The Public Service by its very nature is usually collectively silent when employment issues directly affecting it are being debated, leaving the trade unions which represent some of its members to do most of the talking.
We can be sure, however, that in Wellington's corridors of power little else is being discussed than the Government's election policy to cap staff numbers in the core service - standing at about 38,000 - and how this might be interpreted.
Is a cap not also a cut?
If so, how will it be effected at a personal level?
Some 1500 jobs have already been "lost" within the service; the Government argues it is delivering what it promised during the election campaign: there are more people working "on the front line" providing services, and these numbers will grow.
Furthermore, the initial round of reviews early this year has, it claims, produced a projected $2 billion in savings over the next four years.
In fact, not since the late 1980s and early 1990s has such a chill descended on the office blocks of the capital.
There are very sound reasons why the Government wants more efficiencies in the service.
The Clark government expanded it to a bloated scale (staff numbers working in the core bureaucracy are claimed to have grown by 44% from 1999) with not very much to show for it so far as taxpayers were concerned, other than the enormous extra cost.
According to Bill English, in the past five years the service "has been accustomed to spending growing at twice the rate of revenue and twice the growth of the economy".
Now faced with a decade of deficits, no arm of the government can expect to emerge unscathed from scrutiny with efficiencies in mind.
But how will these be achieved? Cutting staff numbers is the obvious, easiest and crudest method, but this is, after all, an entity which in its various guises exists to assist the people.
Great care is required that a blunderbuss approach - like that of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson - does not leave the service damaged beyond repair.
Mr English is promising faster, better, smarter services, with less money.
If this is to be a realistic goal rather than a mere rhetorical sop to his critics, he needs to do more to demonstrate it.
He has asked for the service to come up with ideas about how it can do its job for the next decade under greater restraint, but there is already a twofold handicap: the Prime Minister has promised no wholesale restructuring, and last week reiterated no privatisation of public services in the current three-year political term.
The man the Government brought in to ensure changes were made, Treasury Secretary John Whitehead, has, however, warned chief executives that if they do not face up to a "fundamental rethink" and trim their departments, they will have change forced on them.
If this threat is carried out, what might it mean? Mr Whitehead wants a service that grows more slowly than the rate at which the productive economy expands.
That implies far greater use of the private sector to carry out tasks on contract and may prove to be a far more valuable scheme to taxpayers in cost-effective terms, for an organisation which in its widest sense employs about 247,500 people (including, among the "essential" services, teachers, nurses, social workers, police and prison officers, and those working for the 17 state-owned enterprises, 84 Crown entities, 11 Crown companies and 31 tertiary education institutions).
And, in an age where computerisation has led to supposed administrative efficiencies, the merging of such functions between departments seems an obvious response.
There must surely also be the ability to reduce the costly consequences which followed the Clark government's interminable regulatory "bender", starting by reducing the vast muster of costly quangos and their boards.
Mr English has given the Public Service a year to produce the efficiencies the Government wants, or else.
No taxpayer, Mr English included, can doubt that without controlling spiralling government spending everyone will be looking at paying the costs of more public debt.
These are necessarily austere times and the Public Service cannot be exempt from them.
And all should note that, while National is committed not to privatise state assets this term, it has made no such decision binding it beyond 2011.
But the Government should not target the Public Service alone.
How about cutting back some of National's extravagantly expensive election-winning and support-party winning enticements?
