Overview

• On July 3, the Senate commission adopted a report mapping 1,904 public bodies—including 434 operators, 317 consultative entities and 1,153 national institutions—to quantify the scale of France’s agency “archipelago.”
• The government plans to fold these recommendations into its mid-July budget roadmap as it seeks €40 billion in savings under EU deficit limits.
• Senators described the system as opaque and poorly overseen, warning that the state lacks a consolidated vision of agencies’ mandates, budgets and performance.
• Key reforms include merging overlapping agencies, transferring duties back to core state services, eliminating outdated bodies like the Agence bio and reinforcing prefects’ tutelage with a unified budget database.
• The Commission estimated that mutualising support functions could yield €540 million in savings and cautioned that larger cuts would require reductions in core missions