Spar package 2025: Defense and Justice in the focus of the cuts

Spar package 2025: Defense and Justice in the focus of the cuts

In Austria, the ministries face drastic savings: In order to achieve budget consolidation, all ministries must save 15 percent of their factual expenses minus the rental costs. This means that the Ministry of Defense of Klaudia Tanner (ÖVP) is particularly affected with a savings fee of 166 million euros. According to the Momentum Institute, the differences in the savings between the ministries are significant: the Ministry of Justice has to save 146 million euros, followed by the Ministry of Social Affairs with more than 142 million euros. The Vice Chancellery, on the other hand, only has to make a minimum contribution of 0.5 percent, which corresponds to a total of only 5.5 million euros, as oe24.at reported.

In addition, the ministries should save a total of 1.1 billion euros in the administrative effort. According to the coalition negotiators, this will particularly affect the departments with high material expenses such as defense and judiciary. However, these ministries have to deal with the challenge that only part of the expenses is freely available; A lot is planned for essential tasks. While the Ministry of Defense has 1.1 billion euros for property effort and almost 1.2 billion euros for investments, the Ministry of Justice spends 970 million euros, such as supplemented. From this it becomes clear that saving in advertisements and other expenses that are monitored by the ministries is not sufficient to achieve the specified savings goals. The heads of department are therefore faced with the urgent task of developing more innovative savings strategies, since earlier austerity programs have led to massive restrictions in the operational area in the past.