Vladimir Putin has signed a resolution to cut 5% of the government executive office's personnel as per with the presidential decree on optimizing the incredibly large number of government officials. Starting on March 31st of this year, therefore, only 1,453 people will be going to work at the Russian White House. But this is only the first stage of reductions, which will continue into the future.
"The amount of personnel in the executive office will be reduced by 5% in 2011, by another 5% in 2012, and by 10% in 2013, the prime minister's press secretary Dmitry Peskov told journalists. "Thus in 2013 these cuts will be complete, with a total reduction of 20%."
According to Peskov, in general "the executive office is quite young, the average age being 45 years." So the workers, who passed through this school and entered into the labor market, will not be stranded for long.
Incidentally, according to statistics 49-52% of workers in the Russian White House are male, and 48-50% are female -- almost equal proportions. Among them, 11.8% of employees are younger than 29; 8% are between 30 and 39; 23.2% are from 40-49; and 18.57% are between 50 and 54 years old. Only 6.3% of employees, those between the ages of 60 and 65, can consider themselves "veterans."
Recall that on January 3, President Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree to cut the number of civil servants and federal employees. The document envisages a gradual optimization of the number of "cogs in the bureaucratic machine."
This is not the first attempt to clip the wings of bureaucracy. In February 2009, in the midst of the economic downturn, President Medvedev ordered a reduction in his own administration -- though from the army of one and a half thousand Kremlin officials back then, they expelled just a hundred.
Vladimir Putin too has repeatedly drawn attention to the fact that both federal and regional government bodies are overstuffed. At one government session last year, the prime minister cited a curious statistic: despite a 4% reduction in the number of regional officials in 2009, the cost to maintain the government apparatus increased by 6%.
Now the authorities have heeded the advice of the Finance Ministry, which calculated that a reduction of state officials by 20% (which amounts to more than 120,000 people) will allow a budget annual savings of about 43.4 billion roubles.
Anastasia Savinykh
