Why senior civil servants underperform

Senior civil servants, both at the national and EU level, enjoy a certain reputation in the collective imagination: they are the elite of the system, those who completed long studies and passed difficult, selective exams. They represent a minority among the countless servants of the state, occupying the highest posts in administrations, state secretariats, and ministries. Intuitively, one might therefore assume them to be competent and productive.

And yet, in most European countries, wherever administration interacts with society, results are mediocre. Senior civil servants seem unable to design administrative processes that are not Kafkaesque for citizens. State education keeps failing to transmit fundamental knowledge to students, as the latest PISA study has once again shown. Public healthcare systems are so run down that citizens are turning away in droves. Public or semi-public transport operators, such as SNCF in France or Deutsche Bahn in Germany, deliver laughable performance—despite record spending.

Why does this supposedly massive intellectual power produce nothing but disaster?

Fierce selection: France, Germany, European Union

In France, the case of the Institut national du service public (INSP), which replaced the École nationale d'administration (ENA) in 2022, is instructive. The INSP is one of the main pathways for training and access to senior state civil service jobs. In 2025, the external competitive exam had 1,628 registrants. The institute ultimately admitted 27 candidates after a final round of oral selection tests. In other words, 1.7% of registrants were admitted—roughly 1 admit per 60 registrants. Relative to candidates who sat the final written exam, the ratio was about 1 admit per 35.

Germany, by contrast, does not have a single grande école training all its senior civil servants. It organizes selection differently, through procedures specific to each career track and administration. Article 33 of the Grundgesetz (Basic Law) stipulates that access to public employment rests on aptitude, qualifications and professional achievements.

The Auswärtiges Amt, Germany's Federal Foreign Office, offers a good example. To enter the senior diplomatic service, selection begins with an online written exam: cognitive aptitude tests plus legal, economic, and language knowledge. Shortlisted candidates are then invited to an oral assessment in Berlin, featuring structured interviews and situational exercises. The 2022–2024 intakes admitted 83, 79, and then 70 successful candidates, out of roughly 1,500 to 2,000 applications per year.

In Brussels, recruitment of European administrators falls mainly to the European Personnel Selection Office (EPSO). EU institutions do not directly recruit administrators post by post. Instead, they run general exams that establish reserve lists from which institutions subsequently hire the staff they need.

In 2017, the generalist exam recorded 29,933 applications for 126 successful candidates—1 successful candidate per 238 applications. The selection process features several tests: verbal comprehension, numerical reasoning, and abstract reasoning.

The limits of exam-based selection

Across Europe, then, senior civil servants who pass these exams excel during the selection stages. A form of merit therefore exists at this very moment.

To borrow Raymond Cattell's typology, these exams measure the two major forms of an individual's intelligence: crystallized intelligence—the capacity to accumulate knowledge—and fluid intelligence—the capacity to adapt to new problems as they arise.

Senior civil service exams thus sort individuals on these criteria, retaining only those who clear the hurdles. As early as 1944, Ludwig von Mises noted that bureaucratic incapacity contrasts with the distinguished origins of European bureaucrats:

“It would be a mistake to ascribe the frustration of European bureaucratism to intellectual and moral deficiencies of the personnel. In all these countries there were many good families whose scions chose the bureaucratic career because they were honestly intent on serving their nation.”

Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1944, pp. 55–56.

However, passing the exam says nothing about one’s' ability to sustain this excellence over time, nor about adaptability in the face of change. This is important to recall because these exams remain valid throughout a career. A 55-year-old civil servant still bears the title of an exam passed just after finishing their studies.

The senior civil servant serves their own interest first

The senior civil servant is a human being like any other: they seek to maximize their personal interest above all else—that is, before the interest of the collective they are supposed to serve. In this respect, they are no different from an employee, a craftsman, or even an entrepreneur. The crucial difference is that, in the market, the pursuit of individual interests by economic actors always indirectly serves the collective. It is by exchanging and cooperating to achieve our individual ends that we enable others to achieve theirs as well. The clearest example: in the market, the entrepreneur serves their own interest only by serving that of their customers. Senior civil servants operate in a very different framework.

