Ensuring Social Services in Syrian Public Sector Reform Post-Assad

The Assad regime fell in December 2024, and one of the first things the new authorities inherited was a payroll nobody could account for. The Syrian public sector had been carrying “ghost employees” for decades: names drawing a salary against work that was never done. Everyone in Syria knew it. Almost nobody could say how large it was.

That payroll was never really an employment system. It was an instrument of loyalty, which is why it grew in the years the state could least afford it. Cutting the ghosts from it is therefore not a personnel decision. It is a decision about who eats next month, taken by a government with almost no fiscal room and almost no reliable data about the people it is about to release.

The corruption is real, and that is the easy part

Let us grant the case for the cut in full, because it is a strong one. The ghost employee is the cleanest illustration of how the old corruption worked: not theft in the dark, but favouritism written into the establishment tables. It rewarded loyalty over competence, and it diverted money that should have gone to schools, clinics and water networks. Dismantling it is urgent. A state that pays people for nothing cannot credibly ask anyone to believe it is a just state.

None of that is in dispute here. The disagreement is about the second half of the sentence, the part that gets left off.

The salary was fake, the household is not

A reader might object that money stolen from the public purse should simply stop being paid, and that hesitating over it is how the old habits survive a change of government. That is true but partial. The salary was a fiction. The household living on it is not, and the two do not disappear at the same rate.

Behind a name on a corrupt payroll there is usually a family, in a country where the currency has collapsed and the private sector is far too small to absorb anyone quickly. Withdrawing that income overnight does not undo a theft committed over decades. It transfers the cost of that theft onto whoever is holding the job when the reform lands, and onto their children. A duty of care is not conditional on the citizen having been well governed.

What a safety net has to do, not what it should be called

The obligation to reform the public sector and the obligation to protect people through the reform are the same obligation, and the second is the one that requires design work.

That work has four parts. The first is temporary income for those who lose a post, set high enough and lasting long enough to permit a real search for work rather than a panicked acceptance of anything. The second is retraining aimed at the labour market Syria actually has, in construction, energy, water and logistics, not the one an aid document imagines. The third is direct support for households with no wage to lose in the first place: the very poor, widows, orphans and people with disabilities. The fourth is the least visible and the most load-bearing, which is keeping healthcare, schooling and housing running while the rest of it happens. Reform that guts services at the same moment it cuts incomes is not reform. It is two shocks arriving as one.

Costing any of this honestly requires a number that does not exist. Nobody has published a credible figure for how many names on the Syrian payroll correspond to no work, what they are paid, or how many dependants sit behind them. That absence is not a footnote to the argument. It is the argument, because a state that cannot count its own employees cannot know whether the savings it is claiming are real.

Hardship has a security bill

There is a second reason to build the net first, and it appeals to nobody's conscience. People with no income and no prospect of one do not sit quietly. They take the options available, and in a country still holding weapons, armed remnants of the old regime, and a long list of actors with an interest in instability, some of those options are recruitment. A reform that produces a large cohort of suddenly destitute former state employees is not a saving. It is a security liability booked as a saving, and it will be settled later at a much worse rate.

A citizen is not a line in a budget

Reform and the duty of care are not competing priorities. A citizen is not merely a number in an economic equation. They are a human being with rights and needs, and a government that forgets this loses legitimacy long before it loses solvency.

What follows in practice is unglamorous. Layoffs phased rather than announced, sequenced behind the support that catches the people they release, and paired with a real effort to create private work through investment. That is slower than a clean sweep. It is also the only version that survives contact with a population which has already absorbed fourteen years of shocks.

Syria has spent decades paying people who did not work. It should not now become a country that abandons the people who did.