The government is set to announce proposals which RNZ understands will seek to reduce the number of government agencies, with amalgamation, more work on digitisation and using AI, and setting a target to reduce the public service headcount to 1 percent of the total population by 2029.
There are 42 ministries and agencies currently in the public sector and just over 63,000 full-time workers.
Willis says the headcount blew out by far too much under the previous Labour governments. It was 48,000 in 2017 and increased to 57,000 by 2020.
Getting the number of public servants back to 1 percent of the total population by 2029 could require thousands of jobs to be cut.
In 2024 RNZ kept a count of cuts in the sector, to get a sense of the changes, and in May 2025 RNZ published an explainer about why it is not easy to finding consensus on the right way to count cuts.