Every senior civil servant wishes to produce regulations, just as every politician wants to leave behind a law that will bear their name. The production of rules is therefore the outcome of their action, the engine of their personal interest. They thus act—as Human Action would have it— within a framework where individual incentives do not align personal interest with the pursuit of collective progress. The problem is not the individual as such, but the framework in which they act and the incentive effects that this framework produces.

This production is not neutral for others. Each new regulation translates, for those who actually produce value, into imposed compliance costs: hours spent filling out forms rather than serving customers; procedures that delay or block projects. Complexity itself becomes a kind of tax paid in another form: as rules pile up, more time, more lawyers, and more consulting firms are needed to do one's job. The conclusion is unavoidable: regulatory production only ever reduces the productivity of economic actors. Paradoxically, the same holds within the public sector itself, where some officials' norms paralyze the action of others. The interests of bureaucracy and of the market are thus opposed.

No measurement of outcomes

In the market, every individual and every firm is subject to the imperative of economic calculation: avoid losses and aim for profit, whether monetary or not. This logic is entirely absent from the senior civil servant's action. The money they allocate is not their own; poor capital management does not put their job at risk. There are no prices, no free clients able to go elsewhere, no option to quit one service for another. The absence of market-based sanctions or rewards for civil servants makes it impossible to evaluate the effectiveness of their work and their real contribution.

This problem is central to Ludwig von Mises's analysis of how bureaucracy functions. In his book Bureaucracy, he writes:

“The lack of standards which could, in an unquestionable way, ascertain success or nonsuccess in the performance of an official's duties creates insoluble problems. It kills ambition, destroys initiative and the incentive to do more than the minimum required. It makes the bureaucrat look at instructions, not at material and real success.”

Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1944, p. 56.

In other words, the senior civil servant is judged on their obedience, their ability to follow a body of rules and to produce regulations. Outcomes matter little, if at all; compliance with procedure matters far more. By following these rules and their careerist interests, they cease to be a public servant and become, in Mises's words, fully a bureaucrat. Being a senior civil servant is a status; being a bureaucrat is a logic of action.

They will continue to receive the same monthly salary whatever happens, regardless of whether they are productive or not. This is a problem identified by William Niskanen: the bureaucrat does not personally and directly appropriate the fruits of good management of public capital, for example in the form of a salary increase. Their interest, therefore, is not to optimize the cost of what they do, but to expand the budget, scope, and influence of their bureau. That is how they "progress" in their mission, in the absence of rewards for sound current management.

Thus, even if the bureaucrat were to create wealth, they would have no incentive to create more. Simply put, the civil servant is never rewarded for their productivity. They therefore have no incentive to be productive—or, if they are, to remain so.

Conversely, calamitous management of public funds costs almost nothing to the person who commits it. For example, in France, the State dismissed twelve civil servants for unsatisfactory performance in 2024, out of around 1.5 million civilian civil servants. That is one dismissal per year per 125,000 agents—effectively nothing.

In Germany, only civil servants still in their probationary period can be dismissed when they fail to prove themselves. Its "political officials," such as state secretaries and ministry directors, can be sidelined at any time, generally when the government changes. They then leave their posts without losing all their income; some can even retain up to 71.75% of their former salary for three years.

In Brussels, the Staff Regulations require three consecutive negative annual reports to downgrade a civil servant by one grade, then two additional annual reports to dismiss them. Dismissal is therefore conceivable only after five years of documented failure.

One cannot measure ex post the effectiveness of the bureaucrat's action, because it operates outside market realities. One therefore judges only the conformity of their action to the rules. And even when conformity to the rules is breached, the civil servant is not necessarily sanctioned for it. And if they are, it can take several years.

A guild mentality

The bureaucrat never operates alone in their professional environment. They belong to a service, a career track, a state corps, a network. A guild mentality therefore naturally develops within administrations. France certainly offers one of the clearest examples of this reality.

For decades, ENA's graduation ranking granted direct access to the best posts a civil servant could hope for—whether at the Conseil d'État (Council of State), the Cour des comptes (Court of Audit), or the Inspection générale des finances (General Inspectorate of Finance). Some, like the jurist Frédéric Thiriez, denounced in a government-commissioned report a system of closed castes and unjustified lifetime rents. The 2021 reform that ended the ENA and created the INSP abolished this direct, automatic access to the grands corps de l'État.

