By the 1980s, the Soviet Union’s attempt to centrally plan every detail of human existence swelled its Council of Ministers to over 100 cabinet-level officials. They had a ministry for everything. There was a Ministry of Heavy Machine Building, a Ministry of General Machine Building, and a Ministry of Medium Machine Building (which, absurdly, was the cover name for the nuclear weapons program).
When the regime inevitably realized that fitting 100 ministers into a single room to make a decision was impossible, their solution was just to invent more bureaucracy: a VIP inner cabinet.
It sounds like peak bureaucratic absurdity – until you realize that, proportionally, Israel’s actually worse.
The Soviet parliament had over 1,000 deputies. The Knesset has only 120. Because Israel currently operates with roughly 30 active ministries and a peak headcount of 38 ministers, nearly a third of Israel’s parliament has simultaneously served in the executive branch. That is almost three times the number of ministers you will find in some European governments. Even more embarrassingly, in classic Soviet style, roughly 50% of Israel’s ministries are entirely made-up portfolios created solely for political patronage.
Unfortunately, this does not translate to 50% more areas addressed by the government, but rather 100% less efficiency, if not more.
In a mere four and a half years, politicians executed 76 structural changes, shuffling 50 different government units across ministries. Some units, like the Authority for the Development and Settlement of the Bedouin, were treated like political footballs, bouncing between seven different ministries.
These administrative transfers are agonizingly slow, dragging out anywhere from three weeks to two and a half years. Beyond the sheer gridlock – where basic communication is impossible because no one understands where everything is going – this constant shuffling carries a massive financial and operational price tag.
The price of bloated bureaucracy
The Finance Ministry estimates that simply streamlining this bloat down to 24 ministries and merging overlapping departments would save roughly NIS 950 million a year.
When the Agriculture Planning Authority was transferred, its entire NIS 40m. budget was completely lost in the bureaucratic friction. Left entirely defunded in 2023, it ultimately required even more taxpayer money just to rebuild the paralyzed department from scratch the following year.
But the damage doesn’t end there; the creation of overtly political ministries minimizes the importance of the very missions they were ostensibly created to serve. When a cabinet grows beyond 20 members, a prime minister cannot effectively manage that many ministers in a single room.
To circumvent the very gridlock they manufactured, prime ministers are forced to create inner cabinets, rendering the majority of ministries functionally irrelevant to the state’s core decision-making. This explains the current setup, where only half of the 24 ministers sit in the security cabinet.
Not only does the prime minister dismiss their value, but sometimes even the ministers themselves cannot pretend to take their jobs seriously. A glaring example was the “heroic” action of Likud MK Galit Distel Atbaryan shortly after October 7, when she resigned and pushed to dissolve her own Public Diplomacy Ministry, openly citing it as a “waste of public funds.” After all, if there was one thing Israel didn’t lack during the two years of war, it was certainly a coherent public relations strategy.
Unlike much of Israel’s Kafkaesque bureaucracy, ministerial bloat is not a leftover relic of its socialist past, but rather a direct product of its politically fractured present. The roots of today’s crisis can be traced back to 2009. Benjamin Netanyahu had a problem: he refused to form a coalition with his primary rival, Tzipi Livni’s Kadima Party. Instead, he was forced to cobble together a governing majority from six different factions.
To secure Avigdor Liberman’s loyalty, Netanyahu handed him the highly coveted Foreign Ministry. But to balance the resulting anxiety and aspirations of Liberman’s fierce political rival – Shas leader Eli Yishai – Netanyahu had to compensate him with the Interior Ministry and a newly revived Religious Services Ministry.
The absurdity and wastefulness of this era – best highlighted by the decision to fracture the Science, Culture, and Sport Ministry into separate ministries just to manufacture more cabinet seats – was so blatant that it became a major campaign issue in the next election.
In 2013, new parties ran on a platform demanding an end to the absurdity of the bloat. Netanyahu was forced to swallow a strict cap on cabinet size after Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett formed a political pact during coalition negotiations. To secure his mandate, Netanyahu amended the Basic Law to legally limit the number of ministers.
Predictably, this structural reform was short-lived. The cap only survived until the ensuing political crises required more bargaining chips to balance power, culminating in the bloated unity governments of 2020 and 2021 that ballooned to an absurd 34 ministers.
And so we arrive at the current government, which at its peak boasted 34 ministers across roughly two dozen ministries, and has only been reduced to 24 because of emergency wartime budget cuts and coalition shuffling. Apparently, it takes a multi-front existential war just to trim a little political dead weight.
The temptation to hand out ministries will always dominate coalition negotiations because these portfolios are the ultimate political currency. They allow party leaders to reward loyalists, carve out massive state budgets, and guarantee media exposure – everything needed to ensure their party’s survival.
We simply cannot expect politicians to throw away such a powerful tool. Even the men who built their brands on shrinking the cabinet – Bennett and Lapid – eagerly abandoned that moderation the second they needed to form their own government in 2021.
We also cannot rely on Israel’s helter-skelter Basic Laws to save us. The legal cap on ministers should undoubtedly be restored, but laws can always be rewritten by a desperate prime minister and a large enough coalition. Ultimately, the only thing that actually forces politicians to cut political dead weight is public demand.
Ultimately, the foundational principle of any democracy still holds true in Israel: no matter how sprawling the government bureaucracy becomes, the single most powerful mechanism for change remains the voter.
The writer serves as the English director of the Ribo Center and the editor of Amit Segal’s newsletter, It’s Noon in Israel.
Source:
www.jpost.com
