THE government has announced an early-retirement package for government employees as part of a comprehensive plan to downsize the bureaucracy. This will cost the government P15 billion if 33,000 government employees will choose early retirement, said Budget Secretary Emilia Boncodin. The expected retirees make up only 3 percent of the 1.1 million government workforce, but the savings are a sizable P7.7 billion in yearly budgetary allocation.

The early-retirement package being dangled by Malacañang is intended to cut costs on the part of the government, which is spending a third of the national budget for salaries of its employees. In the proposed P907-billion budget for 2005 that would amount to about P300 billion going to salaries.