Another key voice on the subject, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, former Secretary-General of the Élysée, published a critique of the French bureaucratic system two years after the reform. He denounces, among other things, the self-perpetuation of the administrative elite and its disconnect from society.

In Brussels, the Selmayr affair showed how the system can decide to reward certain officials in defiance of the strict rules governing internal promotions and advancements. On 21 February 2018, the European Commission appointed Martin Selmayr, chief of staff to its president, as Deputy Secretary-General, then, moments later, Secretary-General. A case of favoritism, criticized even within the EU institutions: the European Ombudsman herself concluded that there had been serious dysfunctions in this appointment procedure.

The false prestige of high office

All initial selection methods for senior civil servants also serve another purpose: to suggest to society that State bodies are composed of the best of the best. Power and its administrations are thus wrapped in an aura of prestige. Mises already noted:

“The prestige and the social standing of the government clerks surpassed by far those of any other class of the population with the exception of the army officers and the members of the oldest and wealthiest aristocratic families.”

Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1944, p. 56.

This intellectual prestige and supposed devotion to the public good serves to legitimize the role of administrations and also the resources they claim to need. They know what must be done; it is therefore normal to grant them what they ask for. Every failure can thus be interpreted as proof of insufficient resources, never as evidence of mismanagement of those resources—hence never as a failure of the system and its servants.

Another mechanism emerges from this observation: if the system continually acquires new resources to accomplish its missions, and if the bureaucrat's interest is both to produce regulations and to protect his entrenched privileges, we can understand why the bureaucratic system grows ever more complex. Failure generates demands for additional resources; these new resources produce new regulations and norms; and these in turn slow the market and make the workings of bureaucracy far more complex.

This self-reinforcing logic locks the highest public offices behind expertise, technicality, and prestige that sanctify their role and help them weather political changes and democratic uncertainties.

From bureaucrat to technocrat

Thus the civil servant, already becoming a bureaucrat by producing norms and defending their career (Mises), subsequently transforms into a technocrat: a true figure of power rivaling elected officials and the sole guardian who understands the system they administer.

The problem, then, lies less in the quality of the people who serve than in the framework in which they serve. The senior civil servant will not become better through another reform; they will become better only by overhauling the incentive effects of the system in which they operate. The only reform that matters is the one that returns every bureaucratic mission to the market—that is, every mission to economic calculation, the only signal that validates, and invalidates, action useful to others. This therefore requires reducing the size of the State.

1. Institut national du service public, Report of the Chair of the entrance examination juries for the INSP 2025, Hélène Farnaud-Defromont, 25 September 2025 — https://www.insp.gouv.fr/files/files/concours/ressources-utiles/sujets-meilleurs-copies/sujets-copies-rapports/rapport_de_la_presidente_des_jurys_de_concours_insp_2025.pdf ↩
2. Auswärtiges Amt, “Auswahlverfahren” of the höherer Auswärtiger Dienst — https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/de/karriere/diplomat-hoeherer-dienst/auswahlverfahren ↩
3. European Commission, COM(2018) 377 final, 13 June 2018, Annex 8c: EPSO/AD/338/17, 29,933 validated applications — https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52018DC0377 ↩
4. Raymond B. Cattell, “Theory of fluid and crystallized intelligence: A critical experiment” ↩
5. Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy (1944) — https://mises.org/library/book/bureaucracy ↩
6. William A. Niskanen, Bureaucracy and Representative Government, Chicago, Aldine-Atherton, 1971. ↩
7. Bundesbeamtengesetz, § 34(1) — https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bbg_2009/__34.html ↩
8. Frédéric Thiriez, Mission Haute fonction publique, report to the Prime Minister, 18 February 2020 — https://www.info.gouv.fr/rapport/11390-rapport-de-m-frederic-thiriez-mission-haute-fonction-publique
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9. Jean-Pierre Jouyet, Est-ce bien nécessaire, Monsieur le ministre?, Paris, Albin Michel, October 2023. ↩
10. European Ombudsman, joint inquiries 488/2018/KR and 514/2018/KR, conclusions of 4 September 2018 — https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/recommendation/en/102651 ↩