The Temporary Commission Bureaucrat

Abstract

The current economic and financial crisis has hit the European economies and their national public finances hard. In their efforts toward budget consolidation, many EU member states are trying to cut administrative expenditure. As in earlier times of substantial (financial) strain, government institutions facing fiscal austerity may tend to initiate budget cuts thereby downsizing permanent staff and upsizing short-term contracted staff (Hall, 2002). This trend — referred to in this chapter as a shift toward ‘contracted government — follows one of the curative prescriptions of the New Public Management (NPM) reform wave and is designed to promote greater flexibility in, and performance of’, public services (Laegreid and Wise, 2007). Although this trend has been extensively studied for national-level bureaucracies (for example, Hall, 2002; Lagreid and Wise, 2007), contracted government above the state has thus far escaped comprehensive analysis. Moreover, whereas NPM-inspired reforms mainly concerned outsourcing government capacities toward the private sector, ‘contracted government’ involves outsourcing public servants that already are ‘good bureaucrats’ from one government institution to another. Based on novel survey data, this chapter of fers a comprehensive analysis of contracted government at actor level — that is, among seconded national experts (SNEs) — within the Commission.