The „major restructuring” of the budget apparatus means over 35,000 public sector employees, according to the Save Romania Union (USR).
„Almost 10 months after Prime Minister Ciolacu’s commitment to carry out ‘the most ambitious reform of the budget apparatus after the Revolution’, which would include mergers and the abolition of some public institutions, we have 35,173 more public sector employees”, reads a USR press release sent on Wednesday to AGERPRES.
The USR MP Cristina Pruna said that the PSD-PNL government „boasts” that it abolished 455 executive positions and 236 management positions in central institutions, plus almost 4,500 more from the hundreds of institutions under subordination or coordination, and that no one from PSD-PNL says a word about the 35,000 people employed by the state in the last ten months.
Romania had, in May, according to the most recent statistics published by the Ministry of Finance, 1,294,311 public sector employees. In September 2023, the month in which Prime Minister Ciolacu pledged in Parliament to implement „a plan to reduce waste in the budget apparatus, both for the central and local administrations, state companies and autonomous institutions „, Romania had 1,259,138 public sector employees, the release informs.
According to the quoted source, among the „winning” ministries are the Ministry of Economy (+524 employees), the Ministry of Transport (+38 employees) and the Ministry of Energy (+35 employees). Adding to these are various public institutions (the Constitutional Court, the Court of Accounts, the Ombudsman, the National Integrity Agency etc).
On the other hand, in healthcare, a field in which at the beginning of the year there was such a serious personnel crisis that large hospitals in Bucharest threatened to close the emergency rooms, the comparison between May 2024 and September 2023 shows negative results. The sanitary units financed from the Single National Social Insurance Fund have 1,236 fewer employees, and the sanitary units from the sanitary network of local authorities have 743 fewer employees, USR shows.
AGERPRES
