mechanism, but also the level of wages themselves.
They suggest that in future the federal government should increasingly orient itself towards the average wages in the entire private sector. The emphasis is on “overall”: Up to now, the federal government has liked to compare itself primarily with large corporations from UBS to Roche to Nestlé. The experts criticize this: “We should avoid orienting ourselves only towards sectors that pay higher wages than the overall economic average.”
But the Gaillard group does not just want to focus on wages. Its savings proposals, for example on asylum or climate policy, would also make it possible to cut jobs. The group has also received proposals from the administration itself. The list includes, among other things, the centralization of the scattered translation services, the examination of synergies between the Federal Offices for Agriculture and for Food Safety and Veterinary Affairs, the centralization of the collection of all federal claims, the reduction of border controls, the merging of all development aid, which is currently distributed between the Foreign Affairs and Economic Affairs Departments. And so on.
Ultimately, however, it is also clear that the administration cannot make a major contribution to the austerity exercise. It does not have enough weight for that. 83 percent of the federal government’s total expenditure is spent on transfers: on payments, contributions and subsidies in all directions, from cantons and municipalities to social welfare and infrastructure funds to universities and farmers.
