Rightsizing Without Redesign Will Fail

Pakistan’s federal rightsizing exercise has moved through ministries, attached departments, and state entities in successive waves. The fiscal logic is understandable: overlapping bodies, vacant structures, and outdated mandates consume resources while accountability remains diffuse.

But rightsizing is not the same as making government work better.

Start With the Function

A weak reform asks which organisation can be closed. A stronger reform asks which public function is necessary, who should perform it, and how performance will be measured.

Merging two bodies without reconciling laws, databases, staff roles, procurement, and field operations can preserve every old problem inside a new organisational chart. Abolishing a unit without transferring its essential work creates a service gap that appears months later.

Count Transition Costs Honestly

Savings are often announced gross, while the costs of severance, pensions, litigation, system migration, office consolidation, and retraining are treated separately. Publishing both would improve credibility and distinguish immediate cash effects from long-term gains.

Staff policy matters as well. Uncertainty encourages capable employees to leave first and others to resist. Transparent criteria, time-bound decisions, redeployment pathways, and fair separation arrangements reduce disruption and politicisation.

Design Around the Citizen

The correct unit of analysis is not the ministry; it is the service journey. If a licence, payment, complaint, or approval still crosses the same number of desks after rightsizing, institutional efficiency has not improved.

Digitalisation can remove steps, but only after rules and authority are simplified. Automating an unnecessary approval creates a faster unnecessary approval.

Pakistan does need a more focused federal state. Success should be measured through lower recurring costs, fewer duplicated mandates, faster decisions, and maintained or improved public services. If reform produces a smaller chart but citizens face longer queues, the state has been cut without being redesigned.

Source note

This commentary draws on the Finance Division’s August 10 federal rightsizing review, its SOE reporting framework, and Pakistan’s reform commitments documented in the IMF programme report.