When it comes to paying the bill for “whatever it costs”, Bruno Le Maire is looking for savings and tracks down the smallest penny to recover. So the 2.5 billion euros of cash surplus recorded among state operators, such as the CNRS or Pôle emploi, are a godsend that he could not ignore. At the end of a review of public expenditure carried out by the administration with around twenty of these structures carrying out public service missions for the State, the government noted a “very abundant cash flow”, affirmed the Minister of the Economy on Franceinfo.
“As of the 2024 budget, we will recover half of these 2.5 billion euros of excess cash from operators,” he said. “The principle of the 2024 budget is to accelerate the country’s debt reduction,” hammered Bruno Le Maire as France narrowly escaped a downgrading of its financial rating by the S & P agency in early June. In the first quarter of 2023, France’s public debt crossed the symbolic threshold of 3,000 billion euros.
No new aid for low-income households
“The operators are very lucky”, since they have benefited from both “assigned taxes” which guarantee the security of their revenues, and “from the support of the recovery plan”, maintained Bruno Le Maire. “Nothing justifies that they have such abundant cash”, hence the drain of more than a billion euros planned as part of the finance bill for 2024, which will be presented at the end of September.
According to an initial assessment of the public spending review initiated by Bercy, released to the press on Monday, “operators totaled 56.6 billion euros in cash at the end of 2022, against 33.8 billion euros at the end of 2019”. According to a recent report by deputies Robin Reda (Renaissance) and Véronique Louwagie (Les Républicains), France will have no fewer than 438 state operators in 2023, employing more than 400,000 people. In their work published in June, the two parliamentarians already recommended reducing by a third the subsidy allocated to the smallest operators (less than 250 employees).
Tuesday morning, the Minister of Economy and Finance also indicated that the government would not create new financial aid for the most modest households, the day after President Emmanuel Macron’s promise to “continue to support them in an appropriate way”. “It is not a question of setting up other aid, (…) there are energy checks for the most modest households”, recalled Bruno Le Maire.