[zermelo]

I'm going to play devil's advocate: the EU's mission was to bring peace. Maybe 80,000 employees producing garbage is a small price to pay for piece.

[pcrh]

Agreed. The EU institutions are remarkably efficient compared to their national equivalents. 80,000 civil servants is a tiny number for a polity of 450 million people. Ireland for example has 50,000 for a population of 1/10th the size.

Admittedly however, the scope of national civil services tends to be much larger than that of the EU's.

[disgruntledphd2]

Where are you getting your Irish numbers from?

This source [0] suggests around 300k if we count everything.

It looks like you are just counting the core "civil" servants and defence maybe?

[0] https://publicjobs.ie/en/information-hub?view=article&id=247...

[potato3732842]

Those 50k Irish bureaucrats exist in that number because the organizations they work for are tasked with, among other things, ensuring compliance with rules written in Brussels.