Three meetings per year, a board of 67 members, and a bill of tens of thousands of euros for the State. This case, documented in black and white in the French budget annexes, illustrates a broader phenomenon: France now has 317 commissions and consultative bodies placed directly under the Prime Minister, ministers, or the Bank of France. Their total cost exceeds 30 million euros each year, with no systematic evaluation to justify their continuation.
This figure is not a guess drawn from a confidential report. It is not a rough estimate: it appears in black and white in the so-called “yellow” budget annex, the official document attached every year to the finance bill. This document, titled “List of commissions and consultative or deliberative bodies,” specifies for each structure its founding text, its number of members, its operating cost, and the number of meetings held. In its annex to the 2025 PLF, 317 consultative commissions comprised a total of 15,868 members and accumulated operating costs of 30.9 million euros for 3,909 meetings. A year later, the count did not slow down: according to an amendment filed in the National Assembly in January 2026, the 2026 PLF lists 318, compared with 313 in the 2024 PLF, and while their number has tended to decrease, their cost has risen without interruption.
Key takeaways
- Why does a 67-member commission meet only three times a year?
- Official figures hide real costs that are twice as large
- No mechanism truly forces the suppression of these obsolete structures
A council, 67 members, three meetings per year
The National Council for Development and International Solidarity (CNDSI) encapsulates the absurdity of the system on its own. In 2023, the CNDSI, a 67-member body, met three times a year in plenary sessions. A few thousand euros in the scale of the state budget, certainly, but a textbook case: how many participants, how much preparation time, how much secretarial support mobilized for three annual meetings? The yellow budget annex records the expenditure and the number of meetings, but never the question of the actual usefulness of the structure.
Other bodies display volumes that defy straightforward comparison. The National Council of Universities alone comprises 4,337 members and held 696 meetings in 2023, a scale that reminds us that these 317 structures are not a homogeneous whole: some carry weight in numbers and activity, others exist almost solely on paper.
Numbers that do not tell the full story
The problem goes beyond the simple accumulation of administrative acronyms. A Senate investigative committee on the agencyfication of the State, whose report was published in 2025, scrutinized the yellow budget annex and uncovered serious inconsistencies. The senators highlight a striking accounting inconsistency: it is unrealistic to treat, as the yellow annex does, that 120 consultative commissions have zero operating costs, while 91 of them held at least one meeting in 2023. A meeting that would cost nothing? Hard to believe when civil servants travel, prepare dossiers, and facilitate debates.
The investigative committee goes further on the real scale of the expenditure. The administrative staff provided to carry out these tasks do not perform the activities that are within the purview of the administration that employs them during that time, and the same is true for the members of these commissions who attend meetings. These indirect costs, mainly salary-related, hardly ever appear in the yellow budget columns. Result: assuming real costs closer to 50 million euros rather than the 30 million euros listed in budget documents, a 20% reduction in the number of commissions and consultative or deliberative bodies would save about 10 million euros. A sum that, compared with the 40 billion in savings sought by the government, looks like a drop in the ocean.
Why these committees never disappear
Yet the mechanism for creation, on paper at least, is not lacking in safeguards. A circular from the Prime Minister dating from October 2017 recalled that consultative commissions created by decree are established for a maximum of five years, intended to force a regular review. In practice, this expiry clause is rarely applied: decrees are renewed, often tacitly, without an activity assessment to decide between maintenance, reform, or elimination. No procedure obliges a ministry to prove that a body still serves a purpose before extending its existence.
There is no shortage of warnings. As far back as 2006, a Senate report already flagged the same flaw for structures attached to the Prime Minister, estimating their cost at eleven million euros and lamenting the absence of evaluation. Even then, the Cour des Comptes denounced the lack of full-cost analysis for each body, calling for a precise activity report at each legislature. Twenty years later, the same finding resurfaces, almost word for word, in the most recent Senate work. The Théodule committees, as some exasperated members of Parliament call them, survive not so much for proven usefulness as for administrative inertia: precisely, no one has an interest in bearing the political responsibility for their abolition.
What remains is a question that the yellow budget annex never explicitly asks: how many of these 317 structures actually weighed on a public decision this year, rather than simply occupying a line in an Excel spreadsheet? The Senate report also notes that a lack of meetings does not necessarily mean that a commission is useless, because it may have an object that only recurs every several years—a useful nuance that further complicates the task of deciding, structure by structure, what falls under a public policy tool and what is nothing more than an administrative relic.
Sources: senat.fr | www2.assemblee-nationale.fr | annelaureblin.fr
