After Assad’s fall, the interim government is struggling to rebuild a broken bureaucracy:
• Payroll cleanup: A new employee database exposed ghost workers—only 900k of 1.4m on payroll actually showed up.
• Dismissals & recalls: Thousands dismissed for corruption or absenteeism, while nearly 50,000 civil servants expelled under Assad have been reinstated.
• New law in the making: A Civil Service Law is being drafted to anchor reform in merit and accountability.
But without transparency and sustained external support, these reforms risk collapsing back into inefficiency and patronage.