A budget already audited but still improvable
At the top of the State, full cost is rarely visible in a single line. Private offices, security, property, transport, secondments, services and support functions can be carried by several programmes. A serious reduction therefore reconstructs full cost before and after and refuses to call expenditure a saving when it is merely moved to a ministry or permanent administration.
For 2026, the State appropriation for the Presidency is about €122.56 million and planned expenditure is about €126.28 million. The Court of Accounts audits the Presidency’s accounts and management annually, providing an existing structured scrutiny base. [1][2]
The second issue is continuity of the State. Political structures may be smaller, but security, decision preparation, interministerial coordination and constitutional continuity do not disappear. Durable gains come from capacity genuinely removed, duplicated functions avoided or procurement reduced, not from a budget label changing.
Use the full cost of the presidential function
Budget reduction is mainly implemented through the Finance Act and Presidency management decisions. Transparency must use full-cost accounting: security, property or support expenditure may be borne by other ministries and must not vanish from the calculation through simple accounting transfers. [1][2]
The legal vehicle shown in the historical corpus remains a reference point, but it is not copied without review. The chapter uses the level of law actually required: Constitution, organic law, ordinary statute, decree, chamber rule or management decision. This hierarchy matters because a misclassified reform can waste months in an unnecessary procedure or become legally fragile because an instrument of insufficient rank was chosen.
Each step must produce verifiable evidence; a missing step remains an assumption.
Find €30 million category by category
The €30 million objective should be decomposed category by category: support staff, travel, procurement, services, events, deferrable investment and pooling. Security, diplomacy, constitutional continuity and heritage should be isolated to avoid a uniform cut unrelated to missions. [2]
Implementation should be written before the rule takes effect: starting position, target rule, responsible authority, date, temporary exemptions, data to publish and control mechanism. The historical lead is Presidency / Budget / Court of Accounts, but the same actor should not produce all figures and certify its own result. A second line of review — Parliament, Court of Accounts, inspectorate, court or open data — must be able to reproduce the calculation.
Reproducibility is central to the Delta-Sierra approach. Readers should be able to move back from the conclusion to the starting data, understand assumptions and identify what still depends on a political choice. A reform can be ambitious without pretending all of its parameters are already known.
Never confuse transfers with savings
Thirty million euros is roughly one quarter of the annual State appropriation. A target of that scale requires a detailed plan and must include costs shifted to Interior, Foreign Affairs, property services or other administrations. Expenditure exported from the Presidency budget is not a saving for the State. [1]
The calculation must distinguish a voted budget, executed expenditure and an assumption. An appropriation is not always fully spent; executed expenditure is not always avoidable; a behavioural estimate does not carry the same confidence as audited accounts. The final report should therefore assign a confidence level to each component and publish a range where the evidence does not support greater precision.
The Institutions block also contains strong interactions. Reducing parliamentarian numbers automatically affects some staff credits; abolishing a body may reduce support functions already counted elsewhere; capping pay can affect an allowance addressed by another measure. The financial ledger must assign every cash flow to one unique owner so double counting is impossible.
Phase reductions over two fiscal years
The reference timetable has four stages. Stage 1 — zero baseline: freeze headcount, contracts, allowances, property, services, legal texts and indicators before reform. Stage 2 — rule and preparation: adopt the instrument, publish instructions and adapt systems. Stage 3 — transition: allow commitments to expire or transfer while respecting rights and service continuity. Stage 4 — stabilisation: measure a full twelve months on a constant perimeter.
Transition is not a footnote. It can include compensation, staff mobility, redistricting, IT adaptation, contract termination, property reassignment or training. Those costs belong in the dashboard because a reform with a high initial cost may still be worthwhile if recurring savings repay it; the reverse is also true.
Security, heritage and diplomacy: essential costs
An abrupt cut may degrade security, diplomatic preparation or heritage maintenance. Conversely, presidential status should not immunise ordinary expenditure from efficiency review. The Court of Accounts is the natural body to scrutinise before-and-after indicators and shifted costs. [2]
A serious objection is used to design a safeguard. For Reducing and fully opening the Presidency budget to scrutiny, at least three indicator families should therefore be published: an institutional or service indicator, a budget indicator and a risk indicator. If savings rise while quality collapses, the measure is not validated. If quality improves but cost is merely shifted, it is not validated either.
A review clause should be built in from the start. Twelve to eighteen months after stabilisation, Parliament or the designated controller should compare target, actual outcome and unintended effects. Deviations are not a documentary failure: they are precisely the information needed to correct a reform rather than preserve a figure that has become unrealistic.
The anti-hidden-transfer rule
Executive reform can produce an attractive accounting result while leaving public cost unchanged if functions move to directorates, operators or contracts. The before-and-after report must therefore identify staff, full-time equivalents, appropriations, premises and services that move. Each transfer receives an amount and a budget owner. Until that traceability exists, the claimed gain remains provisional.
Control must also distinguish a function from the person performing it. Security, coordination or expertise may remain essential even if the holder or legal status changes. The objective is not to make posts disappear on paper but to remove duplication, shorten decision chains and reduce capacity that has genuinely become unnecessary. This approach may yield a smaller number, but one that is much more defensible.
Performance should finally include decision times, quality of arbitration, emergency corrections and outsourcing costs. A cheaper structure that later buys more consultancy or uses more permanent administrative capacity may be less efficient. The annual report should therefore compare savings, decision quality and exported costs.
What the before-and-after audit must disclose
Executive resources are spread across direct appropriations, permanent staff, political staff, security, travel, property, procurement and services supplied by other bodies. The starting audit must therefore map the full perimeter before any saving is announced. A rule on cabinets or office-holder resources saves only expenditure that actually stops; administrative functions taken over by permanent services remain a public cost.
The before-and-after table should distinguish resources attached to the individual, resources attached to the office and resources required for continuity of the State. That distinction is especially important for security, archives, communications systems and international representation. It allows a sobriety rule to be applied without turning a budget objective into an operational weakness.
Annual disclosure should finally compare the legal ceiling, actual headcount, executed cost and any derogations. Every exception needs a legal basis, duration and identifiable owner. The saving retained by Delta-Sierra is validated only after reconciliation with actual expenditure and deduction of costs shifted to another administration.
What must be demonstrated before retaining the 30 million euros per year target
The 30 million euros per year figure remains the Plan’s historical target here, not a budget receivable that has already been secured. To turn it into a bookable saving, the impact file should publish line by line: executed baseline expenditure, the share that can legally and operationally disappear, the year of disappearance, transition cost, expenditure taken over elsewhere and stabilised net saving. Where evidence is missing, the cell should remain open rather than being filled with an invisible assumption.
The proposed operational lead — Presidency / Budget / Court of Accounts — should provide that reconciliation in a reusable format with source documents and formulae. External reviewers must be able to reproduce the calculation without requesting additional confidential material, or identify precisely which protected data are indispensable. The final number may therefore be lower, higher or temporarily zero: Delta-Sierra’s first requirement is traceability of the result and the absence of double counting with other measures in the block.
Open the technical appendix: evidence required before validating the costing
| Stage | Expected evidence | Timing | Treatment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zero baseline | Executed expenditure, headcount, contracts, allowances, property and directly related resources | Before legislation | Publish |
| Avoidable perimeter | Lines that genuinely cease, with date and legal basis | Impact assessment | Justify |
| Transition | Mobility, compensation, redistricting, IT, contracts and transfers | Year 1 | Separate from recurring |
| Transferred costs | Expenditure taken over by another administration or tier | Years 1–2 | Deduct |
| Net result | Recurring saving on a constant perimeter with confidence level | After 12 stable months | Audit |