At the time when the share of public expenditures reaches record levels and the indebtedness overpasses 110% of the GDP, critics are multiplying against the public services deterioration. Social movements started by their employees denounce the diminution of the services quality and are claiming for more resources and for an increase of their payrolls to facilitate the hiring of new agents. A large share of the population feels abandoned due to that deterioration which has caused protest waves and a strong increase of the votes in favor of extremist parties, from the left as from the right. To sum up, more it is spent, less results are obtained.

The answer lies in a recent bureaucratic drift as costly as inefficient. Mechanism is simple. The State, starts, through institutional reforms, to increase laws and orders production capacities, frequently useless. It makes easier the development of institutions in charge of putting these texts into application and the hiring of civil servants in charge of the control of their application. Public services must so recruit employees whose function is not to fulfill the missions to which population is attached, but to look at the respect of the overabundant rules which have been imposed. Household are not anyway the only victims because private enterprises are affected and must recruit teams in charge them too, to be sure that these rules are respected. They are even frequently constrained to have recourse to external advisers as the complexity of their ruling environment has increased along the years.

From the figures published by Phillipe Crevel in the Letter of Saving, there were in 2002, according to the State Council, 52 000 law articles in activity and 161 000 ruling texts (decrees and departmental orders). In 2022, figures were 86 251 law articles and 236 781 ruling texts. How did we get there? Through a mechanism similar to the productive activity in economy, which constitutes another paradox. If you increase the production capacity of texts, as in a car factory, the volume of texts follows, but with an essential difference. In the second case, to produce more you need to have more clients but regarding texts, the clients are these who produce them because at a moment or at another one in their carriers, they will be in charge to make them applied.

The first decisions were about the Parliament members. In 1986, the number of the National Assembly members went from 482 to 577, and later to 579 to improve the representation of the French expats. In 2001, the number of senators has been increased from 301 to 348. In 1995, through the instauration of the unique Parliament session, when before there were two sessions of three and four months, the State has increased by 25% the available time for seating and so for elaborating and approving texts. At last, in 2014 has been instituted the end of the mandates cumulation. An elected person couldn’t anymore be in the same time a member of the Parliament and have executive functions inside a local authority, as a mayor for instance. He hadn’t anything else to do than to legislate.

In total, France has more members in the Parliament, having at their disposal more time to seat and having also more time to give to their mandate because they have no others mandate. The law production capacity so has significantly increased along the years and the result, as expected, has followed, as it is testified in the figures quoted in the Letter of Saving. The phenomenon then was extended to orders because the constitutional principle, inscribed in the article 34, limits the scope of the laws. It favors the recourse to orders, not only to apply the laws but also to institute new regulations, which then come into the area of responsibilities of the ministers and of the organisms which depend from them.

The bureaucratic trend, through contagion, has also concerned local authorities to which the decentralization laws had given new abilities. They have so followed the example given by the State, without that lead to savings for this one. Competence transfers has not meant for itself an abandon because have been created quite a series of public organisms, it is spectacular in the health sector, to be aware that the decentralized institutions respect the framework which has been defined to them.

That situation has been made worse with the reform of the regional and departmental institutions. France, to the difference of Germany for instance which has only one, has two levels between the towns and the State, the department and the region which have each ones their elected representatives and their assemblies. It would have been simpler to merge them. Their representants would have met in the departmental or in the regional formation, corresponding to the competences which have been attributed at each geographical level for each treated issue. In 2014, it was the opposite solution which has been chosen. Through the reduction of the number of regions, the role of the departments was strengthened in the name of the proximity principle. To take the good decisions it was necessary to be near from these who will be concerned. A plethoric system of local representation has so been consolidated instead of simplifying it with all the consequences on the evolution of the number of employees.

The territorial public service has 1.9 million agents, i.e. one third of the whole public service. The Parliament budget rose to 1 billion euro. But it is not so the direct cost of the national and local representations which matters but the consequences of their actions and of that of all the created public institutions which are stacking them to the others. All these regulations and these norms have directly generated public expenditures but they especially have made heavier the operating costs of the economy. For instance, families are confronted with that when they want to build their home of to make works.  

Enterprises as household must cope with the permanent instability of the tax system which characterizes the country and have to, sometimes, call to councils to understand their situation and to take their decisions. The realization delays of the enterprises investments projects are increased due to the recourse procedures made possible by the multiplication of texts. Their costs are so made heavier, which affects their competitiveness and weight on growth. That situation will be worse with the measures taken for the protection of environment and the reduction of the greenhouse gas emissions, frequently indisputable but which increase the complexity of the universe inside which they operate and that will make their strategic choices more difficult.

The State has always played a central role in France economic life and it has been possible to qualify it a “strategic-State” when it made the nuclear choice, when it encouraged the development of the High-Speed Train network, when it knew how to welcome the Disney projects or when it launched the renovation of the La Défense district which allowed to making it the first European business center. But this positive image is put into question with the mutation toward the “bureaucratic-State” with all its consequences on the economic life and on the public finances. If the bureaucratic draft is not stopped, there is no chance to see a recovery of the public finances and a return of the elector trust regarding the action of their political leaders.