The World Bank is Ripping Itself Apart. It Would Be Nice to Know Why.

There is clearly continuing organizational upheaval at the World Bank including restructurings, mergers, dramatic HR policy changes, separations, and decentralization. What there appears to be remarkably little of is a considered rationale for what is going on—at least one available to the outside world, or to staff.

The World Bank used to be big on deliberation of major reforms. Back in 1987, for example, reorganization was underpinned by a high-powered steering committee that issued a meaty two-volume report. Some evergreen observations: “The Bank must find ways to overcome a pervasive disinvestment in its own human capital…. the Bank needs to strengthen its client focus.” In 2014, another round of reforms also reportedly designed to strengthen the knowledge bank and increase client focus involved five change teams and twelve staff working groups.

Of course, to quote the World Bank’s website, the 1987 reorganization “was criticized … for the disruption it caused, the costs associated with it, and the demoralization of staff.” And the 2014 reforms (especially the mergers between Bank and International Finance Corporation units) were largely unwound because they weren’t working. But at least there was some public attempt to justify why Bank management was going to do the wrong thing.

This time the closest we get appears to be brief updates to the Development Committee (the ministerial body that oversees the institution) with a few general paragraphs on reform focused far more on the what than the why. The lack of a paper trail might suggest to the skeptic that things are being driven by senior management whim rather than considered reflection.

If anything, there seems to be an ever-greater effort to cut off public information on how the Bank is functioning. The FY23 Corporate Scorecard Tier 3 reported staff survey results on engagement, reported staff facetime days with clients, Bank performance on project quality, and the share of advisory work embedding global expertise, for example. All that has disappeared from the document that replaced the Corporate Scorecard’s Tier 3, the Organizational Effectiveness Dashboard.

Or take the annual document released on the World Bank’s budget as an example. Since fiscal year 2023, that report has shrunk from 102 pages to 29 pages, even as its coverage extended from IBRD and IDA—the core of the institution—to include previously separate reports from IFC and MIGA, two of the Bank’s other arms. A words-per-institution count for the document is down 93 percent in four years. Among many other details we’ve lost in the FY27 budget release—details that were previously regularly reported—is information on financing by work program that could help illustrate what is happening to project supervision budgets and data on spending on short-term consultants (STCs) which could inform discussion of their apparent mass termination.

What we can know from what’s left of public reporting is that the FY26 budget suggested $468 million would be spent on STCs. This is about 12 percent of all staff, extended, and short-term consultant spending—similar to previous years. This doesn’t suggest a lot of advance planning going into the decision to get rid of them all. Again, we can know that a Bank budget forecast to grow 10 percent in real terms over two years from the FY25 budget delivered 6 percent that year and then -0.7 percent and -1.8 percent the next two, another sign of a rapid volte-face.

We can also see a decline in external finance for trust funds, dropping from $2.1 billion in FY25 to $1.7 billion in FY27 in real terms, potentially arguing for the Bank to spend more of its record profits on sustaining its own work rather than less. That’s especially true given limited evidence of recent profligacy: while the core World Bank budget has been nearly flat in real terms since FY05 ($3.5 billion climbing to $3.6 billion in FY27 dollars), the World Bank portfolio and annual commitments have more than doubled. Focusing on staff and consultant costs alone, the picture is the same (Figure).

To be fair, across the budget reports there are other scattered targets and figures associated with the reorganization amongst much talk of rationalization, consolidation, unification and merger: for example an FY27 “program realignment” alongside “operational efficiency” will apparently deliver combined savings of $207 million through “targeted workforce adjustments” and “the consolidation of positions.” Again, the FY26 budget report suggested the institution would “rebalance workforce to take advantage of lower cost locations” and make “reductions in HQ Subject Matter Experts.” “Other savings” listed frequently mention less use of consultants.

This all fits a little ill with earlier talk that changes weren’t about cutting numbers but improving conditions. And there is no rationale on the reversal from earlier documents that called for staff and budget increases to keep up with a rapidly expanding portfolio, let alone any numbers on actual staffing. The FY25 budget specifically warned that “budget constraints necessitate heightened reliance on the contingent workforce,” and treated this as a risk. It would be good to have some sense of how even tighter budget constraints are being reconciled with reduced reliance on the contingent workforce. Or, indeed, why the World Bank is on an austerity plan while the IFC’s budget continues its rapid growth (at least that suggests limited commitment to the idea of paying for results).

More broadly it would be very helpful to have hear about lessons learned from past reorganizations and decentralization, successful and not, and how those fed into the design of this latest version. And it would be good to know a lot more about how the World Bank Group plans to deal with the considerable conflicts of interest involved with a joint structure that plans to offer policy advice in sectors where it is also investing in private firms.

The World Bank is a vital global institution, and as a publicly funded body, it should be transparent about its dealings. But it has a particular duty to a staff committed to the organization’s goals, many among them world experts in their areas. For four decades the Bank has been touting itself as “a knowledge-based institution,” and the staff hold that knowledge. Given widespread staff discontent alongside increasingly restricted public disclosure of information, this would be a good moment to pause, reflect, and report.